At the beginning of last month’s Olympic Games, the world was abuzz over the overwhelming spectacle of the Opening Ceremony. The ceremony was reportedly mounted at a cost of $300 million, with tens of thousands of dancers, singers, and other Chinese people employed to create them. But while the director of the Opening Ceremony was unknown to most of the world, he was a name well-known to lovers of world cinema- Zhang Yimou. For more than two decades, Zhang has been one of the leading lights of Chinese cinema, having directed such critically-acclaimed titles as Ju Dou, To Live, Shanghai Triad, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers.
If one looks at Zhang’s career to date, one notices that his work can be divided into three basic categories. Zhang originally made his reputation primarily with films that were critical of (and banned by) the Communist government. His most recent, and most expensive, movies have been martial arts epics, heavy on eye-popping imagery and relatively light on political subtext. But interspersed within these movies have been more modest films, generally neo-realist in nature, that focus largely on working-class or rural characters. Of these, The Road Home is probably the best-known in the United States. Made in 1999, it was held back from American release until 2001 to capitalize on the newfound popularity of its leading lady, Zhang Ziyi, who had just appeared in the breakthrough hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Unfortunately, it’s not a very good movie.
The Road Home is meant to be the heartrending story of a man learning about the courtship between mother and his recently-deceased father. Alas, Zhang Yimou and novelist-screenwriter Shi Bao make a colossal miscalculation by telling the story from the mother’s point of view rather than the father’s. When we see the father in extended flashbacks, Luo is a young teacher who has just arrived in a small rural community. Luo’s journey has been long and complicated, and will become more so when he is ordered back to the city for questioning (the movie is set at the dawn of the Cultural Revolution). Along the way, he falls in love with the young and beautiful Di (Zhang Ziyi), and she with him. So smitten is he with her that he eventually escapes his captors in the city to teach school and be with her for one more day, before the authorities separate them again for two more years.
Sounds like a pretty interesting movie, don’t you think? Had only The Road Home told Luo’s story, it might have been. However, the story focuses on Di, whose life is, shall we say, much less eventful than Luo’s. So instead of witnessing his narratively-compelling struggles, Zhang’s camera follows Di as she chases after him, running over hill and dale and hill again to get a glimpse of the man she loves. And that’s not all- when he is forced to return to the city, Di tries to chase him down to give him her specially-made mushroom dumplings. On the day he’s supposed to return, she stands solemnly in a snowstorm awaiting his arrival, and even after she’s taken ill she sneaks out again into the harsh winter.
What makes this approach so misguided is that, by all rights, Luo should be the central player in the story. The film’s framing device finds Luo and Di’s son returning to the town for his father’s funeral, and the now-elderly Di insisting that the townspeople observe the old tradition of bringing Luo’s body home on foot, despite (a) his body being kept half a day’s walk away, (b) the low number of able-bodied men available to carry the casket, and (c) the fact that it’s the middle of winter. That’s a lot of effort to insist that others subject themselves to for your benefit, especially when you yourself don’t have to bear any of the weight. I can imagine this story working if we got some idea of how wonderful and important Luo was not only to Di but to the town as a whole. Unfortunately, we’ve got to take it all on faith, since the story was too concerned with Di’s boring-ass pursuit of Luo to actually take time to show us how awesome he was. So awesome, it seems that not only does Luo’s son have no problem rounding up people (strangers, no less) to bear the casket half a day in the snow, but they actually refuse to take any money to perform this service. Wait, what?
Occasionally, bits of interesting cinema will peek through, briefly illuminating our minds before we get mired in maudlin crap again. Most notable is a scene in which a 
pottery repairman mends a broken clay pot without the use of glue, which is pretty damned impressive if you ask me. And of course the movie looks great- but then, with Zhang Yimou photographing the Chinese countryside, how could it not be? But in the end, The Road Home is an irritating little nothing of a movie, in which the writer and director avoid the compelling story that’s right before their eyes to give the audience scene after scene of Zhang Ziyi running around. Seriously, there must be fifteen minutes’ worth of her running in this movie, which runs less than ninety minutes total. So watching Zhang Ziyi run around for minutes on end is your idea of awesome cinema, then maybe The Road Home will be your speed. But if I want a good Zhang Yimou movie, I’ll take Raise the Red Lantern, thank you very much.