MCLC: thoughts on Zhang Yimou's Coming Home

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Rujie Wang <RWANG at wooster.edu>
Subject: thoughts on Zhang Yimou's Coming Home
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Coming Home, dir. by Zhang Yimou, 2014

I liked the film even though some may think it disappointing. To a degree,
Oliver Stone is right about Chinese directors not daring tackle the past
and question history. This film, which to me represents a bald move to
revisit recent Chinese history, may still not be good enough for Stone. I
like it because Zhang Yimou refuses to forget the victims of the
Anti-Rightist movement and the Cultural Revolution, knowing that he has
very little latitude in reshaping the past and opening it up for critical
reflection. For the most part the production is an attempt to win prizes
in Cannes Film Festival (although I doubt it would win anything). The
redeeming quality of the film is not the fact that it is an  art film but,
at least to me as a Chinese viewer, Zhang’s courageous choice of the
subject matter—past history that is politically sensitive and unsettling
at best—for which he may even risk estrangement from the power that be.

Zhang Yimou never fails to move people when the pain he wants the audience
to empathize is part of the family experience (like in his To Live, 1993).
As someone who was called upon during the Cultural Revolution to denounce
my father for being an American spy (he taught Chinese at Harvard to
American G.I.s during WWII), I relate to the characters in this family who
become strangers, even enemies, to another in the 1970s. The extent of the
psychological trauma becomes painfully visible when it takes years for the
family members to “come back” together, thus the title gui lai. It’s clear
that some of the scars and injuries caused by betrayal and malice never
quite heal even with the passage of time. It is in this sense that the
past is never past and still with us, unable to reach closure or recognize
who we are in the literal sense of the word. The wife (played by Gong Li)
is unable to recognize her husband (played by Chen Daoming) after he comes
back from the labor camp.

Although unsurprising, Mao’s political campaigns and revolutionary
excesses that were responsible for so many personal tragedies can never be
depicted in historical films like this one as anything other than the
result of ignorance on the part of the people or temporary disharmony of
circumstances (as opposed to sin or guilt on the part of the leaders).
Some like Oliver Stone may feel disappointed, but what Coming Home does is
redirect our critical reflections of history and contextualize them within
a tradition or worldview that Frederick Mote considers quintessentially
Chinese. In his Intellectual Foundations of China, he discusses “the
Problem of Evil and Consequences of A World without Sin”, what he argues
partially explains why Zhang Yimou seems to try to circumvent ideological
issues in this film.

<<The late Dr. Hu Shih, eminent historian of Chinese thought and culture,
used to say with sly delight that centuries of Christian missionaries had
been frustrated and chagrined by the apparent inability of Chinese to take
sin seriously. Were we to work out fully all the consequences for Chinese
society of the model offered by an organismic cosmos functioning through
the dynamism of harmony, we might well be able to relate the absence of a
sense of sin to it. For in such a cosmos there can be no parts wrongfully
present; everything that exists belongs, even if no more appropriately
than as the consequence of a temporary imbalance, a disharmony. Evil as a
positive or active force cannot exist; much less can it be frighteningly
personified. No devils can struggle with good forces for mastery of humans
and the universe, and people’s errors, unlike sin in other worlds, can
neither offend personal gods nor threaten a person’s individual
existence.>>

This penetrating analysis is echoed and supported by the insightful
observations of Andrew Plaks who, in his Chinese Narrative, detects the
same lack that so characterizes Zhang Yimou’s film in which pure evil or
pure tragedy is largely absent or does not quite materialize.

<<The Chinese [narrative] tradition has tended to place nearly equal
emphasis on the overlapping of events, the interstitial spaces between
events, in effect on non-events alongside of events in conceiving of human
experience in time. In fact, the reader of the major Chinese narrative
works soon becomes conscious of the fact that those clearly defined events
which do stand out in the texts are nearly always set into a thick matrix
of non-events: static description, set speeches, discursive digressions,
and a host of other non-narrative elements. … The ubiquitous potential
presence of a balanced, totalized, dimension of meaning may partially
explain why a fully realized sense of the tragic does not materialize in
Chinese narrative. Such characters as Prince Shen-sheng, Hsiang Yu, Yueh
Fei, and even Chia Pao-yu clearly possess the qualities of the tragic
figure to one extent or another. But in each case the implicit
understanding of the logical interrelation between their particular
situation and the overall structure of existential intelligibility serves
to blunt the pity and fear the reader experiences as he witnesses their
individual destinies. In other  words, Chinese narrative is replete with
individuals in tragic situations, but the secure inviolability of the
underlying affirmation of existence in its totality precludes the
possibility of the individual’s tragic fate taking on the proportions of a
cosmic tragedy. Instead, the bitterness of the particular case of
mortality ultimately settles back into the ceaseless alternation of
patterns of joy and sorrow, exhilaration and despair that go to make up an
essentially affirmative view of the universe of experience.>>

 Films that may have inspired Zhang Yimou in dealing with personal loss of
memory in clinical terms as well as mass amnesia in a historical sense:

·      The Music Never Stopped, dir. Jim Kohlberg, 2011
·      Amour, dir. Michael Haneke, 2012
·      The Past, (Le Passé), dir. by Asghar Farhadi, 2013

Rujie Wang