MCLC: Coming Home

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Coming Home
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Source: Sinosphere blog, NYT (5/9/14):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/the-coming-home-of-zhang-yim
ou-and-gong-li/

The ‘Coming Home’ of Zhang Yimou and Gong Li
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

“Coming Home,” a new film by Zhang Yimou about the ravages wrought on a
family by decades of political violence in China and how they (kind of)
overcome them, stars Gong Li, his legendary muse. It made Steven Spielberg
cry, the Chinese news media reported. Ang Lee, the Academy Award-winning
director of “Life of Pi,” was “very moved” by it too, he said on Chinese
television.

Yet this emotionally powerful, richly nuanced, politically violent and
historically contemplative movie, which opens May 16 in mainland China, in
June in Hong Kong and in December in the United States, could have been
called “Being Together,” said Zhang Zhao, the movie’s producer and the
chief executive of Le Vision Pictures.

It’s what Mr. Zhang, the director, was trying to say, Mr. Zhang said in an
interview. (The two men are not related.) “This is really a love story.
That’s the most powerful thing.” Despite the ending — spoiler alert!  —
which shows personal loyalty triumphing and suggests an acceptance of the
blows of fate, “it’s not a political metaphor,” he said. No one is telling
Chinese to passively accept their fate. Rather, it suggests a survival
strategy — love. “How are we going to overcome history?” Mr. Zhang asked.
“We need to be together.”

“Nobody can get away from whatever you inherit from your own history, from
your parents and grandparents. So how do you treat history? How can you,
the nation, the people, how you can survive history?” The answer is
“family love,” he said.

With that, “you can survive through whatever material poverty or political
disasters or natural disasters, you can survive everything. That’s what
the director is trying to say.”

There’s a lot to survive in “Coming Home,” which is based on a novel by
Yan Geling, “The Criminal Lu Yanshi.”

While the action opens during the 10-year Cultural Revolution, its main
male character, Lu Yanshi, played by Chen Daoming, is a political
“rightist” who is already in jail. In total, he spends 20 years there.
When he finally comes home his wife, Feng Wanyu, played by Ms. Gong, has
crumpled under the weight of multiple tragedies that affect not only her
husband but her daughter and herself, and she is in a state of traumatized
forgetfulness. Her husband stands by her.

At a private screening in Beijing, many viewers sat for a long time after
the end, dabbing their reddened eyes, especially elderly ones, and it’s
one of the film’s extraordinary strengths that it deals with the process
of aging so sensitively — a major challenge for China, where the
population is graying fast.

For Ms. Gong, playing Feng Wanyu, a character who moves between memory and
forgetfulness, “is tough, the most tough thing to do,” Zhang Zhao said.

“It’s about her own history,” he said. And Ms. Gong, long known as a great
beauty as well as talent, plays an elderly woman.

Ms. Gong is from China but left to live overseas, then returned. “And of
course she is in that age,” he said of the 48-year-old actress and mother,
“so she has got a lot of experience about what is love, what is family.”

“Gong Li said to me, Yimou’s films are becoming deeper and deeper, so for
her as an actress it’s harder and harder to give a good performance. She
was saying that if she can get this accomplished, she can call herself a
good actress,” Mr. Zhang said.

The producers are hoping to connect especially to younger people, who they
feel do not really understand what their parents went through. And the
film suggests, painfully but accurately, that in a person’s life, the
trauma is never over. It can only be managed, through loving loyalty.

But the film represents something else, Mr. Zhang said — a “coming
together” of the director and his long-term muse, who were once
romantically linked and whose deep collaboration began with “Red Sorghum,”
the 1987 film based on a novel by Mo Yan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 2012. The film shot them both to international fame.

“A lot of this film is very much about Gong Li and Yimou,” said Zhang
Zhao, referring to Zhang Yimou, “coming back together as actress and film
director. They are such a legendary couple of the Chinese screen. It’s a
great thing.” They collaborated in 2006 in “Curse of the Golden Flower,”
but that was a “commercial film,” Mr. Zhang said.

“Coming Home” examines history and society itself.

“In a developing country like China, of course we Chinese people are
constantly fighting against all kinds of disasters. Natural disasters,
man-made disasters, you know, all kinds of disasters,” Mr. Zhang said.
“But we, the Chinese people, are going to keep fighting.”

“Our material lives are much much better compared to 20 or 30 or 40 years
ago, but what this film is trying to say is” that family love is essential
to surviving “whatever material poverty or political disasters or natural
disasters may befall.

“You can survive everything, that’s what the director is trying to say,”
he said.

The film will screen at the Cannes Film Festival, which opens next
Wednesday, but is not in competition.