MCLC: Coming Home review (2)

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Coming Home review (2)
Another scene Zhang Yimou handles well is the issue of blame and culpability. When Wanyu pushes away Yanshi trying to be intimate with her, he realizes she is confusing him with someone else who must have tried to make sexual advances to her while he was away. So intimacy is out of the question for Yanshi, as bed room for Wanyu is associated with struggles to repel her assailant. When Yanshi finally goes, with a club in his hand, to confront the person who once tried to sleep with his wife, he finds the person gone (and presumably being investigated somewhere else) when his wife comes out angry at him, thinking that he may be one of those persecutors of her husband. Zhang Yimou suggests that, for what happened in the Cultural Revolution, there is plenty of blame to go around. Nearly everyone is implicated and involved in the scapegoating and victimization.
It is not so much a matter of mass amnesia as a matter of when is the appropriate time to right the wrongs. Zhang Yimou is saying the time is now or never, an issue that is addressed by a similar movie about punishing Nazi party members responsible for genocide of the Jews. Labyrinth of Lies is a recent film based on the real trial of 20 former SS numbers in Germany in 1958, 14 years after the WWII. No one in Germany was interested in punishing one of their own because so many Germans joined Nazi Party. In the film, even the zealous prosecutor finally finds out from the archives of the American embassy that his father was one of the Nazi party members. To try these ex-ss guards at Auschwitz is necessary because Germany as a democratic society requires it. Zhang Yimou is suggesting the same, considering the fact that nearly 40 years after the Cultural Revolution ended, very little has been done to punish those with blood on their hand (other than the trial of the Gang of Four).
Rujie Wang <RWANG at wooster.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on November 3, 2015
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