MCLC: Coming Home review (1)

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Coming Home review (1)
One point to add to Eva Chou’s review—and something that is less subtle than the things she focuses on—is that Zhang directly tackles the theme of historical amnesia in the film. Wanyu’s amnesia, though centered on the personal—on her (lack of) memory of her husband—is surely a metaphor for a broader amnesia in China about the past.
In one scene, Dandan hands her mother a photo of Lu Yanshi that Yanshi himself retrieves from an old family friend as one of his tactics for getting Wanyu to remember him. (During the Cultural Revolution, Dandan had cut out her father’s image from every single photo in the family’s own albums.). When Wanyu is given the photo, she does indeed recognize her husband. Yanshi then appears in person by her side, and she seems to momentarily associate the real man with the image in the photo. But that single historical artifact returning from the past is not enough to jar Wanyu out of her amnesiac torpor, and she suddenly pushes the real Yanshi away, thinking him to be someone else.
I was surprised by the film's ending, having expected some sort of happy resolution in which Wanyu suddenly wakes up and remembers everything and recognizes Yanshi. Instead, the film ends with Wanyu destined to repeat endlessly her monthly trek to the train station to meet her long lost husband (who all along is with her). One could say, I suppose, that in whitewashing its representation of the Anti-Rightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution the film itself repeats the same amnesia from which Wanyu suffers, but I think that might be missing the point. The film is not really about the past, but rather about the present’s relationship with the past. The past is at once close by, haunting the present, and elusive and imponderable.
Kirk Denton <denton.2 at osu.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 31, 2015
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