Starring: Zhao Benshan, Guo Degang, Wu Jun, Song Dandan
Director: Zhang Yang
Category: IIA (Putonghua)
Chinese cinema has never taken to the road movie with the gusto of Hollywood, so the genre provides raw terrain for director-writer Zhang Yang. With Getting Home he imbues the dusty highways of western China with his eye for the offbeat combined with a heartfelt but unsentimental faith in humanity, qualities that illuminated his breakthrough feature, Shower (1999).
Yunnan and Sichuan are the locales navigated by middle-aged migrant worker Zhao (Zhao Benshan) on an unusual journey for both himself and the viewer. He's making good a promise to escort a friend to the latter's home in the Three Gorges region, quite a distance from the Shenzhen site where they were last employed. It's an excursion not dissimilar to those undertaken regularly by tens of thousands of peasants, but for one detail: Zhao's friend is dead, and it's no easy task transporting a corpse across China on a limited budget.
That's the premise for an extremely black, although felicitously non-morbid, comedy-drama that uses the road genre to take a by no means uncritical look at contemporary Chinese society.