Film Review: Coming Home
It's just as well Zhang Yimou's Coming Home was described by Ang Lee at a New York University seminar as "a very good existentialist film" because there is little dramatic pull in this placid adaptation of Yan Geling's novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi.
COMING HOME
Starring: Chen Daoming, Gong Li, Zhang Huiwen
Director: Zhang Yimou
Category: I (Putonghua)
It's just as well Zhang Yimou's Coming Home was described by Ang Lee at a New York University seminar as "a very good existentialist film" because there is little dramatic pull in this placid adaptation of Yan Geling's novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi. The master Chinese filmmaker seeks to reconcile his country with its traumatic past, but in doing so, tests his audience's patience beyond redemption.
Chronicling a rehabilitated political prisoner's years of struggle to restore his wife's memory of him in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the mainland auteur's period romance distantly echoes Albert Camus' philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, in which the protagonist's futile effort eventually becomes an end in itself.
Zhang's intimate tale is not as kitsch as his 2011 war drama The Flowers of War — which was based on another of Yan's novels — but it does appear perfectly content to take its one-trick conceit and stretch it across nearly two hours. For much of the second half, Coming Home is emotionally draining, as well as unapologetically monotonous.
Nonetheless, it marks a welcome reunion of Zhang and former muse Gong Li, who starred in several of the director's landmark films, such as Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991).
This drama, set in the 1970s, sees the 48-year-old actress in captivating form as Feng Wanyu, the long- suffering wife of Lu Yanshi (Chen Daoming), a dissident professor who is sent away for "re-education" for more than a decade.