Coming Home

After a period of creative drought, Zhang’s homecoming is a cause for celebration.

Yimou’s lovely import is the kind of lump-in-your-throat drama they don’t make much anymore, at least in Hollywood. Watching Coming Home you’ll wonder why that is — and who we can write a letter to to fix it.

What this film may lack in terms of visual flamboyance, it more than makes up for in telling its simple and direct story with a raw, emotional power that doesn't need lavish spectacle in order to get its point across.

Coming Home works best on a more lived-in, emotional level. It presents a trajectory not uncommon in Zhang's films: a journey from howling passion to somber, almost tragic acceptance.

Set against the gray backdrop of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, this is old-school melodrama writ big from a director who’s probably better known to mainstream American audiences as the man behind the spectacular Wushu action epics Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Curse of the Golden Flower.

It’s a less pointed and implicitly feminist work than such classics as "Raise The Red Lantern" and "The Story Of Qiu Ju" —one could even call it a shameless weepie. Still, it’s a welcome throwback to one of the most emotionally wrenching actor-director partnerships in film history.

Coming Home sinks into a conventional tragic romance rut that not even engaging performances by Gong and Chen can save.

Beautifully balanced and perfectly directed, Yimou Zhang's COMING HOME takes bites out of your soul while examining the impact of China's cultural revolution in oh so delicate fashion. Zhang who has made hugely spectacular features is here back in small mode but his topics could not be larger, bigger or greater. And all is held together by the wonderful face of Gong Li. COMING HOME is a lovely, powerful achievement.

I have enjoyed Zhang's films with Gong Li in the past, and this has its good points, but failed to really connect with me. A man, an intellectual imprisoned during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, comes home to his family after 10 years or so - but his wife does not recognize him, even though she goes every month to the train station with hand-painted signs, hoping to see him. Thus begins a series of attempts by the man and the daughter of the family to get the Gong Li character to wake up and begin living in reality again. The scenery and acting are fine, but the story began to grow tedious.

Il y a de l'idée dans ce traitement de l'après-révolution culturelle et cette famille déchirée, victime d'un excès de "rééducation", surtout pour la mère devenue Alzheimer à l'insu de son plein gré lorsque son mari bien-aimé revient enfin au bercail... Mais l'idée -malgré la toujours belle Gong Li et sa mignonne fille, bon petit soldat des jeunesses hitl... euh communistes révolutionnaires- est trop mal traitée pour que ça débouche sur quelque chose de valable et vraiment regardable. C'est trop mou, trop gnangnan et tellement lent que même une tortue perdrait patience et tracerait la route. On va pas au bout de ce truc, même en avance rapide... Notons néanmoins (car c'est au début) les chorégraphies, les danses (?!) de la section féminine rouge (ou un machin dans le genre) au cours desquelles les petites camarades nous font un véritable petit ballet martial avec les fusils (sic !).