Coming-Home-2

From Cannes to Home

At the Cannes Film Festival last month, veteran director Zhang Yimou presented his latest movie, ‘Coming Home’, his eighth collaboration with his first and most frequent leading lady, Gong Li.
by

What if you returned home to your loved one, a wife, a husband, or any significant other, after years apart and they didn’t recognize you? That is the idea behind filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s latest film, ‘Coming Home’, (based on Yan Geling’s novel ‘The Criminal Lu Yanshi’) which premiered out-of-competition at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival in May.

A family drama of guilt, love and reconciliation set during the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the period drama spans several decades as it follows the lives of a couple who were forced into an unhappy marriage, until one day the husband escapes to America.

The film stars Chen Daoming as Lu Yanshi, who is ousted as a criminal of the party, during the end of the Mao Zedong-led Chinese Revolution in the 1940s. He attempts to reconnect with his wife, a teacher played by Gong Li, and daughter Dandan, played by newcomer Zhang Huiwen, but is arrested and taken to a labour camp until the revolution ends. 

Yimou was the leading light of China’s “fifth generation” of filmmakers, revered for his epics ‘To Live’ and ‘Raise the Red Lantern’, as well as directing the opening and closing ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics. 

Zhang has won numerous awards and recognitions, with Best Foreign Film nominations for ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ in 1991, Silver Lion and Golden Lion prizes at the Venice Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 1993, he was a member of the jury at the 43rd Berlin International Film Festival.

Speaking about his latest production in an interview with The Los Angeles Times, the director said, “There is plenty that’s political in the movie”, adding, “It’s not so much the Cultural Revolution but its aftermath: How do you repair your life and still pay the debt of the Cultural Revolution?”

And it is exactly that tension — between forgetting and commemorating, moving on and holding on — that is at the centre of this family drama.

When asked where he currently finds himself on the subject of ideologically oriented cinema, the director replied, “I do want to return to political filmmaking. I will go back to my roots. But like the characters in this film, I am not the same as I once was, and I won’t go back to [political films] in the same way”.

Facebook
WhatsApp
Threads
X
Email

More of this category

Featured

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Older Issues

Living and Arts Magazine

現已發售 NOW ON SALE

KNOW MORE LiVE BETTER