Butler's Cinema Scene

Daoming Chen and Gong Li

” COMING HOME” My rating: B+

109 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

In the wrong hands “Coming Home” could have been an insufferable soap opera, like something out of the Nicholas Sparks School of Bathos, China Division.

But the man behind the camera is director Yimou Zhang; in front is his perennial leading lady, the amazing Gong Li; and the subject matter places the yarn’s personal tragedy against a backdrop of political and societal upheaval.

The results are heartbreaking.

The story begins in the early 1970s when Mao’s Cultural Revolution is in full swing.  Feng Wanyu (Li) is a schoolteacher sharing an apartment with her 14-year-old daughter, Dan Dan (Huiwen Zhang).

Dan Dan is an ambitious dancer with a company specializing in proletarian ballets. You know, the kind where the young ladies of the chorus learn to pirouette while waving flags, thrusting bayonets and tossing hand grenades.

Feng’s husband Lu (Daoming Chen) is a former professor who has been imprisoned for more than a decade. His crimes were intellectual and Feng insists on defending her man even though Dan Dan, who has grown up fatherless, has swallowed the party Kool Aid and fears that her chances at big roles are reduced because of her father’s sins.

When word arrives that Lu has escaped, an eager Feng looks forward to being reunited with her long lost love. Dan Dan, though, has a Hitler Youth mentality and isn’t above betraying Daddy to curry favor with the bigwigs at her ballet studio.

The film’s first half hour follows the fugitive Lu as he lives on the streets and tries to contact his wife without alerting the cops who are hovering outside the apartment building. Eventually he is caught and returned to prison without even having held his wife in his arms.

Several years later the Cultural Revolution has run out of steam and hundreds of thousands of “counterrevolutionaries” like Lu are declared rehabilitated and returned to their homes. But the grand welcome the former prisoner has long dreamed of isn’t happening.  Feng now suffers from dementia. She doesn’t recognize Lu…in fact she mistakes him for a party official who once persecuted her.

Lu moves into an abandoned storefront across the street. From there he can watch Feng coming and going and hopefully work his way back into her life.

Gelding Yan’s screenplay is a tragedy of near misses.

Huiweng Zhang as the daughter

Lu comes up with all sorts of ploys to reboot Feng’s memories. He retunes the old piano on which, in happier times, he would seranade his young wife. Perhaps music will jog her memory.

He ships Feng hundreds of unsent letters he wrote  while a prisoner and, posing as a friendly neighbor, reads them aloud to her.

He works quietly to repair Feng’s strained relationship with Dan Dan, who long ago gave up her dance dreams and now works in a factory.

But every time it seems that Feng is ready to accept him, a darkness falls over her features, she turns paranoid and angry, and orders the poor man out of her home.

Not that she has given up on her husband. She retains a letter informing her that Lu will be returning to her on the fifth of the month…and every month on the fifth she waits at the train station. She makes welcoming signs so that he can spot her in the crowd.  But even with the real Lu in front of her, she cannot recognize  him.

All this is astonishingly sad and it might be unbearable if not for the spectacular acting. It’s way more than a case of the breathtakingly beautiful Gong Li going dowdy for her role as a middle-aged woman. With an economy of gesture and expression she perfectly captures the essence of a confused mind caught between hope and loss. There’s something terribly brave about Feng’s resolve to once again be with her husband, and at the same time her failure to recognize Lu when he stands before her is shattering.

Performers in foreign language films rarely get Oscar nominations, but this is a no-brainer.

As the husband Chen is a font of decency and quiet resolve; as Dan Dan young Zhang (who trained as a ballerina) makes a touching transition from selfish brat to disillusioned young woman.

“Coming Home” makes no overt judgments about the Cultural Revolution that destroyed so many Chinese families in the name of ideological purity, but in the simple human terms depicted on the screen it makes a damning case.

| Robert W. Butler