Coming Home
It may move you to tears but it won’t push you there
Coming Home
If they ever remake The Notebook — and I’m not suggesting they do — I would want director Zhang Yimou at the helm. In addition to an impressive resume that includes Raise the Red Lantern, Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang has handled some potentially gooey melodrama (1999’s The Road Home, for instance) with a minimum of mawkishness.
His newest, Coming Home, has a certain Notebookishness to its central plot. In the early 1970s, Dandan (Huiwen Zhang), an aspiring ballet dancer, is growing up without a father. Lu (Chen Daoming) was imprisoned to be “re-educated” as part of China’s Cultural Revolution, though as the film begins we learn that he has escaped.
Lu makes a passionate though ultimately foolish attempt to contact Dandan’s mother, Yu (Gong Li), at a busy train station. A four-way chase ensues — Zhang expertly handles a scene of guards in pursuit of Lu, who is trying to make his way to his wife, even as Dandan tries to hold her mother back lest she be arrested and taken away as well. It ends with Lu back in custody, and Yu bleeding from a head wound.
Three years later, the Cultural Revolution is over, and Lu comes back to his hometown, bearing an official letter of rehabilitation. Dandan, stigmatized because of her father, has had to give up dancing, and now works in a factory. Yu continues her life much as before, but it soon becomes apparent that her trauma has caused her to forget her husband’s face. After briefly appearing to recognize him, she starts calling him Fang, a party functionary whom she desperately dislikes.
This is where the meat of the story is to be found. Lu takes up residence near his wife’s home and tries to find a way to remind her who he is. He pens a letter, promising to arrive by train on “the fifth,” then dutifully shows up at the station, only to have her look right through him as she searches for her husband. (By not specifying the month in the letter, he can try again in 30 days, as she rediscovers the letter anew.)
The story plays out on two levels. Film students could write papers on the metaphors of forgetfulness and rewritten history during the Mao years. Dandan had long ago removed Lu’s image from their family photo album, so he can’t even show Yu a picture of them together. Later the daughter complains of her mother: “She forgets everything but remembers all my faults!”
Yet there is a much simpler human drama on the screen as Lu, with remarkable patience and forbearance, tries to jog his wife’s recall. Beautiful, melancholy images — a rain-streaked sign, a cloth-covered piano — evoke the fragility of memory. And Dandan manages a quiet reconciliation with both parents, even as they remain strangers to one another.
This is Zhang’s second time adapting a novel by Geling Yan. His last movie, 2011’s The Flowers of War with Christian Bale, dramatized an episode during the Nanking Massacre of 1937. But where that story seemed sometimes to teeter over the edge of coincidence and into contrivance, Coming Home stays remarkably grounded, anchored by fine performances and unsullied by oversentimentality. It may move you to tears, but it won’t push you there.
★★★
Coming Home stays remarkably grounded, unsullied by oversentimentality