The tragedy of forgetting
Zhang Yimou’s latest film is a moving study of the terrible distance that can occur in small spaces.
Zhang Yimou directs Gong Li in the poignant “Coming Home.”
Chinese star Gong Li’s exquisitely doleful face is one of cinema’s treasures, and it’s the only special effect that director Zhang Yimou needs to make his latest, “Coming Home,” feel like a return to social-realist intimacy after a stretch in the world of razzle-dazzle epic melodrama (“Hero,” “The Flowers of War”).
The actress and director, who made each other’s international reputations in the late ’80s and early ’90s with art-house hits like “Ju Dou” and “Raise the Red Lantern,” prove a symbiotic team once more in this adaptation of a novel by Yan Geling.
It’s the early ’70s, and Gong plays Feng, a middle school teacher introduced to us in a state of alarm when she learns that her husband, Lu (a masterful Chen Daoming), a Cultural Revolution political prisoner, has escaped from the labor camp in which he’s been for years.
Their teenage daughter Dan Dan (Zhang Huiwen), eager to move up in her propagandist dance academy, has no love lost for her enemy-of-the-state dad. She hopes to turn him in as a way to curry favor.
Her parents’ attempt at a secretive train station reunion, thrillingly directed by Zhang with a Brian De Palma-esque crescendo, backfires when Lu is re-arrested and Feng is injured. This is all prelude, though.
The movie then shifts to three years later. The Cultural Revolution has subsided, and Lu is sent home to a startling new form of separation: An amnesia-stricken Feng no longer recognizes him, even as she patiently awaits her husband’s return.
As Lu valiantly tries ploy after ploy to penetrate Feng’s memory loss — Gong’s pinched features framing eyes that reflect both the confusion of the present and a past stolen — Zhang steers “Coming Home” toward a poignant study of immense distance in small spaces.
Though the details of an oppressive state’s history are never explicitly blamed for Feng’s dilemma, the specter of regret and institutional oblivion hovers over Zhang’s “Playhouse 90”-ish chamber drama like a gray cloud pregnant with rain that can never fall.
By the time the train station makes its last symbolic appearance, in a final, wrenching pantomime of yearning and resignation, Zhang and his sterling actors have made something fairly unforgettable about the tragedy of forgetting.