The Road Home (1999) from Mick Locke

Zhang Ziyi achieved global stardom as the demure bride-to-be/swashbuckling sword fighter in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  That’s the film I saw her in.  She was lithe, audacious, insolent, and aggressive – Juliet channeling Mercutio and Tybalt.  Audiences adored her.  How startling it is, then, to view her first film, which garnered her China-wide stardom.  The Road Home was directed by Zhang Yimou.  Since Yimou also directed her two post-CT,HD hits –  Hero and The House of Flying Daggers –  you might have supposed that Zhang Ziyi is strictly a cinematic martial artist.  The Road Home shows us otherwise.

   For guys who savored a glimpse of Ziyi’s naked belly and that fleeting wet T-shirt scene in CT,HD, y’all should continue to cherish those memories.  The Road Home presents Ziyi as a modest peasant girl of rural China in the late 1950s.  In her traditional Maoist garb, she looks swaddled like a Pillsbury Doughgirl.  The film does offer, however, plenty of full-screen lingering views of Ziyi’s teenage cherry blossom face.

   The Road Home presents a tale of courtship across the gulfs of education, class, and community norms of modesty.  If you’re unusually skittish about films with subtitles, do not fear this one.  Yes, there are spoken lines in Chinese, with some sparse text to read.  But most of the tale is conveyed by face and body language.  For instance, an early act of romantic assertion is Ziyi’s long urgent run – holding dumplings in crockery – after the departing horse and wagon carrying her beloved away.  Run, Ziyi, run!  Over hill and down dale.  No subtitles needed.

   Her heart’s been smitten upon the arrival in her village of a reserved, handsome, city-educated scholar and college graduate, dispatched by authorities to be the new school teacher.  Ziyi hovers as close as propriety allows – which is to say, meters away in a crowd.  Unschooled but resourceful, she contrives and schedules her chores so as to nonchalantly encounter her man.  I would dearly love to narrate in detail her pre-schemed rendezvous at the village well, but just trust me – you’ll love it.  I’ll spoil it not.

   This film is rendered in full-color flashback, framed by black and white fore- and after-words, sort of Wizard of Oz meets James Cameron’s Titanic.  As in Titanic, we encounter first and last the film’s vibrant main character as a dottering old woman.  In fact, quite prominent in the black and white foreword is a Chinese promotional poster for Titanic.  This helps date the film’s framing, just as a 1958 calender page dates the full-color film proper.  It’s also an echo of the Titanic narrative device of bracketing age now around youth back then.

   Our greatest relish while viewing The Road Home is the mutually growing love from afar which radiates between scholar and peasant girl.  Yimou makes the most of lush rural landscape.  Also, he lovingly displays vanishing crafts like weaving, pottery repair, and country cooking.  As a final feel-good kicker, he includes a community-wide gathering and endeavor to emphasize the richness of life this initially young couple ultimately share over decades. 

   In and of itself, this tale of romantic assertion coupled with traditional modesty makes for poignant viewing.  That it stars Zhang Ziyi in her first big-screen luminescence clinches The Road Home as a must-see.  Excellent date film.