GREAT FILMMAKERS: ZHANG YIMOU

Zhang Yimou is certainly the best known Filmmaker in China but also must be seen as one of all-time Greats along with Ingmar Bergman, Mike Leigh, David Lean, Kurosawa, Fellini, and Elia Kazan.

It’s not easy to make a great movie. How many rise above the dreck and the everyday dramas? Very few. Doing the feat under the eyes of Chinese censors is even more challenging.

Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home is a family drama — mother, husband, daughter — driven apart by The Great Leap Forward, perhaps Mao Tse Tung’s greatest social folly. The daughter is a dancer. She loses a role she deserved because of her father’s politics. She rats him to the authorities and he is banished to the countryside for “reeducation”. When he returns his wife does not recognize him. The tale tells of the father’s undiminished love for the mother and the slow return of forgiveness as the daughter experiences rekindled love. The artistry is redolent of The Grapes of Wrath. Keep the Kleenex nearby.

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is a Father-Son drama, a tale of a dying son and a remote father who did not recover from the loss of his wife. The story is moved by the wife of the son who strives to accomplish a reconciliation between Son and Dad before he dies. Slowly, the father, a Japanese fisherman, tries to complete the son’s wish to film the lead singer in a Chinese folk opera. That singer is in prison longing for reunification with his own son, a parallel story within the main plot. Keep the Kleenex handy. The wife Rie’s love of her husband is as touching as Sonya Marmeladov’s love for the axe murderer in Crime and Punishment.

Zhang also does heroic tales such as The House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Hero (2002) and Shadow (2018) where the screen come dazzlingly alive with balletic action to stir any audience.

His little masterpieces telling of common people include To Live (1994), The Story of Qiu Ju (1992) and Not One Less (1994).

• The Story of Qiu Ju (1992)
• Shanghai Triad (1995)
• House of Flying Daggers (2004)
• The Road Home (1999)
• To Live (1994)
• Coming Home (2014)
• Not One Less (1999)
• Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
• Ju Dou (1990)
• Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (2005)