Like many teenagers in any time or country, Dandan shouts to mom, “You’ll ruin everything!” But Dandan (Zhang Huiwen) is a girl in no ordinary time or place. She lives in China during the Cultural Revolution, the state-directed upheaval meant to destroy the nation’s past and eliminate anyone who might deviate from the direction set by the country’s helmsman, Chairman Mao Zedong. Dandan dreams of a future in ballet—in the form imposed by the cultural dictator, Madame Mao—but the return of her father, Lu (Chen Daoming), an escapee from a political prison, could spell the end of her career before it begins—unless her mom, Feng (Gong Li), turns her husband over to the police.
A teenager’s selfishness, a wife’s devotion and a father’s determination to reunite with his family form the emotional heart of Coming Home, the compelling new film by Chinese director Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern). Perhaps the most significant filmmaker who rose alongside China’s emergence from the Mao era, Zhang keeps the story’s potential for melodrama in check while recreating the appearance of a China far removed from today’s global colossus. There are a hundred propaganda posters for every motor vehicle on the streets, the city is covered with the grime of a coal-fired economy, men and women and old and young are dressed more or less identically; at home, domesticity is achieved amidst the proletarian squalor.
We meet Dandan at dance school, rehearsing The Red Detachment of Women, a ballet of choreographed violence and adherence to ideology that entertained Richard Nixon on his historic visit to China. When the principal calls her to his office, she is surprised that mom is already there, wearing a frown of consternation. The principal informs Dandan that her father is on the run and might try to visit his family. At the first sign of Lu, turn him in. “I will obey the Party’s decisions,” Dandan declares, a child of the system as much as her parents. When mom looks less than convinced, the principal warns that “your daughter’s future” depends on her response.
Coming Home includes two homecomings: In the first instance, Lu is apprehended, Feng is incriminated and Dandan loses her place in school. Three years later, after Mao rescinded the Cultural Revolution and re-imposed the anxiety-ridden regimen of a normal sort of dictatorship, Lu is paroled, complete with a “Certificate of Rehabilitation.” “I’m home,” Lu announces, but he’s puzzled by his wife’s uncertain reaction. The problem is that Feng had a breakdown during the intervening years. She is convinced that he is someone else. “Please leave,” she insists. Even the intervention of the neighborhood Communist Party warden fails to move Feng’s disbelief. The look of incomprehension on Lu’s face is the mark of great acting.
The grosser violence of the Cultural Revolution is never shown. Coming Home focuses instead on the smaller repercussions, the emotional and psychological violence that played out in the lives of one family. Politics always becomes personal. Zhang, a survivor of the Cultural Revolution, knows the story well.
Coming Home
4 stars
Gong Li
Zhang Huiwen
Directed by Zhang Yimou
Rated PG-13
