Feng is loyal Dan Dan, an aspiring ballerina hoping to curry favor with state officials, sees her father on the landing of the family’s flat and betrays him to the authorities, unbeknownst to Feng he’s captured the next day, just as Feng has gone to the train station to meet him, secretly, with provisions. The authorities have told both Feng and Dan Dan about the escape, urging them to report back if Lu tries to contact them. Political prisoner Lu (Chen Daoming, who played Emperor Qin in Zhang’s 2002 Hero) escapes and tries to make his way home to his wife, Feng (the marvelous Gong Li, who has often worked with Zhang), and teenage daughter Dan Dan (newcomer Zhang Huiwen), who was a toddler when he was taken away.
The story opens in the early-to-mid-1970s, near the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. I’m never sure what ‘tearjerker’ indicates: that it’s bad to cry at movies?Ĭoming Home, Zhang’s first film since the 2011 historical drama The Flowers of War, is pure melodrama, with all the unfiltered feeling that promises. What will the Americans who get to see Zhang Yimou’s tender and unapologetically fervent Coming Home make of it? For now, the old-fashioned, mainstream Hollywood melodrama is a fairly dormant art form. Melodrama hasn’t died - it survived through the Eighties and Nineties with effective, if not necessarily good, pictures like Ghost and The Bridges of Madison County - but it seems that today’s audiences are wary of it, preferring to get it filtered through the spectacle of superheroes. The heightened, unrealistic intensity of those movies wasn’t a mistake that the filmmakers somehow failed to correct, but a way of drilling past everyday surface anxieties - the random little worries that plague us - to get to a deeper stratum of emotional intensity, the feelings we so often push down in the mere act of living. In the mid-twentieth century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture like Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you could pour your own unarticulated feelings of loss and loneliness.