Coming Home
| Synopsis |
Lu Yanshi (Chen Daoming) and Feng Wanyu (Gong Li) are a devoted couple forced to separate when Lu is arrested and sent to a labor camp as a political prisoner, just as his wife is injured in an accident. Released during the last days of the Cultural Revolution, he finally returns home only to find that his beloved wife has amnesia and remembers little of her past. Unable to recognize Lu, she patiently waits for her husband’s return. A stranger alone in the heart of his broken family, Lu Yanshi determines to resurrect their past together and reawaken his wife’s memory.
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| Year Released |
2014
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| Running Time |
109 min
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| Publisher |
Le Vision Pictures
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| Country |
China
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| Region | |
| Subject | |
| Rating |
Reviews
Please login to review this resourceComing Home 2014
Erin Breault
World History AP
Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12
Film Review
Coming Home (2014) is a romantic drama, from director Zhang Yimou. It would be an excellent addition to the World History course curriculum. The story revolves around, Lu Yanshi (Chen Daoming), a dissident professor’s homecoming during China’s Cultural Revolution. He is a haunted, bedraggled, desperate fugitive; the second time he comes home, he's careworn and rehabilitated. On each occasion, his wife finds herself unable to open the door and let him inside. Doors and gates are recurrent images through out the film.
Xan Brooks from The Guardian (May 20, 2014) argues that Yimou’s new film looks at the cultural revolution more in sadness than in anger, using the spouses' relationship as a metaphor for the country's stumbling attempt to make peace with its past.
When Lu Yanshi is released from jail, amnesiac Feng Wanyu (Gong Li) fails to recognize him. Years before, the couples' indoctrinated daughter (Zhang Huiwen) had cut her father's face from all the photos in the family album, which means that there is no visual reminder; no proof that the man is who he claims to be. His wife looks right through him, standing forlornly at the station’s gate awaiting her husband's return. Brooks criticizes Yimou handling of the subject. The film is sensitive, even elegant, but slides toward sentimentality and is faintly evasive. However, I think that Yimou’s treatment of the impact of the Cultural Revolution on ordinary people is intimate, and bittersweet and the reconciliation of the family is a powerful stand-in for the Cultural Revolution’s legacy on the nation at large.
This film, Coming Home, is a valuable contemporary source for students when studying this period of Chinese history. However, students should be encouraged to evaluate fictional films using viewing techniques and questions specific to film, using “visual thinking strategies”. As a result, students will not only deepen their understanding of the complexity of the Cultural Revolution in China, but will develop a critical picture of how late 20th and early 21st century people viewed this event. This film can serve to highlight for students the way in which film as a global force either disseminates a particular ideology and ethos, and consumer mass culture or exposes and resists it. Teachers can encourage such questions as: Whose voices do we hear in the film? What film effects are utilized to convey the film’s position on the Cultural Revolution? To what extent does this film reflect social reality? Are they representative of a particular ideology?
