MYTHIC JOURNEYS
by Chris Dashiell

Love at first sight doesn't have the mythic currency it once had in stories and films. If you don't believe in it, you're not alone. But chances are, you once did. And since believing, at least for the young, amounts to experiencing, you may have tasted at one time a desperate and overwhelming passion for a person you barely knew, a passion that seemed to consume every waking moment in a fashion both sweet and cruel.

Zhang Yimou believes, or perhaps he just wants to. The Road Home, his simplest and most purely sentimental film, chronicles, through the veil of nostalgia, a story of total devotion by a young country girl for a city boy. It's his vison of paradise lost, and as such it suffers from the distorting idealization that always comes with such visions. At the same time it touches the deepest currents of human feeling, as only such visions can.

The tale begins in the present, with the journey of an adult son (Sun Honglei) to his village home upon learning of the death of his father, who taught at the local school for forty years. His distraught, elderly mother is insisting that her husband be honored by an old tradition - having him carried in his casket all the way from the city to his burial place in the village, in order, for one last time, to show him "the road home." The village elders balk - all the young people have moved to the city; there is not enough manpower to carry out this difficult ceremony. But the old woman stands firm.

The present, according to Zhang, is in black-and-white, matching a sense that something precious has been lost. In the midst of the controversy around the funeral arrangements, the son picks up a photograph of his parents when they were young, and we are plunged into the full color flashback that constitutes the bulk of the picture.

The beautiful village girl Zhao Di (Zhang Ziyi) falls in love with the schoolteacher Changyu (Hao Zheng) when she first sees him arriving from the city. She spends the ensuing days in a shy yet persistent fascination - cooking special dishes that she leaves for the men building the schoolhouse, in the hope that he will pick hers; waiting by the road every day to catch a glimpse of him as he walks home with some of his students. Here Zhang shows his special talent for conveying the passage of time - successive images of the girl getting up as she hears his approach portray the intensity of her feeling through repetition. There is a hint of possible conflict - the girl's blind mother warns her that he is of a different class - but Zhang lets it drop. His interest is solely in the elemental feelings of this simple girl.

After some time, the young man shows interest, only to be ordered back to the city for a time, for some vague political reason - one of the film's few concessions to history (this takes place in the early 1950s). Here the extent of Di's devotion to her absent love object becomes heartbreaking - she runs through the hills trying to catch the wagon departing with her beloved; she waits all day near the road, in the freezing cold, on the day he is set to return. And so forth. The two lovers aren't really seen together very much. The few moments of fulfillment are left curiously understated. Zhang is almost exclusively focused on the intense longing of his young heroine, and on the face of his actress.

If you recall Zhang Ziyi as the dangerously unstable warrior in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you may be surprised at her previous performance here. She is all innocence, fragility, and delicate beauty, with her emotions ever near the surface. The constant use of close-up in The Road Home turns the film into something like a valentine to Zhang Ziyi, to the point where it seems a bit much. The glory of the female face is idealized, like they used to do in classic Hollywood movies, as the icon of romantic feeling. We can see the director trying too hard for effect - but since he possesses the virtue of sincere emotion, the story moves the heart anyway.

I have yet to see a bad Zhang Yimou film. This picture has his visual grace and gentle rhythm. The photography (Yong Hou) is beautiful. Nevertheless, this is one of his minor works. Subtlety has been sacrificed in the service of romanticism. And I find myself wondering if the director, who recently turned 50, might not be at some sort of creative impasse, sorrowing for the lost simplicities of a rural way of life, and the passions and certainties of youth.

It is very strange that in the little house of the old woman that Zhao Di has become, there are two posters for the movie Titanic. Reviewers who have noticed this seem to think that this is Zhang's wry comment about the inroads of modernity into Chinese life. Well, maybe. But why would this old couple have these posters in their house? The film's romantic musical theme (Bao San), with flutes that sound Celtic despite the ostensibly Chinese melody, is in fact remarkably similar to the James Horner music from Titanic. I believe that Zhang is attempting to counter that overwrought romance with his own more traditional version of love's true meaning.

Audiences in the States, outside of film festivals, can be excused for not even being aware that there is such a thing as Korean film - not to mention a thriving new wave in South Korean cinema in the last two decades. The fact is, not a single Korean picture has received general theatrical release until now, with the appearance of Im Kwon Taek's Chunhyang. I can only hope that this absurd barrier has been broken for good.

Chunhyang was perhaps the most predictable choice for an introduction. It is the most expensive Korean film to date, directed by its most renowned filmmaker. It is adapted from a folktale, which gives it universal appeal, while at the same time it is very specific to Korean culture, both in content and form.

Mongryong (Cho Seung Woo), the handsome young son of a provincial governor, wanders outside of his family's estate and sees the beautiful Chunhyang (Lee Hyo Jung) playing on a swing. Being the daughter of a courtesan, she is beneath his station, but he falls in love with her, and they are married in secret. Hiis father, however, is called to the capital to serve the king, and Mongryong is unable to take Chunhyang with him without being disinherited. He asks her to wait for him until he passes the government exams, which will give him the rights and powers of an adult. They part, but the new governor - a ruthless tyrant - is determined to make Chunhyang his concubine, and her faithfulness is put to the severest tests.

The story is one of the best known and most popular in the Korean mythos. Yet Im's purpose is not, it would seem, only to translate this tale into film, but to honor and preserve the ancient art form of pansori, the ritualistic singing and reenactment of a great story by an operatic singer. In this film the entire tale is sung by Cho Sang Hyun, the art's greatest living practitioner, in front of an enraptured audience.

The images in Chunhyang are as beautiful as any you'll ever see on screen. The photography (Il-sung Jung) is almost unbelievably crisp and vibrant - the colors leap out at you like gorgeous illustrations in a fairy tale book. Im, a veteran of over ninety films, is in complete mastery of the visual flow. The earlier sections of the film in particular achieve a precise and sustained rhythm which is really like a folktale come to life.

I would assume that the narration of the pansori singer adds another level of feeling to the film that is accessible to Korean audiences, and to anyone familiar with the form. But here I must confess my own cultural limitations. To these western ears, Cho's voice often sounded like a howling, caterwauling horror, distracting me from the film and not conducive to my enjoyment whatsoever. No doubt these reactions are due to my unfamiliarity - just as someone bred on Asian music might find western forms unlistenable. On the other hand, to pretend that I didn't have this reaction would be dishonest. Take it for what it's worth - I thought the film was a visual treat but the pansori narration felt to me like an endurance test - and the majority of the film's running time has this narration.

The story itself turns out to be a very traditional paen to the virtue of female fidelity to a husband. It is in the nature of such themes that they often seem to represent an ideal of freedom (such as, here, resistance to tyranny), when in fact they reinforce a profoundly conservative world view. It would be wrongheaded for me to complain about this by, in effect, criticizing the very nature of the myth that the film chooses to celebrate. We all find our nurturing from different kinds of stories. This one, as it happens, despite its delicate flavoring, is too conventional to nurture me.

I need also add that Korean cinema is not at all limited to this kind of production - from all reports it is clear that modern questions and struggles are finding powerful expression in their films. Chunhyang, a beautiful work in its own right, may hopefully open the gates to the west for wider access to these treasures.

In the realm of mythic narrative, the same stories keep getting reincarnated. The young hero's journey of initiation, for instance, tends to follow similar patterns, whether it happens in New Jersey or Nepal. Eric Valli's Himalaya is set in the latter place, as you may have guessed. Otherwise the story is fairly familiar. The faces, and the landscape, help to make it something special anyway.

Apparently movies can also reincarnate. Caravan was Nepal's first Academy Award nominee in '99. It's been renamed Himalaya for its current release - the older title made more sense, but maybe the producers thought to ride the mountain range's great name recognition. Well, I hope it works. The film provides a good, stirring tale without being dumb or condescending, so it may just get the enthusiastic audiences it deserves.

The inhabitants of a remote Nepalese village survive by trading
salt for grain. When a salt expedition returns, it is discovered that the tribe's young chief has died in a fall. His best friend Karma (Gurgon Kyap) says it was an accident, but the chief's elderly father Tinle (Thilen Lhondup) believes that Karma killed his son so that he could become chief, depriving his little grandson (Karma Wangel) of his birthright.

Karma is brash and arrogant. He persuades the young men to leave with most of the yaks on the long trek south to trade the salt, four days earlier than the date set by the lamas according to their astrological calculations. Tinle organizes the old men to leave on the appointed day, even though none of them have made the trip in years, with the seemingly impossible task of getting to the mountain passes before Karma. He brings the little boy with him, and the journey becomes the future chief's initiation into manhood.

The conflict between age and youth, reverence for tradition and rash self-confidence, is played to the hilt. The irascible old man is the star of the show, and the film cleverly makes him stubborn and infuriating as well as heroic. Most of the actors are non-professionals. They do pretty well, especially Lhondup. Occasionally one senses a need for the director to rein them in a bit - the tendency of amateurs to be overly explicit in their characterizations is sometimes evident. The one exception is Lhakpa Tsamchoe, who plays the little boy's mother with great dignity and restraint. (The makeup department's attempt to hide her incredible beauty is unsuccessful.)

A great documentary came out a few years ago called The Saltmen of Tibet. It conveyed a very strong sense of traditional nomadic life and spiritual culture that Himalaya doesn't touch. The fictional structure here is based on conventional ideas about conflict and strong personalities, and the tale unfolds rather tidily, like a melodrama. The film's style can be too slick for its own good, with Valli layering on the New Age sounding Tibetan mood music, and the script emphatically underlining its messages.

And yet, the film does enough things right to attain a sort of majesty despite its limitations. Valli takes his time portraying the long journey through the mountains, and this careful approach rewards the viewer with something close to the experience of suffering and faith and endurance that the characters go through. The immense, forbidding beauty of the surroundings, and the essential quietness and strength emanating from the actors, add a deeper dimension to the story than would be evident from just reading the screenplay. Himalaya may not be profound, but it is engrossing, even captivating. And there's nothing wrong with that.

©2001 Chris Dashiell
CineScene