During the late 1980s and early ‘90s, director Zhang Yimou and actor Gong Li had an ongoing collaboration—as well as a behind-the-scenes romantic entanglement—rivaling that of Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina in the ‘60s. Their impressive seven-film run yielded multiple masterpieces, including Raise the Red Lantern and To Live, but after Shanghai Triad in 1995, the two didn’t work together again until Curse of the Golden Flower in ’06. Now they’ve reunited once more for the treacly but effectively straightforward melodrama Coming Home, in which Zhang also returns to a critical era in Chinese history: the Cultural Revolution. But although the film begins in 1973, three years before the end of this period, the depiction of political repression is relevant enough to contemporary China that viewers unfamiliar with the culture may not at first realize they’re watching a period piece.
Before jumping forward to the wake of the Cultural Revolution, the film establishes the tense dynamic between a schoolteacher, Feng Wanyu (Gong), her husband Lu Yanshi (Chen Daoming)—a suspected political dissident on the lam after escaping from prison—and their young daughter, Dan Dan (Zhang Huiwen), a ballet dancer whose drive to land a leading role hangs in the balance when she’s pressed by government officials to reveal her father’s whereabouts. Dan Dan even scolds her mother after they’re informed of her father’s escape, forbidding her to abet an “enemy of the Party.” But Feng does try to help her husband, leading to a suspenseful chase at a train station during which she suffers a head injury while being restrained by the police.
The story picks up three years later. Lu is exonerated and allowed to return home (hence the title), and Dan Dan, having given up ballet, works at a textile factory. Meanwhile, her mother suffers from psychogenic amnesia, a condition that prevents her from recognizing her husband. Although she expects his return, when he arrives she mistakes him for a policeman with whom she bargained for his safety. Lu, aided by his repentant daughter—with whom Feng is still furious—devises a series of schemes to jog his wife’s memory. In one, he poses as a piano tuner in order to play a song she associates with him. Later, he sends her a letter stating that he’ll arrive on the fifth of the month—but when he shows up at the train station, Feng still doesn’t recognize him.
The premise strains credulity, and its circularity eventually becomes repetitive, but such emotional directness is admirable in an age when the melodrama is long out of fashion. Despite constraining Gong to a nearly one-note performance, Coming Home delivers some wrenching moments throughout—although the perfunctorily bleak final shot can easily be predicted about halfway through. The only element actively working against the film is the overbearing score, which sweeps in at crucial moments to underline the emotional arc. It’s especially distracting in the scene in which Lu plays the piano, where Feng’s reaction would play out more effectively in the ensuing silence. But one can either choose to cynically mock the admittedly maudlin storytelling, or accept the sincerity of the cast and filmmaker and get swept away by the emotional current.