The ties that break

The new film by Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern) reunites him with his much-admired star, Gong Li, in a tragic melodrama about a family devastated by the privations of China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1970s.

Gong plays Feng Wanyu, the long-suffering wife of Lu Yanshi (Chen Daoming, in the film’s best performance), a college professor and political prisoner. The couple’s daughter, Dan Dan (Zhang Huiwen), is an aspiring ballerina who conforms to party doctrine in order to advance her career.

Lu escapes prison, but is betrayed almost as soon as he nears the family residence. Feng is injured in the tumult surrounding his capture and is unable to recognize him when he returns home after his release. Dan Dan comes to regret her blinkered loyalties; one parent can’t forgive her, the other can and does.

The story, based on a novel by Yan Geling, moves back and forth between past and present in the characters’ lives, and honors the point of view of each of the three at one point or another. All told, Coming Home is a starkly humane family romance that pays a moving tribute to the binding emotions of three outrageously beleaguered people.