No one in China escaped the impact of the Cultural Revolution. During the decade-long crusade launched by Chairman Mao in 1966 to purge counterrevolutionaries from the Communist Party and recapture the ideological purity of the People’s Republic, schools and universities closed as students rebelled against their teachers, and cadres of young Red Guards policed the ideas of their elders, violently persecuting professionals, intellectuals, and cultural figures. Local communities descended into witch hunts, and there were armed clashes in the streets. Thousands of people were imprisoned, and millions—including some 16 million young people—were banished to the countryside to be “reeducated” among the peasant proletariat. The social chaos plunged China into serious economic distress, and by the time Mao died in 1976, a whole generation had been sidetracked for years by the promise of a glorious socialist rebirth.
“For many years, I wanted to make movies about [the Cultural Revolution]—to discuss the suffering and to talk about fate and human relationships in a world that people couldn’t control and that was very hostile,” Zhang recalled. When he touched on the revolution in his 1994 epic To Live, however, Zhang discovered he was still living in a hostile world he couldn’t control. To Live follows a husband and wife through the Chinese Civil War, the founding of the People’s Republic, Mao’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward program in the late 50s, and finally the Cultural Revolution, exposing the cruelty of fate in the most shocking and absurd fashion. Near the end of the film, a young woman arrives at a hospital to give birth, only to discover that the doctors have been sent to a reeducation center and replaced by cheery, ill-prepared interns. When complications ensue during the delivery, the woman bleeds to death. To Live was banned in China for years, and when it screened in competition at the Cannes film festival, the government barred Zhang from attending (his absence from the press conference was marked by an empty chair).
Zhang the radical, Zhang the reactionary—as Coming Home demonstrates, neither label really fits. Interviewed in 2007, the director expressed his desire to make more movies about the Cultural Revolution, but in the end he’s interested in history only insofar as it shows individuals struggling against, or being swept away by, its mighty currents. “It’s not that I want to make political films about the Cultural Revolution,” he explained in 2007, “but instead, with the Cultural Revolution as the background, I want to show the fate of people, their love and hate, their happiness and sadness, and the most valuable things in human nature that survived this recent period of Chinese history.” One of the most valuable things in human nature is memory, the power to order the world through past experience. With Coming Home, Zhang returns to the task of knocking at his own front door. v
Directed by Zhang Yimou
