nwasianweekly.com
Sept. 16, 2006

Gou-ichi Takata (played by Ken Takakura) is a man locked into his own isolation.

Zhang Yimou returns with touching dramedy

By N.P. Thompson
For the Northwest Asian Weekly

Perhaps three-quarters of the way into Zhang Yimou’s rigorous “Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles,” it occurred to me how daring it is for Zhang to make a film so different from any of his recent work. His trademark themes are here: an improbable journey, family obligations kept at any cost. I think the back-to-back action pictures he made, “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers,” burned away the dross of excessive sentimentality that defined “The Road Home” and “Not One Less.” “Riding Alone” functions as a comedy of errors, yet the movie cuts much deeper than that subgenre typically allows, because the things that go wrong are so tied up in the emotional pain of the characters.

Takata, an elderly Japanese man, learns that his son Ken-ichi, with whom he hasn’t spoken for a decade, lies in a hospital critically ill. Takata’s daughter-in-law attempts to reconcile the men; she hands Takata a videotape of an excursion Ken-ichi made to southern China the previous year and urges him to watch.

Nestled in his rustic fishing village, the old man looks at the tape. The son, it turns out, is a writer, “an expert in Oriental folk arts.” The video has to do with mask operas performed in Yunnan province. On the screen within the screen, we see an interview subject who proclaims himself “the greatest singer” of this style of opera, particularly one called “Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.” Zhang cuts back to Takata standing as he watches; the old man regards this material at a distance, aloof even from a technologically reproduced version of his son’s interests. The singer protests that he isn’t well enough to perform, and Ken-ichi promises he’ll someday return to film him singing.

In these early rural scenes, cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding revels in spectacular shots of snowy mountain sides that ring a dark gray harbor below and in aerial views of a narrow road S-curving toward the sea. Takata contemplates what to do as white waves crash on the shore, and he leaves his remote paradise in order to finish Ken-ichi’s work.

The movie has been starkly moody until this point; once Takata reaches Yunnan province, screenwriter Zou Jingzhi injects a near-farcical scene in which Jasmine, a baby-faced Chinese translator, and a tour guide explain to Takata why filming the singer his son met is now out of the question.

There’s a certain meta quality to “Riding Alone.” Li Jiamin, who performed in Beijing Opera for 30 years, here plays a character called Li Jiamin. And Zhang’s methods of getting humor across have become much more refined since the broadly played, unfunny “Happy Times.” He gently satirizes a prison warden who declares that staging opera behind bars “sounds like an excellent way to promote Chinese culture.” In another wryly observed moment, villagers ascend en masse to a rooftop so that one man’s cell phone can reach a signal — it’s like a big event in their humdrum lives.

Zhang brilliantly handles a phone conversation between Takata and Jasmine in which the camera remains statically close on Takata holding the white receiver, yet the changes he undergoes are tremendous: Jasmine tells him things about Ken-ichi, and you can see that the father is saddened yet appreciative. Ken Takakura, who plays Takata, achieves greatness as a man locked into his own isolation. There isn’t a false note anywhere in this performance.

The movie literally reaches an unbridgeable chasm, in Takata’s elusive search to form a connection, when he and an 8-year-old boy run along either side of a canyon. The two get lost amid the rust-colored jagged cliffs, and in a visualization of solitude’s immensity, one uses a camera flash to illumine the dark night sky while the other blows a whistle. The old man and little boy have a good time at this, amused by their efforts at aiding their own rescue, then the camera cruelly pulls out from them into the expanse of the canyon, revealing to us that they can neither be seen nor heard by a search party. In a way, the entire film is about that: the tricks we do to entertain ourselves when we’re alone, or to preserve our sanity, to show evidence to the world that we’re all right, even if the world isn’t watching, even if no one sees.

“Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles” opens Sept. 15 at Metro Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle. For showtimes and ticket prices, call 206-781-5755.

N.P. Thompson can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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