If you were told that Coming Home was about a mother suffering from amnesia and the father and daughter who are forced to come to terms with the effects of her illness on them, you might assume that this was Hollywood’s latest attempt at an Oscar-bait prestige picture, one most likely featuring a showcase acting performance destined to win all the statuettes during awards season. That makes it even more disappointing that this film is not only from Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou—he of such memorable spectacles like Raise the Red Lantern, Hero, and the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening and closing ceremonies—but that much of it plays exactly like the bland, sentimental, and ultimately forgettable tearjerker you’d expect.
The opening half-hour of Coming Home promises much. For those who had been afraid, based on his recent work, that Zhang had allowed spectacle to overwhelm humanity, it’s refreshing to witness the attention he pays to the emotional nuances of his characters. When, during the 1960s in China, longtime political prisoner Lu Yanshi (Chen Daoming) escapes, his wife Feng Wanyu (Gong Li) finds herself torn between her loyalties to her country and to her husband. Naturally, Feng is reluctant to act on Communist Party officials’ demands that she turn her husband in if she encounters him. By contrast, her daughter Dandan (newcomer Zhang Huiwen), who barely remembers her father, has no compunction about giving him up, especially because her father’s fugitive status cost her a shot at the lead role in a school production of the classic Chinese ballet The Red Detachment of Women. These emotional threads lead to a stirring sequence on a bridge, with Feng running after Lu, Dandan running after Feng, and officers chasing after Lu; this is one of only two sequences in which the film reaches genuinely operatic levels of melodramatic passion.
But then, a few years later, the Cultural Revolution comes to an end, and Lu, finally released, returns home to find not only his daughter no longer dancing, but, even more devastatingly, his wife in the throes of amnesia, unable to recognize him as her husband. Or, at least, this might have been devastating if the details of Feng’s amnesia didn’t seem so suspiciously false. It appears, for instance, that though Feng—with one lone exception—never ultimately recognizes her husband, she does occasionally mistake him for a Party official named Fang who, according to Dandan, took sexual advantage of her. Does Lu actually look like Fang, thus inspiring the confusion? It’s not like we ever get to meet him to compare. This particular detail makes no sense except that it conveniently leads to a tense scene in which Feng suddenly mistakes Lu—having slowly worked his way back into her life by pretending to be a letter reader reading her husband’s letters during his imprisonment—for Fang and throws him out, threatening to undo all his hard work up to that point. Such manipulation is merely par for the course with the film’s screenplay (by Zou Yingzhi, based on a novel by Yan Geling), and maybe Zhang could have sidestepped such implausibilities by ramping up the melodrama on a visual level, Douglas Sirk-style. But no: Visually speaking, this is Zhang’s plainest (read: dullest and most conventional) effort in quite a while, which only enhances the plot’s more ridiculous aspects.
In the middle of this sentimental morass, however, is that second effective sequence of operatic intensity. For one brief shining moment, as Lu plays a tune on the piano (with the music on the soundtrack actually being performed by superstar pianist Lang Lang), Feng seems to make a mental connection and momentarily recognize the husband standing right in front of her. Though it’s brutally cut short when her amnesia steals back into her mind, it’s an achingly romantic moment that stands as an oasis of simplicity and sincerity. (It’s also the year’s second-best scene of music triggering memory, after the concluding scene of Christian Petzold’s Phoenix.) Shame, then, that the rest of Coming Home essentially adds up to little more than yet another standard disease-movie-of-the-week. If this had been an American production, though, maybe we’d already be talking about its Oscar chances, thus ensuring its fall into artistic and cultural oblivion once awards season has passed.
