OUT OF COMPETITION – Gui Lai (Coming Home), a luminous fresco

Zhang Yimou is in the Official Selection for the sixth time, this time Out of Competition, with a theme that is close to his heart: the Chinese director takes on the topic of the psychological toll of the Cultural Revolution.

Photo from the film © Bai XiaoYan 

Zhang Yimou is the pre-eminent figure in the “fifth generation”, an association of Chinese post-Cultural Revolution filmmakers influenced by the Nouvelle Vague. In this fresco, punctuated by luminous and carefully crafted images, he returns to his first loves. Eight years after Curse of the Golden Flower (Man Cheng Jin Dai Huang Jin Jia), the Chinese director reconnects with Gong Li, his former wife and the muse of three of his films presented in the Official Selection: Yao a yao yao dao wai pe qiao (Shanghai Triad), Ju Dou and Huozhe (To Live!), Grand Jury Prize winner in 1994.

With the story of Lu Yanshi, a political prisoner set free at the end of the Cultural Revolution and pained by daily grieving for his wife’s amnesia, Zhang Zimou signs an intimate romantic drama inspired by Yan Geling’s novel “The Criminal Lu Yanshi”. This is the Chinese director’s twelfth collaboration with the beautiful actress and a grand return of the leading lady of Farewell my Concubine. Chen Daoming plays Lu Yanshi.

Coming Home draws on spectacular images to distill the heavy atmosphere of a bygone era. Zhang Yimou writes with great precision, a quality that is evident in the direction given to the actors and of course in the film direction as a whole. A visual splendour that is constantly renewed and does justice to the story.

A film that Steven Spielberg, who viewed it in a private screening in April, qualified as “powerful, profound and emotional”.

Charlotte Pavard

SCREENINGS

Tuesday 20 May / Grand Théâtre Lumière / 11a.m-10:30p.m

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