Last night, I had planned to follow Lias timely advice and watch Main Hoon Na on SBS, a hit Bollywood film with a cast of notable Indian actors.
I couldn’t sit through the first 10 minutes. I’m pretty easily irritated and the main actor Shakruhk Khan irritates me like a grain of sand embedded in the cornea of my movie watching eye.
Main Hoon Na is a star vehicle for Khan, and most of the production crew is linked to him in some way. It plays out like Tom Cruise’s egomanical Mission Impossible 2, which I couldn’t sit through either. The posing, the ridiculous action sequences, the swarthy camera look it’s incredibly cheesy and predictable. 10 minutes, and I was out.
Instead, I popped in The Road Home, a Chinese movie that shows Northern China as a setting for a deeply moving romance.
This film features Zhang Ziyi in her first feature role as Zhao Di, a young girl living in a country village in the blustery province of Heilongjiang. Zhang Ziyi is becoming an internationally renowned actress after her lead roles in Memoirs of a Geisha, Hero and the mundane House of the Flying Daggers.
The director, Zhang Yimou, launched Zhang Ziyi’s career with this slow moving, but compelling film, and would later cast Ziyi in his later, more explosive films.
At the heart, The Road Home is about love but it’s not really a romance. The couple at the centre of the film never say ‘I love you’, thank Bog, and they never even spend a tender moment together. I’m not the kind of guy that gets weepy, but this film melted my icy heart into a puddle of water. No, I didn’t cry.
It’s one thousand times more believable than tripe like Maid in Manhattan, and one million times more moving than Two Week Notice.
Zhang Yimou has often portrayed the Chinese countryside in his films, to the mass complaint of the Chinese public, who would rather the world see films about the shiny skyscrapers of Shanghai, but Yimou has a natural knack of making the life look idyllic, with bright skies, warm, cozy beds and mouth-watering mushroom dumplings. And savoury onion cakes.
The Road Home is I mentioned quite slow-moving, with a lot of close-ups and long, lonely walks, with muted silence as the soundtrack; still, it’s mesmerizing watching the story unfold amidst the alpine forest. Zhang Ziyi gets a lot of the screen time, and she turns us on our asses, with her coquettish smiles, her cheery face morphing quickly into disappointment and despair.
Watching her cry, I wanted to wipe away that single tear and warm her up with a hot cup of Woolong tea. Don’t worry, I’d reassure her, every little ting is gonna be alright.
I ate a pomegranate while watching the film, and the tart seeds exploded in my mouth with a satisfying pop. The red juice stained blood on my palms, as if I experienced my own stigmata, expressing my connection with this incredible love story.
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