My Favorite Zhang Yimou Film

Imagine if there was pressure from the American government to avoid negative portrayals of the Vietnam War on film. Imagine if because of that pressure, directors would be denounced and penalized, and their most important films subject to censorship or outright bans. Now imagine the American film landscape without "Apocalypse Now," "The Deer Hunter," "Full Metal Jacket," and "Born on the Fourth of July."

That's why out of all of Zhang Yimou's films, "To Live" strikes me as the most vital and important. It was one of small wave of films that came out of China in the 1990s, along with "Farewell My Concubine" and "Blue Kite," that directly addressed the negative consequences of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, major attempts by the Maoist government to impose Communism on the Chinese people, affecting millions. Government pressure had previously stymied any attempts to examine these events in any depth. So when these newly critical films emerged, the government banned and un-banned them, vocally denouncing their content even as they racked up festival awards around the globe.

Zhang Yimou probably had the least to worry about. By 1994 he was the most prominent and successful Chinese filmmaker in the West, after a dizzying run of films including "Red Sorghum" and "Raise the Red Lantern" that had received unprecedented global recognition. "To Live" was his fifth collaboration with leading lady Gong Li, and contained all the elements that Zhang was famous for - bold visuals, picturesque locals, and particular emphasis on the lives of common people. Many of his earlier films had been torrid love stories, pitting the individual against the inescapable constraints of family and tradition. In "To Live," the struggle is simply for survival in tumultuous times.

We first meen Xu Fugui (Ge You) and his wife, Jiazhen (Gong Li) in the 1940s. Fugui is a good-for-nothing with a weakness for gambling. After he loses his entire fortune and the family estate, Jiazhen leaves him, and Fugui is forced to go on the road performing shadow puppet operas in order to earn a living. However, by extraordinary luck, he and his partner Chunsheng (Tao Guo) come out on the right side of the war between the Nationalists and the Communists. Fugui is able to reunite with his wife and children. However, this is only the beginning of their struggles, as the world around them is changing very quickly, and Fugui's luck never stayed very good for very long.

When I watched "To Live" a few months ago, it wasn't until about halfway through the movie that I realized that I had seen it before, way back in high school. My parents rented a lot of Chinese films, but I didn't appreciate many of them back then. "To Live" left an impact though. All of a sudden I remembered in vivid detail how the rest of the story was going to play out, and I was getting emotionally distraught just at the thought of it. The film's tragedies are extremely affecting, not just because of their particular circumstances, but because they happen to these characters, and because we see the consequences of them over the long years of their lives.

The performances of Ge You and Gong Li are not particularly flashy, but they are extraordinary. We follow their family through the 50s and 60s and beyond, and see the weight of years accumulate on them. I was very familiar with Gong Li, who often played headstrong, doomed heroines. Here she gets her moments of pique, but tempered by stronger expressions of love and devotion. Ge You, however, was unfamiliar. In his early scenes of spoiled indulgence, it was easy to view him as a comic villain type, but fate and necessity soon require him to transform, gradually, into a sympathetic everyman who just wants to keep out of trouble and protect his little family.

From how I've described the movie so far, you'd probably expect "To Live" to be some kind of deathly serious, harrowing cinematic experience, and it's not. What I found on rewatch was that the film was much funnier than I remembered. Xu Fugui is a bit of a fool and a bumbler, who occasionally has to be taken down a peg by his wife and kids. Society may be cruel at times, but each individual we meet is shown to have a good side. The film is full of wry observations and little ironies, culminating in a thrilling, devastating, and somehow terribly funny sequence involving a poor doctor who incapacitates himself by eating too many steamed buns.

The government, despite all the controversy, doesn't come off all that badly for the most part. Yes, their policies definitely play a part in causing the family's sorrows, but those sorrows are just as much a product of luck and fate. I wonder if they were really more upset by the irreverence with which they were treated in a few scenes. Zhang Yimou is famous for his use of color composition - the drying silk skeins in "Ju Dou" and the famous lanterns of "Raise the Red Lantern." Here, he gets a lot of mileage out of the Communist iconography from the propaganda that is plastered everywhere, and incorporated into daily life to ridiculous extremes.

I think "To Live" resonates more with me now that I'm older, and I've seen the world change for myself. The events of the movie are far more dramatic and compelling and beautiful than most people's lives, but at its core it captures an essential truth: after enough time and enough history, everyone's life is an epic story.
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