TO LIVE
A film review by David Wong Shee
Copyright 1995 David Wong Shee
Zhang Yi-Mou's (RED SORGHUM, RAISE THE RED LANTERN, JU DOU) most recent film is TO LIVE again featuring Gong Li in a principal role. The film follows the fortunes, and misfortunes, of family that lives through the communist revolution of 1949 and the later cultural revolution. The depiction of both the family melodrama and of the tumultuous historical backdrop against which it is set, combine to make this a film of considerable value.
"Political correctness" is also a theme of sorts. The characters constantly struggle to keep in step with the shifting ideological requirements of those in power, often under threat of imprisonment or execution. Ironically while the characters in TO LIVE succeed in this Zhang Yi-Mou has not. As I understand it he has been barred from any further international collaborations for the next five years because the treatment of the Chinese Communist Party in this film. This is in spite of fact that communist party officials in the film are portrayed as genuinely sympathetic and well meaning individuals.
The film implies that to those who lived through China's recent history it is obvious that many people suffered as a result of imperfections and inconsistencies in Party policy. This suffering, even though it may have been inflicted inadvertently, still demands of that those who experienced it a need to come to terms with it. TO LIVE can be seen to be as an attempt to do this.
The Party however is obviously still sensitive criticism of this sort and so have put Zhang Yi-Mou in a five-year "time capsule." The positive side is perhaps that they did not punish him more overtly and did not actively suppress the film from international circulation.
-- dws@insane.apana.org.au * David Wong Shee *
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews