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Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles

Written by Nobuhiro Hosoki

 

The mainland Chinese  director Zhang Yimou, creator of opulent and intense wire-action dramas like the consecutively successful Hero and House of Flying Daggers, has now turned his focus back to a comparatively smaller, low-budget offering.  Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles proves that he can succeed in a variety of genres.

The film takes place in a contemporary setting. Gou-ichi (played by veteran acting great Ken Takakura, the equivalent to Clint Eastwood in the US), is a granite-faced and taciturn resident of a remote fishing village in northern Japan, where he leads a lonesome existence. One day he receives a distraught phone call from his daughter-in-law Rie (Shinobu Terashima) claiming that his son Ken-ichi (Kiichi Nakai) is rapidly dying of liver cancer and has only a month to live. She secretly lies about his arrival to make the two estranged men meet up after years of conflict. But her plan backfires, and any chances of an encounter at the hospital were dashed.  But the older man sees an opportunity to patch things up when Rie hands him a video of his son's work in which he films folk-opera singer Li Jiamin (played by himself) in China. Unfortunately, Li's voice was not then ready to be captured.  So in hopes of reconciliation with Ken-ichi, he takes the drastic step of traveling down into southern China to fulfill his son's dream.

Soon, Gou-ichi's task becomes more complex as he encounters a series of obstacles. First, Li was
sentenced to jail for injuring another performer with a sword, so he has to deal with the towering cultural wall of Chinese provincial bureaucracy. On top of that, he is given a faulty guide who barely utters and Japanese. Thanks to his emotional persistence, Gou-ichi finally sees the wall crumble, and he meets Li in jail. Li bursts into tears as he recalls an estranged son he had left eight years before. All of a sudden, his mission shifts to locate this abandoned son.

Throughout the film, director Zhang deliberately maintains a slow pace to let us become involved in Gou-ichi's mission to win back his son's affection, which is seen as a universal narrative.  The village people in the film are simple and extraordinary characters who are cast as the decent people they are. The vast and magnificent landscapes are striking also,as photographed by Zhao Xiaoding, who previously worked with Zhang on his last two martial-arts films. The presence of Takakura is astonishing. He is as impassive as ever, telling the story in as few words as possible.  Anti-social by nature, he connects well with the audience by means of a vibe that slowly and intensively touches our minds. In life, the relationship between father and son is one thing that we usually misinterpret. Here, we see the huge shadow of a father cast over a snowy mountain, symbolic of Takakura's long and amazing body of work (more than 200 films).  We do indeed feel like riding alone for thousands of miles.

Directed by Zhang Yimou
Written (in Mandarin, with English subtitles) by Zou Jingzhi
Based on a story by Mr. Zhang, Mr. Zou and Wang Bin
Director of photography: Zhao Xiaoding
Edited by Cheng Long
Music by Guo Wenjing
Production designer: Sun Li:
Produced by Bill Kong, Xiu Jian and Zhang Weiping
Released by Sony Pictures Classics.
Running time: 108 minutes.

Cast: Ken Takakura (Gou-ichi Takata)
Shinobu Terajima (Rie Takata)
Kiichi Nakai (Ken-ichi Takata)
Li Jiamin (himself)
Qiu Lin (Lingo)
Jiang Wen (Jasmine),
and Yang Zhenbo (Yang Yang).