‘The Road Home’ Winds Through Lush Scenery

Because Zhang Yimou unhesitatingly adjusts his style and scope to suit his material, each new film from the director of “Red Sorghum,” “Raise the Red Lantern” and “Shanghai Triad” comes as a surprise. Like his last picture, “Not One Less,” his latest, “The Road Home,” honors selflessly dedicated rural schoolteachers, yet they are quite different films.

Whereas the earlier film was gritty and harsh in tone, “The Road Home,” written by Bao Shi, is a work of poetic grandeur celebrating the natural magnificence of the rolling hills in which a primitive village is nestled.

It is called Sanhetun, and Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei), a businessman in his 30s, is made sharply aware of the many years since he has visited his hometown in North China. Receiving word of the death of his father, the village’s revered schoolmaster, Luo heads home from his distant city to console his mother and attend his father’s funeral.

When he arrives at last he encounters his mother, Zhao Di (Zhao Yuelin), sitting in front of her late husband’s school, which he had helped build in the late 1950s when he came from the city to become the village’s first teacher. Luo has already been informed by the village mayor that his mother adamantly wishes to uphold tradition in the matter of her husband’s funeral.

Not only is she determined that her long unused and broken loom, the last of its kind in the village, be repaired and set up so that she can weave her husband’s shroud herself but also that his body be carried by men to his grave site by an ancient, now unused well. That would be no problem if he had died at home, but he died in a town on the other side of a mountain, some distance from Sanhetun. He had worn himself out traveling substantial distances to raise funds for the construction of a new school.

Zhao Di wants the community to honor properly the man who gave his life to it; the trouble is that all the able-bodied men have left Sanhetun, leaving behind a community of old people and some children left in their care.

When “The Road Home” shifts from the rich black-and-white to an even richer color of the past, the reasons for Zhao Di’s stubbornness become increasingly clear. Back in 1958 Zhao Di (as a younger woman played by “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s” exquisite Zhang Ziyi) was a beautiful 18-year-old living with her blind grandmother (Li Bin). Like everyone else in the village, she is excited by the arrival of the new schoolteacher, Luo Changyu (Zheng Hao), a tall, smiling man her age. She is transfixed at the sight of him, and will be swept over by a love for him that knows no bounds.

In his shy way, Changyu begins to respond to her--and her tasty meals--but is abruptly summoned back to the city. The villagers surmise, probably correctly, that it is over some political issue, and suspense grows as to whether he’ll make it back by the date he is expected.

“The Road Home” is a paean to the power of love as sustenance in difficult times and to the value of learning. Zhao Di never did learn to read and write but her reverence for learning, echoed throughout her community, is profound.

The film is suffused with the relentlessness and inevitability of change, and it is an expression of Zhang Yimou’s fear that the value of family and community ties and of selfless love may be lost in the process.

Photographed by Hou Yong, “The Road Home” is a gorgeous film with a vision strong enough to sustain heart-tugging, heightened by San Bao’s romantic score, that verges on the sentimental. The film is also a showcase for Zhang Ziyi, who is never less than enchanting.

* MPAA rating: G (all ages admitted). Times guidelines: suitable for all ages.

‘The Road Home’

Zhang Ziyi: Zhao Di (in youth)

Sun Honglei: Luo Yusheng

Zheng Hao: Luo Changyu

Zhao Yuelin: Zhao Di (in old age)

Li Bin: Grandmother

A Sony Pictures Classics release of a Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia presentation of a Guangxi Film Studios & Beijing New Picture Distribution Company production. Director Zhang Yimou. Producer Zhao Yu. Executive producer Zhang Weiping. Screenplay by Bao Shi. Cinematographer Hou Yong. Editor Zhai Ru. Music San Bao. Costumes Dong Huamiao. Art director Cao Jiuping. In Mandarin, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

At selected theaters.