Riding Alone For Thousands Of Miles (Screen Daily Review)

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Riding Alone For Thousands Of Miles (Qian Li Zou Dan Ji)
Mark Schilling in Tokyo 02 November 2005

Dir: Zhang Yimou. HK-Chi-Jap. 2005. 108mins.

The opening film at the Tokyo International Film Festival, Riding Alone For Thousands Of Miles is a departure for director Zhang Yimou from the big-budget period spectacles he has been making of late and a return to the themes and rural settings some of his most-acclaimed earlier work.

But instead of a determined young woman setting out on a journey to seek justice (as Gong Li did in The Story Of Qiu Ju [1994]) or find a lost student (see Wei Minzhi in Not One Less [1999]), his protagonist here is an elderly Japanese man, played by Ken Takakura, who goes to China to complete a research project for his dying son.

Takakura, an idol of Zhang's since the director first saw him in Junya Sato's 1976 action feature Cross The River Of Rage, will boost the film's prospects in both Japan (distributor: Toho), where he is still a bankable star after a 50-year screen career, and China, where his films are well known and where Riding Alone For Thousands Of Miles opens in December.

Elsewhere Zhang's name, as well as the film's dramatic strengths and spectacular visuals, shot in China?s mountainous Yunnan Province, will open distribution doors. Sony Pictures Classics holds US rights, while Edko (a co-producer) will open the film in Hong Kong.

Takakura plays Gouichi Takada, a Japanese fisherman who has become estranged from his son Kenichi (Kiichi Nakai), a researcher of Chinese folk arts, who he has not seen for 10 years. Then he hears that Kenichi is dying of liver cancer and goes to Tokyo to see him.

Kenichi refuses to meet his father, but his wife (Shinobu Terashima) gives Takada a tape of Kenichi's most recent trip to China - which shows his unsuccessful attempt to persuade a Beijing opera singer (Li Jiamin) to perform a classic number entitled Riding Alone For Thousands Of Miles. Takada decides to visit the singer in Yunnan Province and tape his performance for Kenichi.

Once he arrives, however, he finds that the singer is in prison for stabbing a colleague who taunted him about his illegitimate son. His guide tells Takada his mission is hopeless - and leaves him for another client - but Takada engages a local man (Qiu Lin) who can string together a few words of Japanese and presses on.

Making full use of the electronic gear he has brought with him, as well as his fumbling interpreter, Takada persuades a powerful bureaucrat to let him visit the singer in prison - but the artist, conscious-stricken about his now parentless son, refuses to perform.

So Takada sets out for the boy's remote village in the mountains ? to find and reunite him with his father.

Zhang tells this story much as he has told his other cinematic tales of stubborn persistence in the face of formidable official opposition - that is, with wry comic touches, but also with straightforward sympathy for his hero, as well as all he encounters, including the bureaucrat, the prison warden and others who, in almost any other film, would automatically fall into the evil or clueless bins. Instead of blunting his film's edge, Zhang uses this stance to deepen it - and effectively unloosen audience tear valves.

Takakura, familiar to Western filmgoers for performances in The Yakuza, Black Rain and Mister Baseball, has not only aged well - he looks spiffy, spry and thoroughly conversant in various modern electronic mysteries - but also gained the gravitas to complement the silent-but-strong persona that has long been his stock in trade.

He also is the most economical of actors, who can convey volumes even when, as in his scenes with the singer's young son, he is reduced to little more than looks, gestures - and the occasional bodily function gag.

Once the action moves to the son's village, in the film's final third, Zhang and cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding fill the screen with images - such as the hundreds of feasting villagers at linked tables stretching down a long street and Takada and the boy wandering through a fantastic landscape of wind-carved rock - that equal anything in his oeuvre in sheer visual splendour, although fans of the Raise The Red Lantern, Ju Dou and Red Sorghum will notice that his palette has become more subdued: more blues and greys, fewer of his once trademark reds.

The film itself, however, is a moving reaffirmation of the humanistic qualities that made Zhang's work so celebrated in the West in the first place. It will not ride alone at the box office.

Production companies
Elite Group (2004) Enterprises
Beijing New Picture Film Co
Gilla Co
Edko Films
Zhang Yimou Studio

Chinese distribution
Beijing New Picture

Producers
Xiu Jian
Zhang Weiping
Bill Kong

Screenplay
Zou Jingzhi from a story by
Zhang Yimou
Zou Jingzhi
Wang Bin

Cinematography
Zhao Xiaoding

Production design
Sun Li

Editor
Cheng Long

Music
Guo Wenjing

Main cast
Ken Takakura
Shinobu Terashima
Kiichi Nakai (voice)
Li Jiamin
Jiang Wen
Qiu Lin

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