Going Home by Yang Zhang (2007)
15 November 2007A lovely mainland Chinese film about a man doing all he can to bring his friend’s body home from the city to the family in the North East who he can’t find. It is all about loyalty, and the people one meets when going on such an adventure, and it really is a lovely little tale. I enjoyed Yang Zhang’s films Shower and Quitting, so this was a no brainer, and I am happy I picked it up. And luckily the mainland Chinese disc has English subs, though you can’t really tell from the label.
Zhao Benshan plays Zhao a man whose best friend Liu died in the city working as a constuction worker, and he has no money for a coffin and is literally carrying his friend back home to the North East of China any way he can. He has only a tiny bit of money, though his friend has $5000 from the company, which he plans on taking back to the family to help them.
REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS…
Zhao has an interesting journey. First he takes a bus, but they are robbed, and when he tells of the money and that it is for his friends family, the robbers leave, and leave everything they were going to take, but then the people on the bus kick him off for having a dead body with him. So he must carry his friend.
Along the way he meets a bike rider trying to get something done. A crazed truck driver whose woman left him. Bee keepers whose wife had half her face mangled in an explosion. A tractor driver who gets him a wheel to roll his friend in. A nice woman hair dresser from his province, and the police officer who loves her. He meets a bunch of wonderful people, until one day he finally collapses on the road, and gets picked up by a hospital and the police, who say he has to cremate his friend, but then help him to get to the family that they cant contact.
They find the village near the 3 gorges damn, and it is totally destroyed, but they find a door with a message from Liu that they love him, and where they moved, and the cop says they had better get going, because it will be a 7 hour drive to get there. And the film ends.
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Really a lovely little film about loyalty and how people react to it. And really the goodness of people all around.