To Live

The history of China over the last 50 years has been one of phenomenal transformations and political upheavals. To Live is an amazing two and a half hour-long epic that translates all that history in human terms. The story is a melodrama that begins in the 1940s and takes us through such events as the 1949 communist revolution, the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, and concludes during some unspecified point in China's recent, pre-Tienanmen past. To Live, however, is no dry recitation or reinterpretation of history. The story's emphasis is on the human melodrama, on the effects that all these constant political shifts wreak on ordinary lives. It tells a multi-generational story that focuses on one family and the mechanisms by which they cope throughout these tumultuous decades. One need not be a China buff to understand the nuances of To Live; one need only be a student of human affairs and a fan of great filmmaking. China's preeminent filmmaker, Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern), has once again created a masterpiece which was recognized as such when it was awarded the Grand Jury prize at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. Yimou's aim must have been true because it provoked the Chinese government to ban screenings of the movie in its homeland and place gag orders on Yimou and Gong Li, the director's longtime collaborator and co-star of To Live. The movie continues Yimou's distinctive tradition of exquisite visual stylings, though in keeping with this story about “common people” his compositions are a bit more subdued than his more histrionic, earlier work. One of the film's running storylines involves delicate performances of shadow or silhouette puppetry, a beautiful but little-practiced art form that's worth seeing for its sake alone. Gong Li's performance, as always, is extraordinary and her co-star Ge You (who also won the Best Actor award at Cannes for this movie) is another great talent with a most expressive face. Detailing the events of this epic would only suffer in the retelling. To Live is a movie to be experienced.