Beyond the Multiplex

"Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles": The Clint Eastwood of Japan, on a long journey of reconciliation

One of those protean artists who's hard to sum up or get a handle on, the Chinese director Zhang Yimou seems to want to reinvent or at least reorient himself with every new picture. After the international successes of the martial-arts costume dramas "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers," it seemed as if Zhang had found a new style, an action-packed counterpart to the grand melodramas of his earlier career, like "Ju Dou" or "Raise the Red Lantern."

In fact, his new film, "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles," represents a third stream in his career, the understated and intimate character drama aimed more at Chinese audiences than the international film market. Other examples have included "Not One Less" and "The Road Home," and, like those, this new picture will reach only a few devoted American spectators. That's too bad, because once you get used to the apparent flatness and emotional reserve of this picture, it's a sad, slyly comic tale of family trauma and reconciliation that packs a wallop.

Zhang's entire agenda in making this film apparently involved creating a part for the great Japanese actor Ken Takakura, an impassive he-man type sometimes called the Clint Eastwood of Japan. Playing Takata, a fisherman from a remote Japanese village who must travel into China's mountainous Yunnan province to fulfill a promise made by his estranged and desperately ill son, Takakura justifies the director's confidence. With scarcely a crack in his granitic expression, as rocky as the spectacular Yunnan scenery (wonderfully captured by cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding), Takakura conveys an entire internal world of paternal anguish.

Takata is officially traveling to China to find a performer of folk opera whom his son, an academic, promised to film doing a traditional work titled "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles." But the opera singer (a real performer named Li Jiamin) is in prison, with a young estranged son of his own in a distant village, and Takata's lonely thousand-mile journey begins to digress like a shaggy-dog story or an 18th century novel, taking him ever deeper into a strange land where he doesn't understand the culture or speak the language.

Prison authorities, balky tractor engines and unreliable cellphone signals -- every few minutes, Takata must phone his translator (Jiang Wen) to get him out of yet another incomprehensible situation -- block the way, but ultimately Takata finds Li's son (Yang Zhenbo) and prepares to bring him to his father. (Zhang has always found terrific child actors, and Yang is no exception.) But no one has asked the boy if he actually wants to go, and he and Takata end up lost, deep in the Yunnan canyons, with a boat whistle, a digital camera and absolutely no language in common.

Don't worry, "Riding Alone" is not the kind of film where really terrible things happen to innocents. But that's not to say there isn't an inexpressible core of sadness at its center. The nearly wordless connection that forms between this fatherless son and this childless father in the movie's latter stages may leave you blubbering, partly because you'll understand that, like all human passions, it will last only a short time. In its resolutely unhistrionic way, this is one of Zhang's best films, and an entirely new kind of role for Ken Takakura. (I'm not even going to pretend to rank it among his 203 other films.)

"Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles" opens Sept. 1 in New York and Los Angeles, with a national release to follow.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)