Less Action, More Talk

In Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, Zhang Yimou karate chops martial arts to the curb.
by Chris Cabin
Rating: 3 out of 5

So, you’re a director; a Chinese director, to be exact. You’ve just hit the peak of your career with a huge box-office success (Hero) and a monster critical success (The House of Flying Daggers). In the Western eye, you are the man for martial arts films. So how do you follow this up? What great feat of imagery and ass-kicking could possibly follow this win? If you’re Zhang Yimou, you don’t try. You just go back to what you did before those: small art-house character pieces.

Gou-ichi (the great Ken Takakura) makes a modest living as a fisherman in Japan and lives a very lonesome existence away from his family. Ken-ichi (Kiichi Nakai), his son, especially wants nothing to do with him due to some unnamed conflict. When he finds out his son has liver cancer, however, Gou-ichi rushes to Ken-ichi’s bedside, but is denied by the son’s constant grudge. Instead, he is met by Rie (Shinobu Terajima), his daughter-in-law, who gives him a tape of footage his son took of legendary opera star Li Jiamin (the Chinese opera performer plays himself). Sadly, Jiamin couldn’t sing the son’s favorite song, “Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles,” but promised Ken-ichi he would perform it the next time he toured in front of the camera. Moved by the terminal state of his son, Gou-ichi sets himself on a journey to China to videotape the singer and possibly stitch up the familial rift.

It’s a sentimental journey, and that might be the film’s most fatal point. While cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding (also of House of Flying Daggers) films both countries beautifully, there is something peculiarly hokey about the film’s language and its overdone story of death and reconciliation. The moments that hit hardest are those where we are alone with Gou-ichi, especially the mystical, ambient opening shot of him on the banks of the river. Though he has always been known for treading into obvious, overwrought dialogue, Yimou burdens the film unendingly here with moments that should speak through image rather than bumbling sentimentality.

This is not to say that the actors don’t overcome it, for the most part. Takakura, a monument of acting in his native Japan, has garnered much respect for his reserved, coiled performances that garner similarities to Clint Eastwood and John Wayne. Here, he carries the film with little intervention from other actors. Most notable is Qiu Lin as Lingo, a guide of sorts in Li’s village who attempts to help Gou-ichi when he arrives in China. Kiichi Nakai also makes good on the scant time he is given as Ken-ichi, but Terajima overdoes her role as the daughter-in-law and doesn’t give the conversations between her and Gou-ichi enough sincerity and realism.

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles makes an interesting pause between his last two films and the upcoming Curse of the Golden Flower, but it doesn’t bode well in the canon of Yimou, whose Raise the Red Lantern was a much more interesting and honest drama than this. Character studies about age and family can be enthralling and sometimes transcendental (check out the films of the late, great Yasujiro Ozu), but the film trades that for the well-tread territory that Hallmark built its name on. LAA

Rated PG; opens Sept. 1 in select theaters.