Also, I love the well-crafted first 10-minute and the sentimental ending. Their performances are superb, one of the best performances I've seen in recent years. Still, I have to admit, there are some good sides of the film, especially Gong Li and Chen Daoming's amazing acting. However, Coming Home didn't achieve that, I can barely feel anything behind its intended simpleness and schmaltz.
And such thing behind its simpleness is the soul of the movie.
#Coming home the movie movie
For simple life story movies (Yi Yi, Platform, The World, A Simple Life), the key to be a great movie is if it could give audience a special feeling and a deep theme through its simpleness. However, such simpleness is intended, it is not natural. He intended to make everything simple, trying so hard to drop his color- using style and maintain simple. The story is simple, the cinematography is simple, everything is simple in this film, just like what Zhang promised. To be precisely, I had mixed feeling about the film, I think it is Zhang's best film since House of Flying Daggers, however it is still not a good film. However, after watching this 111-minute movie, I was disappointed. So when I heard there was an advanced screening on May 11, I immediately went to see it. I had high expectation for Zhang Yimou's latest film Coming Home, because he finally went back to tell a simple and plain story.