(2000, b/w and color; Wo de fu gin mu gin, Chinese) Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei), an only child, returns to Sanhetun, the village of his birth, to look after his mother (Zhao Yulian) upon hearing from the mayor that his father has died. In director Zhang Yimou's lovely pastoral portrait of the beginning of a 40-year love affair, the central story, based on Bao Shi's novel Remembrance and script, takes place during the 1950s, filmed in color, while the opening and closing scenes from the 1990s are photographic black-and-white. Cinematic imagery and soundtrack harmonize, creating a very appealing musical/visual landscape for this intimate drama of reverence and remembrance.

The mayor explains to Yusheng that his father, who had been the village's only teacher for four decades, died of a heart ailment during a severe storm while campaigning to raise funds for construction of a new schoolhouse. Now, according to an old custom and superstition (not followed since the Cultural Revolution), his mother demands that her husband's body be brought back in a coffin carried on foot in a funeral procession so that he will "remember his way home."

She won't allow the use of a car or tractor, as the mayor and her son suggest (nearly 40 men would be needed for the long, arduous journey; most of the young men have left the village to find work elsewhere, and the impoverished village can't afford to hire others); she insists on using her old loom to weave a cloth for his coffin, just as she had woven the lucky red banner she made for the schoolhouse when it was new upon Luo Changyu's arrival when she was a maiden. "The freedom of falling in love was unfamiliar," says Yusheng as narrator; remarking that arranged marriages had been the rule, his mother was the first in her village to make her heart's choice.

Coming from the city of East Gate in a horse cart, Changyu (Sun Honglei) is the new village teacher. According to tradition, the prettiest girl, Zhao Di (Zhang Ziyi), is chosen to weave a crimson fabric for good fortune. The only daughter of a blind, widowed mother, Di has had many suitors, none of whom met her mother's approval; she takes an interest in Changyu, preparing special dishes for him and the workmen while the schoolhouse is under construction.

Illiterate, she enjoys listening to his voice chanting lessons as she passes by the schoolhouse daily to fetch water; coy but clever in her efforts to be courted, she waits for him walking down the road with some of his students at the end of the day.

Every family takes a turn at serving the teacher a meal in the home. When Changyu comes to Di and her mother's humble residence, she asks if he remembers the bowl in which she had supplied food when the schoolhouse was being built. Her mother reprimands her because he, an educated gentleman from the city, is above their station: "You'd best forget about him." He, however, gives her a gift of a fancy barrette.

Running after the horse cart carrying Changyu and her heart away to the city - his presence has been demanded, some villagers saying he's in political trouble and may not return, though he assured Di he'd be back - she stumbles, falling and breaking the bowl she'd been carrying full of dumplings for him. She also has lost her barrette, retracing her steps daily in search of the only token of affection from Changyu.

After waiting until the day he promised he'd return, ill with fever she walks in a snowstorm on the road toward the city.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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