Getting Home(China, 2007)
Getting Home” is a quintessential road movie set within the rural backdrop of China. Directed by Yang Zhang (Spicy Love Soup, Shower, Sunflower), the film tells a simplistic, but heart warming story centered around a peasant and his dead friend. Director Zhang Yang’s humorous and moving tale of friendship offers a powerful, and sometimes slapstick, commentary on the value of community and human connectivity in modern China.Getting Home is also visually rewarding, shot against the panoramic Chinese countryside.
For four years, Zhao and Liu Quanyou worked together in a big city factory. The friends often drank together and talked about life, including their innermost fears. Zhao was afraid of dying alone in the big city and away from his family. His friend, Liu Quanyou, promised that if he did pass away he would take his body back to his hometown.As fate would have it, Liu Quanyou passes away first and Zhao decides to honor his friend’s promise - by carrying his friend’s body back home. The journey is long and Zhao encounters many difficulties, meets with many quirky characters. Zhao crosses paths with highway robbers, a heart broken truck driver, a man that sets up his own fake funeral, a hairdresser with a northern accent like Zhao’s, a family of beekeepers, a homeless woman that Zhao takes interest in and a bicyclist on a journey to Tibet etc.
But there's no happy ending. Lao Zhao has to cremate his close friend's body after the police tell him the related law in China. With help and finally accompanied by police, Lao Zhao finds Wang's home, but only ruins of it remains. Wang's son left a message under the door: "Daddy, we have been looking for you for years. But I realized I made a mistake. We moved to a new house. The address is.... We are waiting for you to come back. Here is your home forever." Thus, Lao Zhao begins yet another journey to find the home of Lao Wang. The open ending leaves space for the audience to imagine..
The original title, Luo ye gui gen, is a common Chinese expression meaning “Falling leaves return to their roots”.But the attempts made by the protagonist seem to suggest that the return to roots is a cyclical journey that takes one nowhere.As Zizek puts it in another context,
"What I like is that the solution is the boat. What is the definition of boat? Is that it doesn't have roots. It's rootless. It floats around. That's the solution. We must really accept how we are rootless. This is for me the meaning of this wonderful metaphor. Boat. Boat is the solution. Boat in the sense of you accept rootless. Free floating. You cannot rely on anything. You know, it's not a return to land. Renewal means you cut your roots."
( Zizek in a documentary on the film "Children of Men".)
