How many bodies does it take to make a revolution
活著 Huozhe [To Live], dir. 張藝謀 Zhang Yimou, starring 葛優 Ge You & 鞏俐 Gong Li, 1994.
woquinoncoin sent me an email a while back, in response to a query on 'What books are must buys before I leave Taiwan?' She reeled off a nice little list, and mentioned 余華 Yu Hua, who wrote the book 活著 (1992) that the film is based on. She said of the film, "an epic family saga if ever there was one, and I cry and cry and cry every time I watch the movie." Well, I didn't cry and cry and cry through the whole thing, but I cried and cried and cried through the last hour or so.
I will sheepishly admit that I watched it with the English subs (that it wasn't supposed to have, at least not according to the box - 小貓貓 insisted I buy it when we were down at my favorite DVD store & I cheerfully complied, but a lot of Chinese films in Taiwan don't have English subs, for obvious reasons).
The film starts in the '40s, in a gambling hall, where 福貴 Fugui (Ge You) is gambling away the family money and house.
家珍 Jiazhen (Gong Li) is his long-suffering wife who puts up with his gambling, until the night he gambles away the family house - she takes off with their daughter Fengxia, with another spawnlet cooking in the oven.
The rest of the movie is life - we go from the 40s to the 50s to the 60s, and all along the way, little missteps are made. Some lead to strange strokes of luck, more lead to absolute disasters. It is a story of a little family of four set against the backdrop of great movements, and the participants have no choice but to get swept up too.
After gambling the family house away, Fugui is given a set of traditional puppets - I really, really loved the scenes of the puppets with the traditional music.
While travelling and making money as a puppeteer, he gets nabbed by the KMT (who are at this point losing their battle with the Communists) and pressed into service of sorts. Luckily for Fugui, it turns out even the Communists like entertainment - traditional or no - and he manages to make his way back to his wife, his daughter, and his son.
Here we have the first twist: after getting back, the guy who took Fugui's family home for gambling debts owed (Long'er, played by Ni Dahong) is executed for being a landlord. Fugui realizes that had he not gambled away the family home, that would've been him with five bullets in him. Small favors don't last long, and during the Great Leap Forward, Fugui's son Youqing (Deng Fei) is killed (in a cruel twist, by Fugui's friend who survived the civil war with him).
And yet the family trundles on. Fengxia (Liu Tianchi as the older Fengxia) - who is mute after a bad childhood illness and somewhat deaf as well - finds a nice match with an appropriately revolutionary mate. She dies during childbirth. The movie wraps up a few years later with a sweet family scene ....
I still cried and cried and cried. Gong Li and Ge You are both wonderful in this movie - Gong Li as the mother and wife who tries so hard to protect her family, but just can't manage to shield them from the goings on of the outside world. Her wails and screams as the bloody, covered body of her son is carried by and her pleadings with the ill-trained nurses as her daughter hemorrhages and dies in her arms had me bawling, and while the English subtitles probably make it seem mawkish and overdone, it's heartrending to listen to it in Chinese.
Ge You's Fugui is a man almost too flexible - bending and changing with the political tides, though I think he's a very sympathetic character after the first 20 or so minutes of the film. He's the one who decides that Youqing needs to go to school to melt down iron because the district supervisor will be there, even against Jiazhen's protests to 'just let him sleep.' When Fengxia is in the hospital giving birth & everyone decides that the young nurses just aren't going to cut it, it is he who gives a doctor who has been penned up as a reactionary - and hasn't had food in three days - seven mantou, leading to the doctor being incapable of helping when they really need him. So while my heart broke for Gong Li, it was hard not to shed tears for Ge You's portrayal of an all-too-human man.
The movie is a rather scathing look at the idiocy of Communist policies - I believe it is still banned on the Mainland? - and rightfully so, I think. The further the movie goes, the worse and worse it gets.
The beautiful puppets have to be burned during the Cultural Revolution - old feudal stuff, dontchaknow - but in one of the next scenes, not only are the parents playing matchmaker, the potential groom brings gifts for the family (could we get any more feudal? Sure, it's a cap and buttons and some appropriately socialistic reading material, but come on).
What good does burning puppets do if traditional norms are still in place?
The most tragic example is in the hospital - the young nurses snarkily say that 'Everything will be fine' - the experienced doctors have been locked up for being reactionary. Until everything starts going very, very wrong, at which point you have young and frightened nurses running around covered in blood, not knowing what to do. And a dead girl to show for it.
And yet people trudge along, believing that someday, somehow, things will get better. The chicks will grow up into a goose, and the goose will grow into an ox ... and after that, well, we live. Bit by bit, everything will get better - except (in this movie, at least) it doesn't at all.
Loved the scenes with the puppets:
My favorite subtitle flub of the movie (that should be he set *fire* to the house, not *life*):
And good Communist weddings look like a horribly bad time:
