Sterling story: `To Live' relates human battles amid civil strife

THE CHINESE triumph "To Live" manages to fit more history, laughter, tragedy and humanity into two hours of film than just about any other movie you are likely to see for some time. That the epic family drama succeeds on so many rich emotional levels is a tribute to the brilliance of director Zhang Yimou ("Raise the Red Lantern") and the wonderful lead performances by Gong Li and Ge You.

The incomparable Gong, Zhang's frequent leading lady and one of the stars of "Farewell My Concubine," plays Jiazhen, a woman married to an affluent but impressionable man, with great humor and sensitivity. As her husband Fugui, Ge You crafts a perfectly developed character whose growth from dependency to self-sufficiency is often sabotaged by his own stubbornness.

Despite Jiazhen urging him to avoid the lure of the gambling den, Fugui loses all of their money including their home to a fellow gambler. Although the gambler keeps Fugui's money, he gives the ruined man a box of metal shadow puppets; Fugui makes a vow to his wife and young son that he will support them as a puppeteer and never gamble again.

This he does until an evening performance is interrupted by nationalist soldiers during the outbreak of civil war in 1949. Fugui and his puppet troupe are obliged to entertain the soldiers on the battlefields and are then obligated to perform for Mao Tse-tung's fighters after the Communists come to power.

What follows is an unpredictable political and human journey for Fugui and his family as they try to survive in Mao's new China of the 1950s. Under the seamless storytelling of Zhang and screenwriters Yu Hua and Lu Wei, misfortune follows closely on the heels of good fortune, and vice versa, in an entirely natural manner.

It would be inappropriate to reveal too much about the family's hardships during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution of the late 1950s and '60s. Zhang, however, employs an abundance of wit and satire to come to terms with the personal calamities on the home front, transforming devastating circumstances into darkly funny ones.

The sarcasm aimed at Chairman Mao and his misguided economic and domestic policies is hilariously on-target and certainly contributed to the film's censorship problems in China. In contrast, the serious scenes shared between Fugui, Jiazhen and their children are quietly moving.

In Chinese with English subtitles, the visually sumptuous "To Live" begins its engagement on Friday.

Copyright 1995
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.