Review: Zhang Yang's 'Getting Home'

Lead actor Zhao Benshan, most notable to western audiences for his charmingly gruff role in Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times, essentially replicates a similarly tough-but-tender role which allows the popular Chinese comic-actor to explore the odd scene of greater emotional complexity beyond the slapstick stuff. The best of these scenes is a police station performance to a group of migrants where he longs for a real home. The rest of the cast including East Palace, West Palace’s Hu Jun play out their caricatures to reasonable success but the focus remains on Lao Zhao’s quest fairly unwaveringly so none of the supports are afforded an opportunity to go beyond their ‘lovesick truckie’, ‘feisty hair salon-girl’ or ‘thuggish restaurant owner’ roles.

Fiftysomething migrant worker Lao Zhao (Zhao) discovers his buddy Lao Wang dead and fulfilling a drunken pact to deliver whoever-dies-first’s body to their hometown, Lao Zhao disguises his friend as a passed-out drunk and hits the road. Complications inevitably arise after the pair are held up on a tour-bus by a gang of thugs and divulge
the secret. They’re booted off the bus and turn to hitchhiking and other forms of transport (in one act of humorous scene Lao Zhao uses an oversized tyre to move his friend) to make it towards the Three Gorges region to bury the body. The duo’s situation turns from bad to worse as Lao Zhao learns Lao Wang’s compensation is counterfeit cash and attempts suicide. He’s rescued by a beekeeper and continues the trek before being jailed in a black-market bloodbank raid. Once the authorities discover the truth, Lao Wang’s body is cremated and a kindly police officer arranges for Lao Zhao to fulfil his promise. When they finally arrive in the Three Gorges area, they find nothing but rubble and the film ends rather abruptly as the journey is about to take another twist to find the dead man’s son.

This quick sketch of the plot may seem rather plodding but its generally in keeping with the tone of the picture which utilises a gallery of quirky supports and believable, if eventually tiring, situations to lurch from A to B. Like Zhang’s previous multi-generational drama, Sunflower, there’s a reluctance to tackle any of the deeper themes at play instead relying on superficial references to some of the country’s current problems (here it’s the ‘city vs. country divide’, the black market bloodbank trade, industrial conditions).

At its core there’s two main subjects at play: the country’s expanding migrant class living in the city and their dislocation from their home towns; and the social disruption and dislocation the ambitious Three Gorges project will have on its residents. It may be expecting too much to find an intelligent exploration of these issues nestled amidst a
comedy about transporting a dead corpse cross-country but the whole production still feels a tad undernourished.

It’s slightly compensated by a glossy visual design and edit that glides over a few scenes which feel purely functional such as a detour to a fake funeral and a chance encounter with an attractive hair salon girl. These moments plug the necessary gaps in the journey but feel inorganic and overly scripted. The undeveloped stirrings of a romance between Lao Zhao and a scruffy single-mother also lead to nowhere frustratingly but would probably need another film to properly explore in the context of everything else going on.