Hey folks, Harry here... and I'm again honored to have the beautiful Elaine and her amazing looks at several films... This time though, she claims to have found possibly "the most intense love story" she's ever seen.... and in the subject line of her email it stated... "THE BEST FILM EVER MADE?" concerning THE ROAD HOME. So... be a good boy or girl and give it a chance... demand that your local theater book it.... and have that magical experience.... as for the rest... read and learn... good stuff here...

THE ROAD HOME (China, 1999)

I gave up an advance screening of "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou" and an opportunity to watch Holland's swimmers win their umpteenth gold at the Sydney Olympics in order to see "The Road Home," Zhang Yimou's latest effort since "Not One Less." That's how badly I wanted to see the only film Zhang Ziyi played in before "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" made her a star. Was it worth it? Hell yes. "The Road Home" ("Wode fuqin muqin" or "my father and mother" in Chinese) is quite possibly the most intense love story I've ever seen. In fact, it may well be the most intense film I've seen, full stop. It made me weep. And then some.

I don't cry easily over films. I get chilled every now and then, or numbed, as I did when I watched "The Ice Storm" and "Heartbreak Island," an obscure Taiwanese film I doubt can be found outside Taiwan. I shed a few tears over the 'Wise Up' scene in "Magnolia" and the burning paper scene in "The Name of the Father," and I was on the brink of a crying fit the first time I saw Haing Ngor wade through skeletons in "The Killing Fields." Generally, though, I remain quite stoic when confronted with supposedly sentimental scenes. So you can imagine my surprise when "The Road Home" reduced me to tears. I burst out crying a few minutes before the end, and felt like weeping for a good many hours afterwards. If I hadn't had to watch and review four more films I'd have gone home and bawled. That's how intense the love affair depicted in "The Road Home" is. It's the story of a love that we all hope to find one day - the sort of love that stays with one forever and without which one's life simply isn't complete. The kind of love that scares the shit out of control freaks like me, who dread commitment and choke at the idea of dependence, but which somehow, deep down in our hearts, we all crave. That kind of love. Love with a capital L.

I didn't think I'd be so drawn in by this film. To be sure, I loved Zhang Yimou's previous work; until a few days ago, his "Raise the Red Lantern" was my all-time favourite film. All the same, I was rather apprehensive when I traded my "Oh Brother" ticket for a "Road Home" one, as it seemed that many of the things I have come to appreciate in Zhang Yimou's films were missing from this one. Gong Li, for starters. Zhang Ziyi seemed a worthy replacement, so I wasn't too worried about Gong's not being around. I seriously frowned, though, when I heard that the music wasn't by Zhao Jiping and the cinematography by someone other than Zhao Fei. In my scheme of things, Zhang and the two Zhaos are a holy trinity. One simply cannot imagine a Zhang Yimou film without Zhao Jiping's score or Zhao Fei's magnificent camera work. At any rate I couldn't, before seeing "The Road Home." I can now.

"The Road Home" is a masterpiece. The story is simple but sublime, the acting is stunning and the music and the cinematography are as impressive as one would expect from a Zhang Yimou film. Cinematographer Hou Yong can quite hold his own against Zhao Fei. His close-ups may lack the razor-sharp quality of Zhao's, but in all other respects he acquits himself brilliantly of the wonderful material Zhang Yimou gave him to work with. The same holds true for musician San Bao. The recurring theme from "The Road Home" is as poignant as anything Zhao Jiping ever wrote, and as haunting as, say, the motif from "Kikujiro" or Barber's Adagio for Strings as used in "Platoon." Throw in a strong script by Shi Bao and an absolutely mesmerising performance by Zhang Ziyi and you've got the best film Zhang Yimou has made to date. Which is saying a great deal.

"The Road Home" is a frame-story which begins and ends as a documentary. When the film opens, the audience is treated to a black-and-white tour of a poverty-stricken village covered in snow. The camera then zooms in upon a small, damp-looking house with, of all things, a "Titanic" poster on the wall. The audience is introduced to a young man (Sun Honglei) who has returned to the village where he grew up to hear that his father has died. In fact, his father died in another village, and his mother (Zhao Yuelin) wants the dead body to be carried home by pall-bearers. The problem is that pall-bearing was made illegal during the Cultural Revolution and that no one has done it since. Even if it were legal, the mayor says, it would be hard to find bearers, since most able-bodied young men have left for the city and the remaining ones aren't up to much in this kind of cold. The widow may borrow the village tractor to get her husband's body back home, but the best thing, the mayor suggests, would be to leave the body where it is and bury it there. Predictably, Mrs Luo refuses, insisting that her husband be carried back home by pallbearers, over the road that connects the two villages. The film then goes back some forty years in time to explain why that road is so important to Mrs Luo, and why it is so essential that her husband be buried close to her.

This is where the film changes gear. From a black-and-white documentary about tradition and modernity in present-day rural China it turns into a full-blown, full-colour romance, the intensity of which I haven't encountered in any other film. It's a very particular kind of intensity. "The Road Home" is not powerful in the grand-emotions-and-tremendous-sobbing-fits kind of way; it's too subtle and underacted for that. Nor is it a conventional are-they-going-to-get-each-other-or-not kind of drama. Thanks to the frame structure, one knows from the start that the heroine (Zhao Di, the young Mrs Luo) is going to get her man and that an intense forty-year marriage is going to ensue. The drama, then, lies in Zhao Di's dogged belief in her love - in her relentless efforts to be with her man, and her harrowing despair when she finally loses him. Her love is made so tangible that it makes one understand why it is fitting that Mrs Luo should have a poster of "Titanic" on her wall, and takes away whatever desire one may feel to get cynical about it.

"The Road Home" is a great character study. It is the story of Zhao Di (Zhang Ziyi), an illiterate peasant girl who falls in love with the local elementary school teacher, Luo Changyu (Zheng Hao), and passionately holds on to her love no matter how hard her blind mother (Bin Li) tries to dissuade her. Soon her feelings for Mr Luo come to determine even the most insignificant aspects of her life. She becomes obsessed, and begins stalking Mr Luo in so gentle and unassuming a way that I'm almost ashamed to call it stalking. She waits for hours on the road between her home and the school in hopes of meeting him and makes huge detours to get her water from the well near his school. Even in mid-winter, she waits for him at the roadside, while snow piles up on her eyebrows and her eyelashes turn into icicles. She hears his voice even when he is miles away. And, since it is after all a Chinese film, she puts a premium on the food she cooks him. Di spends hours cooking the teacher elaborate meals, and runs miles to give him the dumplings she has promised him. None of this reeks in any way of "Run Lola Run" or "Like Water for Chocolate." There may be a lot of cooking and running in the movie, but "The Road Home" is not the kind of film in which food prepared with love reduces those who eat it to willing slaves; it's the sort of film in which a pining girl sees the food she has slaved over eaten by the wrong man, while the man she loves doesn't even recognise the bowl she serves her food in. The bowl, which pops up in several guises in the film, symbolises Di's feelings for Mr Luo, and one really feels for her when it's broken.

Of course all's well in the end. Di gets her man and the whole village is happy for them. This could have been the ending to the film, but instead Zhang Yimou takes us back to the original present-day frame. In a "Schindler's List"-like black-and-white epilogue, Zhang shows us people from all over the area paying deference to the dead man, and his bereaved widow's reaction to this. It's an impressive sight but it seems a cold ending after the intensity of the earlier love story. However, just when one is ready to curse Zhang for leaving us with footage of Zhao Di the Elder rather than Zhao Di the Younger, Zhang Ziyi reappears. In a quick sequence of black-and-white shots and coloured ones, the young Zhao Di and her elder version wrap up the story, the close-ups of their faces accompanied by their son's voice. It is glorious film-making and utterly, utterly heart-wrenching.

"The Road Home" is very much a Zhang Ziyi vehicle. As the illiterate Di, Zhang doesn't get to 'kick ass' the way she does in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"; nor does she look particularly glamorous. She waddles like a duck and dons endless layers of padded clothes which make her bum twice as big as it is and render her waist all but invisible. Yet her charm is such that one forgets she's a silly peasant girl with an unhealthy crush on a seemingly unapproachable teacher and falls head over heels in love with her. Fans who raved about Zhang's performance in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (that's pretty much everyone who's seen the film) get their money's worth here. She is absolutely irresistible, and anyone walking out of the cinema without having fallen in love with her is inhuman.

Incredible though it may sound, there is more to "The Road Home" than just Zhang Ziyi. As in many Zhang Yimou films, there is a bit of politics in the background. Much of the story is set in 1957-8, during the anti-rightist movement of which Mr Luo becomes a victim. Furthermore, the funeral scenes in the prologue and epilogue feature some political discussions, and there is a pervasive symbolism involving the colour red, which stands for communism as well as married love. Somehow, though, the film doesn't have a political feel to it. It is, first and foremost, a romance - a love story so simple and intense it will haunt you for days. It still haunts me, and it's been a week since I saw it.

Words cannot do justice to the magic that is "The Road Home." I can only beseech you to go and see it when it hits a cinema near you, a couple of months from now. Go see it, then go and see it again. It will change your perceptions about love and make you a lifelong member of the Zhang Ziyi fan club. That's a guarantee.

Now this one is getting raves from everyone...

BILLY ELLIOT (UK, 2000)

"Billy Elliot" (formerly known as "Dancer") received rave reviews from all who saw it at Cannes, Edinburgh and Toronto. It's now opening in British cinemas and it's worth a recommendation.

"Billy Elliot" is another of those working-class dramas that the Brits seem to have taken out a patent on. Like "The Full Monty," "Billy Elliot" is set in a dreary city in the north of England (Durham, in this case, the Norman cathedral being nowhere in sight) where local accents are rife and outlets for frustration scarce. The city is in the grip of a miners' strike which greatly affects the lives of the Elliot family, the two bread-winning members of which are miners. To render the strike atmosphere more convincing, screenwriter Lee Hall and director Stephen Daldry chose to shift the action of the film to the early eighties, when strikes such as this were common. The Thatcherian atmosphere is well drawn. Rebellion and uproar are ubiquitous, and The Jam and The Clash are played to great effect. This is one film in which The Clash's "London Calling" is as much in its place in as Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake."

The Northern English working-class atmosphere isn't the only similarity between this and "The Full Monty." As in the earlier film, the protagonist of "Billy Elliot" (the eponymous hero himself) looks to dancing as a source of inspiration and sustenance. As in "The Full Monty," there is a lot of fun to be had with people's clumsiness and woodenness. Unlike "The Full Monty," however, the cast of "Billy Elliot" is largely made up of confused adolescents, which considerably changes the atmosphere of the film. "Billy Elliot" is a lot more emotionally involving than "The Full Monty." There may be a few cardboard characters here and there, but on the whole, Hall and Daldry tread the line between satire and sentimentalism with care. They poke fun at their characters without ever losing respect for them, and if they leave some of the relationships in the story underdeveloped, one doesn't notice until the film is well over. It is, in short, one of those films where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It's charming, and then some.

The story of "Billy Elliot" is about an 11-year-old boy who is forced by his widowed father to take boxing lessons but discovers he prefers ballet. Unbeknownst to his father and elder brother, who disapprove of mincing boys with a passion, he takes ballet lessons and prepares himself for an audition for a famous dancing school in London. Meanwhile, he gets to experience love in all its many guises: maternal, from the ballet teacher he shortly suspects of having a crush on him ("you don't fancy me miss, do you?"); heterosexual, from his ballet teacher's daughter ("if you want, I'll show you me fanny!"); and homosexual, from his best friend, a budding transvestite who regrets that male dancers don't wear tutus as he believes that Billy would look "wicked" in one. And in the background, there's a demented live-in grandmother who believes she could have been a professional dancer if she'd only had the training, and a tragic girl who's always there but never talks.

For a large part "Billy Elliot"'s success is due to the acting. There simply isn't a mediocre performance in the film, which is an achievement not to be underestimated, given that half of the actors Daldry had to work with were under twelve. Then again, the actors are given some excellent material to work with. Hall's dialogues are simple but effective, and there's so much unspoken emotion underlying each scene that one genuinely cares for the characters, caricatures though some of them are.

"Billy Elliot" is British thespianship at its best. Gary Lewis should make a few Academy heads turn with his portrayal of Mr Elliot, the macho miner who equates ballet with homosexuality and isn't going to let his only child turn into a poof. The choked agony on his face when Billy does a quintuple pirouette right in front of his eyes has to be seen to be believed. Julie Walters is equally brilliant as the tarty ballet teacher who, in her teenage daughter's words, "does dancing" because she is sexually "unfulfilled." The businesslike way she treats Billy is both funny and touching. Likewise, Jamie Draver is brilliant as Billy's hostile brother, and Jean Heywood is superb as the family's demented grandmother. Most of all, though, "Billy Elliot" is Jamie Bell's film. Bell is fabulous as the eponymous hero who discovers more about life, self and ambition in half a year than most of us will in our entire lifetimes. He may not have Haley Joel Osment's intensity, but his Billy is as likeable a motherless urchin as any. If only he'd been a tiny bit more flexible, he'd have made a brilliant dancer, too.

Which brings me to the dancing. Oscar-worthy performances by Lewis, Walters and Bell notwithstanding, the real star of "Billy Elliot" is the ballet, which is muse, mistress and scourge rolled into one and all the more alluring for it. It's a shame, then, that people will avoid the film precisely because it has ballet in it. Plea to macho men and other potential Mr Elliots: don't hold the fact that this film has ballet in it against it. Forget, for a moment, that you don't believe in men who know the second position of both arms and feet. Ignore the fact that little girls in tutus make you queasy, and don't allow anyone who might remind you that one Marilyn Manson is worth 283 Tchaikovskys to come near you. If you manage to do all this, you'll be rewarded with one of the most beguiling movie experiences of the year. You'll want to watch the film again just to see why it's so effective, and you may wish to see the Bolshoi Ballet's next performance of "Swan Lake" too. Either that, or you'll buy a T-Rex CD. The choice is yours, just so long as you see the film.

and now she looks at Penelope Cruz in...

WOMAN ON TOP

I wasn't going to see this film. The poster of Penelope Cruz sniffing a pepper looked too corny to be true, and I'm not that keen on magic realism, although I admit I rather enjoyed "Rough Magic," made when Russell Crowe was still flat-bellied and wire-fu hadn't become all the rage. But then I read Alexandra DuPont's scathing review (link here) and decided to give it a go, just to see what Alexandra had got so worked up about...

The opening confirmed my worst suspicions. First of all, there's an impossibly romantic South American setting, all colour and lovey-doveyness. Then, by way of opening credits, the title appears on screen in the shape of cutesy twinkly-twinkly little stars. Yikes. Stars.

Next up, a close-up of the ravishing Penelope Cruz as a cook (sorry - CHEF) in her husband's beachside restaurant. The voice-over informs us that "she did all the work" while "he got all the credit." Aaah. Poor baby.

Then Penelope catches her husband in bed with another woman. He's on top, relishing how powerful and masculine this makes him look. His being on top is a significant fact, since he's apparently sleeping around for no other reason than that Penelope will never let him get on top. The voice-over: "Oh, but some men must always appear to be men." Well, really!

Obviously, Penelope is heartbroken by her discovery, so she catches the first plane to San Francisco (as you do). When her husband, Toninho, finds out she's gone, he logically curses not himself or his male chauvinist ego, but the goddess of the sea, Yemanja. Shocked bystanders go, "YOU SHOULDN'T CURSE YEMANJA!" They're right, obviously. Yemanja is so outraged at Toninho's behaviour that she keeps all her fish to herself. The village nearly starves, and Toninho (that wouldn't mean 'tuna' in Portuguese, would it? ah, symbolism!) is forced to close his restaurant.

Meanwhile, Penelope causes a stir in San Francisco. She mystifies the caretaker of her flat by preferring walking the stairs to taking the lift. This could have resulted in great close-ups of her legs, but alas, I don't remember any. All I remember is the sight of the short-skirted Penelope walking on the street with an army of drooling men following her and drooping tulips straightening up as she passes by. (Hey, all Dutch flowers do that.)

Funnily enough, Penelope isn't in the least satisfied with the attention she garners. She misses her husband so much she wails, "I'm so lonely! I can't even COOK without Toninho!" Overcome by despair, she trails a photo of Toninho over her body, but just when it appears she's going to dry-fuck it she drops it. Shit. Talk about a missed opportunity...

Other sensual imagery (well, sort of, anyway): Penelope kneading a slice of fresh coconut meat. Her instructions to the people who are taking her cooking course: "Ladle some hot water over it and squeeze... squeeze... SQUEEZE..."

Needless to say, this is an impossibly romantic film, in which girls (well, Penelope anyway) get serenaded and told that their hair holds "the scent of cinnamon." (Cinnamon shampoo. Now HERE's an idea.) It's also utterly implausible, in that Penelope's cooking flavours are made visible, candles burn under water, and more such nonsense. And of course it's horribly predictable; it all ends exactly the way you would expect it to, with True Love saving the day.

Does this make "Girl on Top" a bad film?

Surprisingly, it doesn't. Sure, it's corny as hell, and the first twenty minutes are annoying, but it's not nearly as bad as those little stars (or Alexandra, for that matter) had led me to believe. I actually had an OK time watching the film. And I'm not even a Penelope fan...

See "Woman on Top" if you're desperate for a feel-good experience, or have a girlfriend in need of one. Just don't expect it to be any more than an unsubtle attempt at diverting you for an hour and a half. There are only four seconds of nudity, and not even Penelope Cruz looks good when she's puking.

Sorry.

And now she looks at...

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH (UK, 2000)

The new Gillian Anderson starrer "The House of Mirth" didn't go down well with AICN's reviewers at the Edinburgh and Toronto festivals. It's easy to see why. First of all, it's costume drama, which many AICN-ers hate with a vengeance. More importantly, however, it's sterile and whiny (yes, the two CAN go together). It's the sort of costume drama that disappoints fans and turns non-fans off the genre forever.

"The House of Mirth" is based on a 1905 novel by Edith Wharton. Wharton's novels, as those who read early-twentieth-century American fiction know, deal with the conflict between corrupted society (usually represented by the New York upper class, whose pretentions are based on wealth alone) and a somewhat tainted, but intrinsically innocent individual. In "The House of Mirth" the innocent individual is Lily Bart, a 29-year-old socialite who lives off her aunt and has feelings for a young man named Lawrence Selden. For his part, Selden appears to be interested in Lily, too, but he isn't wealthy enough to make her a good husband. More interested in luxury than in love, Lily sets out to capture a millionaire, and the first one on whom her eye falls is Percy Gryce. Just when she's on the point of catching Gryce, however, Selden turns up, and Lily recoils from her millionaire, without doing anything about the Selden situation. Later in the story, another millionaire, Sim Rosedale, is interested in her, but he's too nouveau riche (and Jewish into the bargain) to please Lily. She turns him down. From there it's all downhill. Lily gets into financial trouble, asks the wrong person to help her, and gets into even deeper trouble, from which not even Selden can save her. Or can he?

"The House of Mirth" is a social satire. As such, it depends on caricatures and a lack of subtlety. Unfortunately, writer/director Terence Davies largely overlooked the satire part when he adapted Wharton's novel to the screen, and went for subtle romance instead. Sadly, he undermined the main premise of the romance (that Lily and Selden can't get married because Selden is too poor) by faulty art direction. Instead of making Selden a visibly down-at-heel fringe element of New York's upper class society, Davies gave him rooms as opulent as those of his peers, and had him attending operas in as splendid an attire as that of his wealthy friends. As a result, the audience fails to understand that the relationship between Selden and Lily really is doomed, and leaves the cinema wondering, "Why on earth didn't they just get married? That would have prevented all this misery..."

It is not only Selden who is misrepresented in the film. Lily, too, remains an obscure character. Her actions aren't particularly rational in the novel, but they lack even more context in the film. By robbing Lily of past and interiority, Davies makes it hard for the audience to root for his heroine. Very hard. For this is not a twenty-first-century power woman we're talking about, but an early-twentieth-century tragic heroine - "too fine in her perceptions to act ruthlessly enough to achieve her worldly aims, and too much the captive of those aims to be able to live by her perceptions," as a famous literary critic once had it. Her inability to treat those around her the same way they treat her doesn't quite commend Lily as much to the modern audience as it did to early-twentieth-century readers of the novel; in fact, it makes her a rather irritating person to watch. She's too passive to inspire sympathy and too fatalistic to inspire admiration.

It isn't just Wharton and Davies' fault that the modern audience fails to 'connect' with Lily. To a large extent Gillian Anderson's portrayal of the heroine is to blame for the lukewarm feelings she inspires in the audience. Anderson makes a pretty Lily Bart, though she's not nearly as breath-taking as the book would have you believe. There are impressive close-ups of her fiery red hair and her waist looks incredibly thin in that corset. Unfortunately, Anderson's acting resembles her waist: it's thin. She never looks quite at ease in her part, being too much of a coquette in the first half of the film and too whiny in the second. She tries so hard to articulate clearly that her dialogues come off incredibly stilted, and as if that weren't bad enough she spends half of the film sighing deep sighs. I'm sure upper-class ladies had a lot to sigh about in 1905, but Anderson overdoes it.

Other disappointing performances in the film include that of Eleanor Bron as Lily's hopelessly overacting aunt, and Eric Stoltz's portrayal of Selden. It isn't until the second half of the film that the audience begins to understand why Lily is attracted to Selden. Until that time, there's hardly any chemistry between the two.

Anthony LaPaglia (Rosedale) and Dan Aykroyd (Trenor) make convincing nouveau riche slimeballs, but aren't quite revolting enough to justify the repulsion Lily feels at the thought of getting intimate with them. It would have been better if Davies had allowed them to go a bit more over the top every now and then.

On the plus side, Laura Linney is delightfully vile (and sadly underused) as Lily's nemesis, Bertha Dorset, while Jodhi May, who seems to have succeeded Helena Bonham Carter as Britain's corset queen (has she ever played in a modern film?), is convincingly cringe-inducing as Lily's righteous rival, Grace Stepney. It's a pity she is made to look so awful, with her pallor, red-rimmed eyes, etc.. The hairdo she sports in her final scene is criminal.

As befits a proper costume drama, the best thing about "The House of Mirth" are the settings and the cinematography. Remi Adefarasin ("Elizabeth," "Sliding Doors") enriches the story with beautiful close-ups of tiny, gloved girls' hands in powerful masculine ones (ah, romance...), cigarette stubs being lit against each other (a metaphor lifted straight from the book), and chloral dripping from a bottle (fleeting life, anyone?). He also treats the audience to an atmospherical, if overlengthy, transition from rainy New York to sunny France. It isn't enough to save the film, though. A film needs an intriguing heroine as well as beautiful shots, and the heroine Terence Davies and Gillian Anderson have concocted simply isn't up to scratch.

Elaine