'Coming Home' fails to live up to director's earlier works

Whenever Zhang Yimou comes out with a movie it's always a hot topic among Chinese audiences. As the saying goes, the higher your expectations, the greater your disappointment. From A Simple Noodle Story to The Flowers of War, over the last three years, each subsequent movie has earned Zhang the ire of moviegoers.

At this point he must be afraid to try anything new which is probably why he seems to have chosen the safe path when filming his latest work Coming Home, which hits the big screen on Friday.

Adapted from writer Yan Geling's novel Criminal Lu Yanshi, the combination of touching storyline and Chinese audiences hungry for a local movie, make it hard to think of a reason that Zhang won't earn quite a lot of money for his new bosses at Le Vision Pictures.

To be honest, the novel is quite good. A touching romance between Lu Yanshi and his arranged wife Feng Wanyu, it offers a window to the past for people like me who were born in 1980s to look back on the times of our parents and grandparents.

However, the movie doesn't do a good job building up this romantic aspect. Even if you are moved to tears during the film (as I almost was), you will still have no idea why Lu loves Feng so much, especially considering they haven't seen each other for 20 years.

Before Lu is put into prison, the two don't have any close feelings and the movie skips over Lu's contemplation of his arranged marriage while in prison and his wife's love towards him. Only three important scenes from the novel are kept, including Lu's escape during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and his return after the revolution comes to an end.

When Lu is captured at a train station and put back in prison, I thought the movie would show some of this life in a Northwest prisoner camp - one of the more eye-catching parts of the original novel. But no, in the very next scene the Cultural Revolution is over and the rest of the movie focuses on Lu's efforts to get his ageing wife to remember the deep love she once had for him.

Lu tries everything he can to convince Feng that he is her long departed husband, but stricken with dementia and an ailing memory, she only remembers things that Lu wrote to her in his letters and the original date he was supposed to return home. This part of the movie reminds me of 50 First Dates, starring Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler, which has a similar plot about a man trying to get a woman to fall in love with him even though she forgets him at the end of every day. I'm not sure if Zhang has seen this US comedy, but both films are very similar towards the end.

After seeing the film, I tried to find some reason to recommend the film to some friends, but all I could come up with is that Zhang really needs the money to feed his three kids and pay the over 7 million yuan ($1.1 million) fine for having two more kids than China's family planning policy allows.

The acting of Chen Daoming (Lu Yanshi) and Gong Li (Feng Wanyu) earns the movie some points, however. Take one scene where Lu dresses up as his younger self, sits in front of the piano where he and his wife once spent long happy hours together and begins playing. As the music floats through the sun filled room, I could easily believe in the happiness the two feel from the facial expressions of the actors.

The set designers should be applauded as well for collecting many old items like revolutionary slogans, newspapers, and rarely-seen old buses and for even recreating an old train station.

All in all, Coming Home is a movie that's only worth it if you pay for an early morning half-price matinee show, or watch when it hits streaming sites with your older family members at home.