The Road Home

Zhang Ziyi (the girl-warrior in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) gives a brilliantly earnest and girlish performance here as an idyllic rural teenager in 1950s China who falls in love with her remote village's new schoolteacher (Zheng Hao), a young man barely her senior. Ziyi's delicate, eager, ingenuous performance is the centerpiece of this unabashedly and deeply romantic film (even though there's not a single kiss, nor even an embrace due to cultural formalities), which is bookended by a moving present-day act in which the son of these two lovers returns to the village for his father's funeral. A wonderful work of emotional purity and simple visual gracefulness from acclaimed director Zhang Yimou (Not One Less), this is highly recommended. (R. Blackwelder)