"To Live"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                             January 28, 1995


   "To Live" is another film from China directed by Zhang Yimou and starring
his wife Gong Li. This is the same team that brought us such gorgeous and
moving films as "Ju Dou," "Raise The Red Lantern," and "The Story of Qui Ju"
all of which, in featuring Gong Li in starring roles, have been centrally
about women in China in specific time periods and class milieus. This focus
has made me, for one, think of them as feminist films. The new film, "To
Live," takes a broader view in several senses. Figuratively speaking it's a
"two shot" instead of a "close up," by which I mean that the focus is not on
the one woman character but on two characters, a husband and wife, Fuqui
(played by Ge You) and Jiazhen (played by Gong Li). And chronologically it
takes in a wider range than the other films have, looking at the sweep of
recent Chinese history from the 1940s through the 1970s. This effort to depict
a piece of recent Chinese history as it is reflected in the lives of these two
people makes comparisons with Chen Kaige's "Farewell, My Concubine" nea rly
inevitable. "Farewell, My Concubine," however, covers even more historical
ground (from the 1920s to the 1980s) and has more of an epic feeling    about
it than does "To Live."    "To Live" basically uses the vehicle of the
domestic melodrama rather than the epic vehicle of the world of
classical Chinese opera to tell its version of story. "To Live" seemed to me,
in comparison, to be a rather toned down version of some of the horriffi as
events during that period--almost a kind of Chinese Norman Rockwell version of
events in which, despite wrenching sorrows, all of the characters are just
really very nice folks.

     It may have been toned down because it may have been all that Zhang Yimou
and his screenwriters thought they could get away with in terms of overt
criticism of the regime that still holds power in China ("Farewell, My
Concubine" was, after all, made in Hong Kong and its director lives in New
York not China itself as Zhang Yimou and Gong Li do). But if that was their
guess, it proved wrong, for even this rather benign version of the events of
recent Chinese history earned them the wrath of the government and a two year
ban on filmmaking activities (although winning acting prizes and Cannes and
having worldwide distribution has, I believe, tempered the Chinese
government's total ban on the film itself).

    Looked at from the perspective of a woman's life, "To Live" shows us a
strong woman who can and does struggle to make as good a life as she can for
herself and her children, with or without the help of her husband. During the
1940s her young husband is addicted to gambling and the high life and proceeds
to gamble away the family fortune and even the house they live in until he
reduces the whole family to a destitute condition and himself to a homeless
street peddler. Finally cured of his gambling addiction, the man to whom he
lost his house gives him the means of earning a living: a set of ancient
Chinese shadow puppets around which he builds a troupe of puppeteers and
musicians and goes off to entertain the Nationalist army but ends up as luck
would have it doing the same thing for the Red army and earning a certificate
to prove he fought for the Revolution, which serves to protect him and his
family when the purges begin to come. The man who won his family's mansion is
executed as a Capitalist landowner.

   The 1950s bring the Great Leap Forward for the country but the accidental
death of Fuqui and Jiazhen's small son, killed by one of their old friends now
a party functionary. The 1960s bring the Great Cultural Revolution, which they
might survive since their daugher is married to a leader of the Red Guards,
but the excesses of the period touch them, as well, when the daughter has a
medical emergency in childbirth and no one can help her because the medical
students have thrown the "reactionary" professors out. By the 1970s the
revolution is turning against many of those who were its supporters and Fuqui
and Jiazhen no longer mouths the slogans of a glorious communism as the great
goal to be strived for, but embraces the more modest goal that their grandson
may have a better life than they did.

    This is a completely compelling and appealing film, not, I think, as great
as some of the earlier ones by this team of filmmakers, but interesting
and worth pondering.

For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film.

Copyright 1995 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  Please do not reprint this
review without the permission of the author.