Review by Richard Toews.

When a theatre full of high school students sits quietly enthralled by a movie with subtitles, and laughs at all the right places, one can only conclude that the movie is a hit. Zhang Yang’s Getting Home, is definitely a hit.

Getting Home is a delightful and bittersweet tale of a man trying to fulfill a promise made to his recently deceased friend/workmate to return his body to his home village at Three Gorges Dam for burial. This journey of unusual twists and turns also begins in a most unusual manner. Zhao Benshan, the hero, books two seats on a coach, one for himself and one for the corpse, which Benshan fobs off as a drunken passenger sleeping it off. When Benshan and his dead friend are removed from the coach, he continues the journey as best he can, carrying the body on his back. Benshan meets generous and equally quirky people who help him along the way, and each meeting allows Benshan to share something he has learned about life. He also learns from the people he meets, such as the man who stages his own funeral simply to see who would come. Turns out that most of the “friends” are paid mourners (Benshan is the most genuine mourner). But even this allows the not-dead man a moment for dispensing wisdom to Benshan. Others along the way include a lovelorn trucker, a woman who scavenges to pay for her son’s education, and a family that collects honey and lives in a van.

The point of a journey is usually its end, but, in Getting Home, the ending provides the final irony. Death is supposed to have a certain logic to it - you live, you die, and you are buried. In the case of Benshan’s friend, death is supposed to get him home, but the Three Gorges Dam, China’s economic miracle and the dead man’s home, raises serious questions about what it means to have a home. Home is the common theme of all of Benshan’s encounters. In each case, their individual stories revolve around themes of family and community, nurturing the soul, and longing and hope. But, with the discovery that Benshan’s friend’s home has been destroyed, that there will be no burial in the ancestral home, it seems that honour, the life-blood of the people of rural China, has no capital in the new China, and people are left to carry their dead dreams and aspirations on their backs.

Getting Home
Zhang Yang | China | 2007 | 97min

Fri. Sept. 28 | 7:00pm | Ridge Theatre
Thur. Oct. 4 | 1:00pm | Empire Granville Theatre