Leben!

This is the best movie that I have ever seen.

I watched this movie because I was taking a class on the politics of China. When I saw that this movie covered such an expansive time period I thought "great, I will learn something." That I did. I cried, I cheered, I stayed up very late... I made my then future husband watch it... he liked it too, not as much as I do.

I tell everyone in conversations about movies that this one is my all time favorite. It took the place of American Beauty, a movie that I have watched about eleven times.

So, I recommend it. If I had a lot of money I would pay people to watch this. It is THAT great.

This is Zhang Yimou's and Gong Li's crowning triumph -- a top candidate for the greatest Chinese film of all time. Splendidly photographed and composed, consumately acted and faithfully scored, "To Live" is a three or four hour film novel lovingly packed into two hours and fifteen minutes. For a long time, Ingmar Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander" stood by itself as the greatest family epic in my moviegoing experience. "The Best Years of Our Lives" ran a distant second. But since 1995 "To Live" has moved into a very close second.

Most Chinese who lived through Mao's Revolution say this film tells it like it was at the simple townsperson level. Though it can serve as an overview of Chinese history 1944 to 1970 or so, unlike Lean's "Gandhi" or "Lawrence of Arabia", this is not a hero's biopic. Instead we see a foolish, once rich but now fallen heir and his wife blown about by the winds of fortune for three decades and challenged as parents trying to raise two children under increasingly harsh and punitive communist tyranny. What you sense in this film, that I've never seen before in any Chinese film, is how the ethical and moral principles that have prevailed in Chinese culture for 2500 years - a mix of transcendence and pragmatism, humility and grit, cosmic harmonic balance and social duty - allows an ordinary couple to accept unbearable tragedy and keep going. It also shows what this survival strategy costs them in their Communist context. The screenplay is full of cosmic irony. It makes us aware, without shouting, that this is just one family among millions. As Yimou's transitional screen message says: "...leaving no family unaffected". It is to that extent, a tribute film.

Maybe ten hours of Kieslowski's "Decalogue" might accomplish the same broad survey of of human happenstance and emotion. Maybe Kurosawa in three or four hours. But never in two plus hours have I seen the scope Zhang Yimou achieves here. "To Live" also contains as wise a moral lesson as any film I've seen, and it's a gentle one despite the surrounding violence. I couldn't paraphrase the lesson for you. I wouldn't try. Just watch. It will reach you non-verbally in about 90 minutes. Just know, this isn't Shakespeare, Hollywood or soap opera. It's something else.

Gong Li's work is as powerful as anything Streep or Sarandon have ever done in the west - which is all the more inspiring since the camera doesn't lavish star-level attention on her. As her husband, Ge You turns in an emotionally riveting, charming, sometimes funny and devastatingly honest performance. The direction is sure handed, the shooting unfailingly gorgeous. Zhang Yimou's cinematic canvass has never been so big or his palette so colorful and controlled. Full of spectacle, great sweeps of time and onrushing tides of humanity, "To Live" is still, in the end, a sweet and poignant epic with an intimate, observant heart. Great story telling. Do not miss! Try to view a letterbox version on a big screen.

I saw this together with Red Lantern and viscerally knew which one I preferred right away. Having given it a few days to sit now, I see that Red Lantern has grown even more in my estimation while this has almost completely faded from view.

Lantern was precisely contained within narrative walls, it abstracted life by placing us in the midst of turning cycles of life and wove cloths out of that turning in the form of rituals that marked passage; color, sound, weather, architecture. It was akin to a Buddhist mandala to me, a cosmic picture directing me to find my own place in the center of things, choose repose over madness.

Zhang by contrast here wanders unconstrained, under the auspice of history, aiming for a full chronicle of sorts of Chinese life as a family moves through the decades. The stage backdrop changes frequently; Civil war, Great Leap, Cultural Revolution.

We do still have the turning of cycles and it does create a (cosmic) picture; a life of comfort squandered by the man's ignorance who loses it all, to one of hardship and quiet abiding. But eventually it doesn't direct towards a center that will illuminate the turn as something more than the ramblings of history.

And it's simply not a very enviable position to want to be the chronicler of history like Zhang is trying to here, it reminds me of how Kusturica stifled himself in similar endeavors. It means our reference point always has to be an externally agreed version of reality and we have to be chained to that sweep.

You can see him try to root himself in something more essential - the husband becomes a puppeteer putting on shadow plays for the people, life as the canvas where these evanescent shadow plays are enacted, now losing a fortune, now gaining back your family, so that we could see it from the distance of transient flickers of drama. Civil war is introduced as someone hacking down the screen, revealing war as another play that demands its actors assume their place.

But this is forgotten in lieu of stopping at various points of history so that it ends up being more the Oscar winning type than history parting to reveal myriad reflections like Andrei Rublev. Had it come out from the West, I'm sure it would have won a few and the wonderful Gong Li her first. The best I got out of it eventually was the sense of a man and woman trying to make their way together as the skies shift and the stage quakes by the ignorance of unseen puppet masters enacting their little plays. The Great Leap castigated as a wall collapsing on a little boy, because the man who crashed his car and the boy were both overworked and needed sleep.

Zhang took care to color history within certain lines so that we veer close to the monumental failures of the era but never quite see the full brunt of the horror, famine or mass persecution, only bits of abuse in passing. It was still banned by Party hacks anxious to control the play.

Yimou Zhang's "To Live" begins in the late 1940s and covers several decades in the life of Fugui (You Ge), his wife Jiazhen (Li Gong), and their two children. It is an excellent family drama, provoking both laughter and tears, and distinguishing itself from similar movies because of its commitment to showing how China's changing society affects the family. It takes the huge subject of "the first twenty years of Communism in China," and brings it down to a human scale.

Both leading actors nicely portray the way their characters change over the years. At first, Fugui is the stereotypical "callow young man" and Jiazhen the even more stereotypical "long- suffering wife," but the screenplay and actors eventually deepen the characterizations.

The best sequence of the film covers the Chinese Civil War. Wisely, Yimou Zhang resists the temptation to make the movie too epic, and instead focuses on Fugui's personal experiences. The result is a very moving depiction of the human cost of war. In another striking touch, Fugui's hobby is singing with a shadow-puppet troupe. The puppets not only provide an interesting glimpse into traditional Chinese culture, they also take on a symbolic meaning.

After watching "To Live," it's easy to see why the Chinese authorities banned it: there's a lot of tragedy in the film, and in most cases, Communism is to blame. Remarkably, though, Zhang also makes many of the Communist characters sympathetic. For instance, Fugui and Jiazhen's daughter marries an officer in the Red Guards, who is a little ridiculous in his devotion to Mao Zedong, but not a villain. This is in keeping with the overall spirit of "To Live"--humanistic and subtle, instead of bombastic or propagandistic. It's both an important examination of recent Chinese history, and a universal story about how individual human beings manage "to live" in times of hardship. A rare combination, and one well worth seeing.

This movie, which was banned in mainland China for "Questionable" outlooks on the communist party, is one of the best movies I have seen thus far.

It is easy to dismiss this movie as a "Sad period piece," but with another look, one sees that this is a story about triumph... of taking heart in the fact that one lives. The title, "To Live," is very apt, as we see the rises and falls of one small family living through the ups and downs of China during the pre-revolutionary era, the civil war, the Great Leap Forward, the Proletariat Cultural Revolution, and beyond.

This movie is at turns dramatic, humorous, touching, chilling, heart-wrenching, and triumphant. A true roller coaster of emotions, played out in the subtle tones only Chinese film can truly capture.