Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (Qian Li Zou Dan Ji) Review

Zhang Yimou knew my dead father.

He knew how he felt about his approaching death, his regrets about certain wrong turns in his life, his sins of omission toward his children. And his heartfelt yearning to connect again with a son he had lost.

Those thoughts and emotions tumble together in Zhang's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, with familial roles turned inside out. Tanaka (Ken Takakura) is in the twilight of his life, but it is the serious medical condition of his estranged son Ken-ichi (Kichi Nakai) that hastens his desire to reconcile.

Ken-ichi refuses to see the old man, and only the tearful entreaties of daughter-in-law Rie (Shinobu Terajima, a shimmering, solitary performance from the actress who made her mark in Vibrator and It's Only Talk) give Tanaka hope. He sets off on a long trip, with the idea of bringing back something that will soften Ken-ichi.

The temptation is to say that Zhang Yimou returns to doing what he does best in Riding Alone, which has been available on DVD for some time and will open September 1 in the US with limited theatrical engagements. Certainly he is painting on a smaller canvas than his previous two pictures, and the resultant film is a pleasant, modest, artfully-drawn drama, an exquisite portrait of the relationship between a father and son.

Tanaka did something in the past that alienated his son, to the point where they have not spoken in a decade. Tanaka has retreated to a rural island in his native Japan and become a fisherman. When he receives word from Rie that Ken-ichi is very ill, Tanaka quickly boards a train to Tokyo. He is rejected just as quickly by his son, though he stands but a few feet outside his hospital room.

As so often happens with such intergenerational rifts, wife and daughter-in-law Rie is stuck in the middle. She wants to help, and gives Tanaka a videotape she thinks will help him get to know Ken-ichi better. Tanaka seizes on something in the tape and immediately books a trip to China.

The trip, filled with linguistic misunderstandings, bureacratic red tape, and emotional detours, serves as a means for Zhang Yimou and co-writer Zou Jingzhi, along with actor Ken Takakura, to explore Tanaka's psyche. Zhang has stated that he wrote the script with Takakura in mind, but even if the script is simply an expression of Zhang's desire to work with an actor he admired, it's filled with details that will be familiar to any veteran of the war between sire and offspring, a battle that I recognized instantly, and which feels intensely personal.

The multi-award winning Japanese star, perhaps best known to audiences outside Asia for his roles in the Hollywood films The Yakuza, Black Rain, and Mr. Baseball, has more often played action roles, but he is well-suited to the "strong and silent" father figure he embodies here. Tanaka has no idea how to reach his son, lacking any real insight into what makes him tick. He relentlessly pursues an idea that he hopes will bear fruit, with little real expectation that it will happen.

Zhang endeavors to maintain a reserved distance from a story that is inherently melodramatic, in both the framing and the absence of an obtrusive musical score. Still, it's impossible not to feel the "warm fuzzies" when a rebellious young child enters the scene—he's too obviously a substitute player, and even the superemely dramatic backdrop of the spectacular mountainscapes of the rural Yunan Province in China cannot entirely disguise the sentimental ploy.

Even so, Riding Alone rings true, in the same way that Not One Less or Raise the Red Lantern or House of Flying Daggers have depicted their respective landscapes: perhaps not with undebatable honesty, but more with authorial integrity. In other words, you may not buy everything that Zhang Yimou offers, but you believe he is an honest salesman, that he believes what he is saying.

You can't ask much more than that from a man on speaking terms with your dead father.