Zhang Yimou combines his ongoing concern with the grim state of education in China and the kind of period provincial romance for which he's known. The result is an interesting, if slightly unbalanced, hybrid: a social problem film with the warm heart of a deeply felt love story. The film opens in contemporary China, where businessman Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei) has just learned that his father, a schoolteacher in the northern Chinese village of Sanhetun, suffered a fatal heart attack while traveling the countryside in an effort to raise money to restore Sanhetun's crumbling schoolhouse. Yusheng rushes back to the village where he was born to find his grieving mother, Z...
Released:
1999
Rated:
G
Length:
100 mins