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The Road Home': Two Lives In China, With Mao Lurking By Stephen Holden

Zhang Yimou's tenderhearted film ``The Road Home'' is a cinematic ballad of such seamless construction and exquisite tonal balance it transcends most of the pitfalls of movies that aspire to a classic, lyric simplicity. The one grating element is a redundantly schmaltzy soundtrack by San Bao that shamelessly imitates James Horner's quieter theme music for ``Titanic'' and nudges ``The Road Home'' toward an emotional grandiosity. But that pushiness, thankfully, does not extend to the rest of the movie.

Zhang, whose credits include ``Red Sorghum,'' ``Raise the Red Lantern'' and ``The Story of Qiu Ju,'' was a cinematographer before becoming a director, and his mastery of color and mood and his attunement to nature lend this elemental love story a penetrating hum of universality. Much of the film is set during the winter in a pristine, hilly region of northern China that is connected to the outside world by a single unpaved road. There is no electricity in the town, and water is pumped from two wells.

Saturated in a bluish winter snow-light and filmed with an extraordinary sensitivity to the changing seasons, the weather and the time of day, these scenes are so atmospheric they beckon you into a childlike state of wondrous apprehension. Before the engulfing realities of wind, snow, sky and cold and the sound of crunching boots, nagging everyday thoughts recede into the background.

A major influence on ``The Road Home,'' Zhang has said, is contemporary Iranian cinema, especially the movies of Abbas Kierostami, which convey a similarly ecstatic awareness of the natural world. But ``The Road Home'' isn't as austere as Kierostami's work. Its panoramic shots of the village nestled in the snowy hills in the dead of winter and of grain fields blazing gold in the late summer heat are unabashedly gorgeous and fraught with a nostalgic poignancy that one doesn't feel in Iranian films in which the atmosphere tends to be more mystically spiritual.

The film's overwhelming sense of a purifying return to nature helps compensate for its central characters _ two humble but luminous young people living in a remote Chinese village during the Cultural Revolution _ not being sharply etched.

The story is narrated by Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei), a young engineer who, upon the sudden death of his father, returns from the city to the village of Sanheutun, where he was born. When the funeral arrangements are discussed, his wizened mother, crushed with grief, insists that traditional custom be observed and the body be carried on foot by local residents the considerable distance from the hospital back to the village.

As Yusheng contemplates his father's death, he begins to reminisce about his parents' marriage, and the movie, whose opening scenes are filmed in a grim bluish gray, bursts into brilliant color. We meet Luo's mother Zhao Di (Zhang Ziyi) when she was a radiant 18-year-old who falls in love at first sight with Luo Changyu (Zheng Hao) the handsome 20-year-old schoolmaster who arrives from the city.

For the first third of the movie Di, the prettiest girl in the village who has resisted entering into an arranged marriage while tending her blind but canny mother (Li Bin), throws herself at the visitor, who soon notices and shyly reciprocates her interest.

When the villagers build the schoolhouse in which Changyu will spend most of the rest of his life teaching primary school, she lovingly weaves the traditional red cloth to be wound around its rafters. Visiting the school daily, she stands outside, listening enchantedly to the sound of his mellifluous voice as he drills the students in quasimilitary calls and responses.

Zhang's intensely concentrated performance conveys a current of stubborn, obsessive passion lurking behind Di's girlish wide-eyed innocence. This is a woman who, on recognizing her destiny, will let nothing stand in the way of her seizing it. When Changyu gives her a simple ornamental hairpin, it becomes a precious icon.

The chaste courtship is painfully interrupted when Changyu is called back to the city to face interrogation for unspecified political reasons, and Di, who has pinned all her hopes on his return, nearly dies from a fever caught waiting by the road for him to return on the day he promised.

``The Road Home'' isn't about politics but about how the echoes of ideological wars waged in distant capitals affect ordinary people who have only the most tenuous connections with those struggles. In villages like Sanheutun, life goes on as usual, and change, when it comes, arrives gradually. Not once in the film is the name Mao Tse-tung mentioned or his image shown. The revolution that turned most of China upside down is merely a dim flicker of lightning beyond the wintry horizon.