Video review from The Movie Snob.

The Road Home. (B) This is a Chinese movie from a couple of years ago, and it tells two stories at once. In the present day, a youngish man approaching middle age returns to the mountain village of his childhood to bury his schoolteacher father, who has passed away suddenly. He died away from home, at a provincial hospital, and his widow insists that his body must be carried back to the village by hand, so that his spirit can find its way home. Most of the movie, however, is a flashback to 1958, when the widow was a beautiful 18-year-old village girl, and the man who would become her husband was a freshly graduated 20-year-old schoolteacher who took the job as village schoolteacher because there was no work for him. It was love at first sight, but tradition and political difficulties conspired, for a time, to keep them apart. Given the way the film is constructed, there can be no real surprises, and the absence of overt displays of affection set this movie far apart from modern American romances. As my cousin Diane aptly described it, this movie is lovely and quaint.