Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (DVD)

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It's more than ironic that Takata has to leave his son to grow close to him. It's paradoxical, and Zhang flirts with more irony and paradox throughout this narratively simple but thematically complex tale. When Takata arrives in Yunnan and receives a phone call from Rie telling him his son has terminal cancer, he proceeds undeterred with his plan to film. Nothing can stop him--not uncooperative translators, not bureaucratic red-tape, not language barriers, and not an imprisoned and uncooperative Li Jiamin (who plays himself). Whatever obstacle he faces, Takata is determined to overcome. The turning point comes when Li Jiamin can't sing because he is too sad, having never seen his son. At first, Takata tries to bring the boy to the opera singer so he can get his film. But as we see Takata turning away from his own purposes, we see him as well growing symbolically closer to this surrogate son, Yang Yang (Yang Zhenbo).

Location filming makes us feel as if we're journeying right alongside Takata, and the landscape of Yunnan province looks almost otherworldly at times. Small mountains that look like stalagmites sprout from the earth, and the village looks as if it could have been filmed in 1805 instead of 2005. It feels rare to see, as if it were too private to be seen in public. That's the way Takakura's performance feels, too. "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles" is a powerful piece of storytelling that may serve up an easy metaphor, but a complicated range of possible interpretations.

Video:
Mastered in High Definition, "Riding Alone" is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with good color saturation and awfully good sharpness for a standard DVD. There's the slightest bit of grain, but nothing that detracts from our enjoyment.

Audio:
The main language is Chinese Dolby Digital 5.1, with Portuguese 5.1 and French 2.0 Surround options and subtitles in English (CC), French, Spanish, and Portuguese. The audio quality matches the video-solid, if unspectacular.

Extras:
There is only a single, brief making-of featurette, which is pretty standard and mostly serves to answer our questions about the filming process. It was filmed, on location, and real Chinese from Yunnan were filmed.

Bottom Line:
As a character-driven drama, this quest story is both unusual and familiar. But paradox seems to be at the core of Zhang Yimou's film, and so it feels quite natural. So does the rest of "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles," an organic study of how fathers and sons misconnect . . . and reconnect.

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