Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (Qian li zou dan qi)
Mr. Takata (Ken Takakura) has lost his way. An aging, taciturn Japanese fisherman, he hasn't spoken with his son (Kiichi Nakai) in a decade, and the demons of loneliness and regret are settling in for good. Then his daughter-in-law (Shinobu Terajima) calls with the terrible news that the son is dying, and Takata pushes himself out into a strange, elliptical journey.
Zhang Yimou has arguably lost his way, too. The rich early '90s dramas that won the director praise as perhaps the most important of China's Fifth Generation filmmakers -- ``Raise the Red Lantern," ``Ju Dou," ``To Live" -- have been followed by visually stunning yet dramatically undernourished action epics such as ``Hero" (2002), ``House of Flying Daggers" (2004), and the forthcoming ``Curse of the Golden Flower." A master plummeter of emotional depths, Zhang seemed to have turned into a painter of gilded surfaces.
With ``Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles," it's anyone's guess what he's up to. The film is simple bordering on sentimental bordering on sloppy, yet it's kept in artistic check by the vast backdrops of China's remote Yunnan province and by Takakura's nearly wordless performance. The 75-year-old star has been called the John Wayne of Japan, and the effect here is a little like finding the Duke in a Lifetime movie: slightly comic, oddly moving, often mysterious.
The son, who we barely see, is a Tokyo-based professor of Chinese folk-art, and his father's first glimpse of what his child has done with his adult life is a broadcast videotape of a ``mask opera" in rural China. The son appears on camera talking with the lead performer, Li Jiamin (playing himself), enthusiastically promising to return someday to see a production of the ancient tale ``Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles." Since Takata has been turned away from his son's hospital room, he decides to journey to China and tape the opera as a final gesture of conciliation.
The trip quickly turns into a dry comedy of errors. Li, the singer, has been jailed for three years after a brawl, and the aging fisherman will accept no one in the role but him. His two interpreters, a polite young woman named Jasmine (Jiang Wen) and a local man named ``Lingo" (Qiu Lin) do everything in their power to get the old lion to return to Japan, but he will not budge. The further he goes, the further he must go, and Takakura's face is a marvelous mask of stone eroding under sorrow.
Not speaking a word of Mandarin, Takata manages to get bureaucrats, tour guides, and prison wardens on his side; the language barrier intensifies both his isolation and determination to break through. By the time he travels to an even more remote village to fetch the singer's young son (Yang Zhenbo), all the good will in China seems to be following in his wake. ``Riding Alone" wonders what can be done when good will isn't enough.
Zhang is pondering the bonds between fathers and sons here, as well as the trickier aspects of human connection. The film nevertheless gets sidetracked by the landscapes and by a portrait of rural China that feels gentle to the point of harmlessness. The image of a village turning itself out for a banquet in Takata's honor -- the table practically extending the length of the town -- is a beautiful one, but the tender, quietly tough tone of ``Riding" loses impact as it goes. At a certain point, miles from nowhere, Takata gets lost in a maze-like series of canyons. He has no idea where to turn. You sense he's not the only one.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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