To Live (1994 film)

To Live, also titled Lifetimes in some English versions, is a 1994 Chinese drama film directed by Zhang Yimou and written by Lu Wei, based on the novel of the same name by Yu Hua. It was produced by the Shanghai Film Studio and ERA International, starring Ge You and Gong Li, in her sixth collaboration with director Zhang Yimou.
The film looks back on four generations of the Xu family: Xu Fugui, played by Ge You; his father, a wealthy landowner; his wife, Jiazhen, played by Gong Li; their daughter, Fengxia, and son, Youqing; and finally their grandson, Little Bun. The action goes from the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The film, like many examples of fiction and film in the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrates the difficulties of the common Chinese, but ends when conditions are seemingly improving in the 1980s.
To Live was screened at the 1994 New York Film Festival before eventually receiving a limited release in the United States on November 18, 1994. The film has been used in the United States as a support to teach Chinese history in colleges.
Having achieved international success with his previous films (Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern), director Zhang Yimou's To Live came with high expectations, and lived up to it, receiving critical acclaim. It is the first Chinese film that had its foreign distribution rights pre-sold. Furthermore, To Live brought home the Grand Prix, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and Best Actor Award (Ge You) from the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, the highest major international awards Zhang Yimou has ever won.
The film was denied a theatrical release in mainland China by the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television due to its critical portrayal of policies and campaigns.
In the 1940s, Xu Fugui, a rich man's son and compulsive gambler, loses his family property to a man named Long'er. His father dies after signing over the family house to Long'er, and wife Jiazhen, leaves him, along with their daughter, Fengxia, and their unborn son, Youqing. Long'er does, however, give Fugui a set of shadow puppets. He starts a shadow puppet troupe with a partner named Chunsheng. The Chinese Civil War is occurring at the time, and Fugui and Chunsheng are conscripted into the Kuomintang's Republic of China armed forces during a performance. Midway through the war, the two are captured by the communist People's Liberation Army and earn a certificate of commendation for performing their shadow puppet operas for the communist revolutionaries. After the Communist victory, Fugui returns home, only to find out that due to a week-long fever, Fengxia has become mute and partially deaf.
Soon after his return, Fugui learns that Long'er burned all his property just to deny the new regime from seizing it. No one helped put out the fire because Long'er was a gentry. He is eventually put on trial and sentenced to execution. As Long'er is pulled away, he recognizes Fugui in the crowd and tries to talk to him as he is dragged toward the execution grounds. Realizing that Long'er's fate would have been his if not for his "misfortune" years earlier, Fugui is filled with fear and runs into an alleyway before hearing five gunshots. He runs home to tell Jiazhen what has happened, and they quickly pull out the certificate stating that Fugui served in the communist People's Liberation Army. Jiazhen assures him they are no longer gentries and will not be killed.
The story moves forward a decade into the future, to the time of the Great Leap Forward. The local town chief enlists everyone to donate all scrap iron to the national drive to produce steel and make weaponry for invading Taiwan. As an entertainer, Fugui performs for the entire town nightly, and is very smug about his singing abilities.
Soon after, some boys begin picking on Fengxia. Youqing decides to get back at one of the boys by dumping spicy noodles on his head during a communal lunch. Fugui is furious, but Jiazhen stops him and tells him why Youqing acted the way he did. Fugui realizes the love his children have for each other.
The children are exhausted from the hard labor they are doing in the town and try to sleep whenever they can. They eventually get a break during the festivities for meeting the scrap metal quota. The entire village eats dumplings in celebration. In the midst of the family eating, schoolmates of Youqing call for him to come prepare for the District Chief. Jiazhen tries to make Fugui let him sleep but eventually relents and packs her son twenty dumplings for lunch. Fugui carries his son to the school, and tells him to heat the dumplings before eating them, as he will get sick if he eats cold dumplings. He must listen to his father to have a good life.
Later on in the day, the older men and students rush to tell Fugui that his son has been killed by the District Chief. He was sleeping on the other side of a wall that the Chief's Jeep was on, and the car ran into the wall, injuring the Chief and crushing Youqing. Jiazhen, in hysterics, is forbidden to see her son's dead body, and Fugui screams at his son to wake up. Fengxia is silent in the background.
The District Chief visits the family at the grave, only to be revealed as Chunsheng. His attempts to apologize and compensate the family are rejected, particularly by Jiazhen, who tells him he owes her family a life. He returns to his Jeep in a haze, only to see his guard restraining Fengxia from breaking the Jeep's windows. He tells the guard to stop and walks home.
The story moves forward again another decade, to the Cultural Revolution. The village chief advises Fugui's family to burn their puppet drama props, which have been deemed as counter-revolutionary. Fengxia carries out the act, and is oblivious to the Chief's real reason for coming: to discuss a suitor for her. Fengxia is now grown up and her family arranges for her to meet Wan Erxi, a local leader of the Red Guards. Erxi, a man crippled by a workplace accident, fixes her parents' roof and paints depictions of Mao Zedong on their walls with his workmates. He proves to be a kind, gentle man; he and Fengxia fall in love and marry, and she soon becomes pregnant.
Chunsheng, still in the government, visits immediately after the wedding to ask for Jiazhen's forgiveness, but she refuses to acknowledge him. Later, he is branded a reactionary and a capitalist. He comes to tell them his wife has committed suicide and he intends to as well. He has come to give them all his money. Fugui refuses to take it. However, as Chunsheng leaves, Jiazhen commands him to live, reminding him that he still owes them a life.
Months later, during Fengxia's childbirth, her parents and husband accompany her to the county hospital. All doctors have been sent to do hard labor for being over educated, and the students are left as the only ones in charge. Wan Erxi manages to find a doctor to oversee the birth, removing him from confinement, but he is very weak from starvation. Fugui purchases seven steamed buns (mantou) for him and the family decides to name the son Mantou, after the buns. However, Fengxia begins to hemorrhage, and the nurses panic, admitting that they do not know what to do. The family and nurses seek the advice of the doctor, but find that he has overeaten and is semiconscious. The family is helpless, and Fengxia dies from postpartum hemorrhage (severe blood loss). The point is made that the doctor ate 7 buns, but that by drinking too much water at the same time, each bun expanded to the size of 7 buns: therefore Fengxia's death is a result of the doctor's having the equivalent of 49 buns in his belly.
The movie ends six years later, with the family now consisting of Fugui, Jiazhen, their son-in-law Erxi, and grandson Mantou. The family visits the graves of Youqing and Fengxia, where Jiazhen, as per tradition, leaves dumplings for her son. Erxi buys a box full of young chicks for his son, which they decide to keep in the chest formerly used for the shadow puppet props. When Mantou inquires how long it will take for the chicks to grow up, Fugui's response is a more tempered version of something he said earlier in the film. He expresses optimism for his grandson's future, and the film ends with his statement, "and life will get better and better" as the whole family sits down to eat.
Zhang Yimou originally intended to adapt Mistake at River's Edge, a thriller written by Yu Hua. Yu gave Zhang a set of all of the works that had been published at that point so Zhang could understand his works. Zhang said when he began reading To Live, one of the works, he was unable to stop reading it. Zhang met with Yu to discuss the script for Mistake at River's Edge, but they kept bringing up To Live. Thus, the two decided to adapt To Live instead.
Ge You, known for his comedic roles, was chosen by Zhang Yimou to play the title character, Fugui. Known for poker-faced comedy, he was not accustomed to expressing emotional states this character requires. Thus, he was not very confident in himself, even protesting going to the Cannes Film Festival where he would eventually garner a best actor award.
Growing up, Zhang spent his youth years through the Cultural revolution. Having personally experienced what it was like in such a time and setting, he had a very strong understanding and emotional connection with Chinese culture and society.
As a student who studied screen studies in university in the country’s capital city, he and his peers were heavily exposed to various movies from across the world and across time. His classmate, who is now the President of the Beijing Film Academy, stated that during their four years in university, they went through over 500 films, spanning from Hollywood films from the 1930s to Italian Neo-Realism. Zhang stated in a previous interview that, even after many years, he still remembered the culture shock he experienced when first exposed to the wide variety of films.
The combination of the two very crucial parts of his life provided him with a very strong vision for his films. He was able to have a very strong understanding of both the Chinese national outlook as well as the international outlook of films and applied them extensively throughout his career.
Zhang described To Live as the film he felt the strongest connection to because of the Cultural Revolution background in the film. The political background of Zhang’s family was the label “double-counterrevolutionary”, which was the worst kind of counterrevolutionary. Different from other fifth-generation filmmakers such as Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zhang was in a desperate state and cannot trace back things that were lost during the Cultural Revolution. Zhang said “For me, that was an era without hope – I lived in a world of desperation”.
Zhang, in an interview, described how he used different elements that diverged from the original novel. The use of the shadow play and puppet theatre was to emphasize a different visual look. The ending of the film To Live is different from the novel’s because Zhang wanted to pass the censorship in China and gain approval from the audience in mainland China, even though the film has not been publicly screened in China yet. On the other hand, Zhang’s family had suffered enormously during the Cultural Revolution, but, as Zhang stated, they still survived. Thus, he felt that the book’s ending where everyone in Fu Gui’s family had died was not as reasonable. Furthermore, Zhang Yimou chose Ge You, who is famous for his comedic roles to play the protagonist, Fu Gui. Ge You actually inspired Zhang to add more humorous elements in the film, therefore it is more reasonable not to kill every character at the end.
In the film of To Live, Zhang Yimou did not choose to directly express the theme of the novel, but to reduce the number of deaths, change the way of death, and cut into the doomed sense of fate to eliminate the audience's immediate depression brought by the story itself. In the film, these deliberately set dramatic turns highlight the theme that those infinitely small people, as living “others”, can only rely on living instinct to bear suffering in history, times and social torrents. The theme of the novel – the ability to bear suffering and the optimistic attitude to the world – is hidden in these little people who are helpless to their own fate, but still live strongly.
An extremely faithful adaptation of the novel would have been far too dark and depressing for an audience to endure. Therefore, Zhang decided to alter certain aspects of the story, removing some of the more tragic elements, in order to make it more accessible. Nevertheless, To Live is still regarded as a good adaptation of the book by many, because it still retains the essence of the story despite these changes.
The film opened on September 16, 1994 in Canada. By the time the film opened in the United States on November 18, the film had grossed $67,408. On November 18, it expanded to 4 theaters, including Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Plaza in New York City, where it grossed $32,902, towards a weekend gross of $34,647. It went on to gross $2.3 million in the United States and Canada.
This film was banned in China due to a combination of factors. First, it has a critical portrayal of various policies and campaigns of the Communist Government, such as how the protagonists’ tragedies were caused as a result of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Second, Zhang and his sponsors entered the film at the Cannes Film Festival without the usual government’s permission, ruffling the feathers of the party. Lastly, this film suffered from the bad timing of its release, following Farewell My Concubine and The Blue Kite, films which cover almost the same subject matter and historical period. Both of these films had alerted the Chinese government, due to their similar critical portrayals of Chinese policies, and made them very cautious and aware of the need to ban any future films that tried to touch on the same topics.
Despite being officially banned, the film was widely available on video in China upon its release and was even shown in some theaters.
To Live received critical acclaim and various critics selected the film in their year end lists. To Live has an approval rating of 87% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 23 reviews, and an average rating of 8.3/10. The website's critical consensus states: "To Live (Huo zhe) offers a gut-wrenching overview of Chinese political upheaval through the lens of one family's unforgettable experiences".
There is, among film critics, almost a consensus that To Live is not merely a lament of difficult times, nor a critique of the evils of the totalitarian system, but more “an homage to the characters’ resilience and heroism in their odyssey of survival.” Some scholars further argue that the era’s hostile and chaotic environment is not the story itself, but simply serves as a stage for the story.
The usage of shadow puppetry, which carries a historical and cultural heritage, throughout the movie acts as a parallel to what characters experience in the events that they have to live through.
In two places of the film, there is a similar line. The version that appears earlier in the film is: “The little chickens will grow to be ducks, the ducks will become geese, and the geese will become sheep, and the sheep will become oxen, and tomorrow will be better because of communism.” The version that appears later in the film is: “The little chickens will grow to be ducks, the ducks will become geese, and the geese will become sheep, and the sheep will become oxen, and tomorrow will be better.” This line acts as a picture of the Chinese people’s perseverance in the face of historical hardships, giving the feeling of hope for the audience.
The scene in which the father publicly punishes the son in To Live can be read as a miniaturized re-rendering of the dramatic punishing scene watched by the entire world in June 1989, the Tiananmen Massacre.
There is a scene that the local town chief calls on everyone to donate the iron products of the family to make steel. This implies the historical time jumps to the Great Leap Forward. At that period of time, the Communist Party tried to copy the huge success of the industrial revolution in Britain. However, the method is wrong and wasn't helpful. It shows that when the flood of time come upon a single family, they have no choice but to be carried forward.
During its second half, another tragedy occurred to Fugui's family – Fengxia died of childbirth. None of the nurses knew how to treat postpartum hemorrhage. It's worth noting that the nurses are saying: "We don't know how to deal with this! We are just students!", as the most qualified doctor is almost beaten to death. This section of the film suggests the suffering that the Cultural Revolution brought to people. Most doctors were replaced by Red Guards and were accused of being reactionaries. As the sign on the doctor's body shows, he was in many conflicts with the Red Guard.