TO LIVE (Directed by Zhang Yimou. Starring Ge You, Gong Li)

There has been much excellent Chinese cinema in the last few years, and Zhang Yimou has been at its forefront. His latest marks an unusual departure, lacking the formal rigour of Red Sorghum, Ju Dou and Raise The Red Lantern, or the semi-documentary conviction of The Story Of Qu Jiu. It is, in some ways his least adventurous film, concentrating on character and plot ahead of design and style. Covering four decades of cultural revolution and the effects of the turmoil on ordinary people, it seems to fall somewhere between two other recent Chinese films, domestic epic The Blue Kite and the melodramatic Farewell My Concubine, yet it does not suffer in comparison.

Concentrating on the superb performances of his cast against a stunningly realised historical background, Zhang Yimou impresses with his capacity to centre on the human drama in set pieces of immense scale. A stunning battle sequence is played out as black farce as the unfortunate hero (Ge You) stumbles from one side to the other. It is Yimou’s inspired stroke to mine a vein of black comedy, and search out laughter in the worst possible tragedies, slowly building up a picture of the resilience of people awash in a tide of events over which they have no control.

To Live, which also means To Survive in Chinese, is a film in which the everyday characters don’t so much rise above events as come to terms with them. Even at its most chilling – a hospital birth botched because all of the doctors have been dismissed as capitalists and the nurses are untrained Red Army Guards – it is also farcically entertaining. Sometimes you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but Yimou ensures you are, at least, feeling something.