E-Mail This Article to a Friend POSTMEN IN THE MOUNTAINS

Set in the fairy-tale wilderness of Hunan Province in the 1980s, Huo Jianqi’s visually glorious, dramatically thin film offers a pleasant, sometimes poignant version of the old story of fathers and sons, tradition and change. Slowed down by arthritis, a middle-aged rural postman passes his route on to his son, whom he takes on his final trip. As the pair and the postman’s loyal and resourceful dog wander over misty terrain like figures in a Chinese landscape painting, the son in voiceover and via flashbacks relates their uneasy past. With his father often away on duty while he grew up, the son resented and feared him, and he felt bad for his seemingly abandoned mother. But now, as he sees how the far-flung villagers on the route depend on the old man (his "reading" of a letter to an old blind woman will bring tears to the eyes of the uncynical) and also discovers how the job might be a good way to meet women (a scene where he dances with a fiery young woman at a village wedding is especially memorable), he begins to appreciate the nobility of the profession. Best at its moments of simplest poetry (the image of the son carrying his father across a stream has more veracity than entire Hollywood movies on similar subjects), Postmen makes sentiment into art. In Mandarin with English subtitles.