The puppets enable Fugui to regain his self-esteem and give him a sense of creativity, as he is now capable of articulating his thoughts through the puppets. He is able to make a better living as a traveling entertainer than as a seller of needles and thread.
When it became too painful to live in his old town where he was once so wealthy, Fugui flees and goes on the road with the Nationalist Army. When the communists are obviously going to win, he easily and quickly switches alliances, just as easily as he gambled his life's fortune away. Following the Red Army, he makes his way back to his old town and life and is reunited with his family, who now accept their newly chastised father. Fugui throws himself into the New China, praising Maoism for what it has taught him about virtue, discipline, and the best way to live life. His earlier decadence seems to validate Maoist assumptions and he rejects of his old ways.
But the communist revolution or fate is hardly portrayed in a positive way in "To Live." Like the decadent aristocracy, it also becomes corrupt with the madness of the Cultural Revolution. Due to no fault of the family, Xu Fugui's daughter goes deaf and mute after a long illness. The only man who will marry her is lame, a factory worker far different than the wealthy man envisioned as her husband when she was still a baby. She dies in childbirth because there is no one in the hospital where she gives birth who knows anything about medicine -- higher knowledge and anything intellectual is a forbidden art during Mao's revolution. Doctors are imprisoned as criminals the only doctor available is suffering from indigestion. The scene is funny, sad, horrifying, and tragic all at once. The only hope is Fugui's grandson, whom the old man grows to love. He marvels at the great changes he has overseen during his life, as he looks at the young boy and also wonders what the child will see and suffer as he grows.
The film is intensely episodic -- all of the scenes are dramatic, and many of the self-contained episodes could have been subjects of an entire film themselves,...
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