What makes the work of Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou so remarkable is not the period settings, the historical significance or the politically charged subject matter.

Movies like "Red Sorghum," "Ju Dou" and "Raise the Red Lantern" are enthralling because they so accurately focus in on the human condition. Zhang has managed to grasp a simple truth that so often eludes modern filmmakers — if the story is recognizable and the characters are real, the audience will easily identify with them and be swept away.

And so it is with Zhang's latest epic work, "To Live," a deceptively simple title for this story of one family's struggle against a country torn by civil strife over a 30-year period.

Broken into several distinct episodes, the film begins with Xu Fugui (Ge You) in the early 1940s, before the revolution, being chastised by his wife Jiazhen (Gong Li) — and his entire family — for spending so much time in a local gambling den. When he manages to gamble away the entire family fortune, Jiazhen takes their daughter and strikes out on her own, giving birth to their son alone.

Later, however, Jiazhen gives Fugui a second chance, and to support his family he becomes a traveling puppeteer. One night, while putting on a show, he finds himself reluctantly recruited by the Nationalist army to help fight the communists. There are unexpected twists and turns, and as a result of his military service, Fugui matures and gains a new perspective on life.

He eventually returns to his family, and we see the couple grow older together. In a tender sequence that leads to some of the film's most complex emotional strength, their hearing-impaired daughter is betrothed to a crippled soldier, and they watch as their socialist life becomes less than ideal. The latter reaches an apex when their daughter has complications in childbirth and the youths who run the hospital don't know what to do.

There is much more — intimate, delicately detailed scenes that register high emotion, and huge, epic sequences that employ hundreds of extras. And through it all, Zhang manages a wonderful balance of drama, melodrama and comedy.

The film is also perfectly cast, without a flawed performance in the lot, and Ge You and Gong Li are wonderful in the leads.

As yoy may have read, the way in which Zhang presents his country's civil strife has displeased the Chinese government, resulting in the filmmaker being censored — he has been banned from making movies for two years.

But there is a worldwide audience out there that is just discovering his work — and that audience anxiously awaits his return to the screen.

In the meantime, there is "To Live." Don't miss this one.

"To Live" is not rated but is probably in PG-13 territory for wartime violence and some profanity.