The Chinese director Zhang Yimou is known for lovingly photographing landscapes, but he’s never shot one that’s bleaker or more godforsaken than Ken Takakura’s face. Blasted feelings leak out of his hooded eyes and long buried regrets twist his thin lips. Fifty years of film history push his gravitas past the breaking point, and when he cries in Mr. Zhang’s “Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles” he hides his face because watching this national monument crack apart is more than most normal viewers can bear.

Between 1955 and 1976, Mr. Takakura played the same role with minor variations in 180 movies. He was an old-school yakuza in a modernizing world, and by the last reel you always knew he was going to sacrifice everything — his girl, his gang, his life — to honor an old debt that no modern gangster would dream of fulfilling.

These movies were called ninkyo eiga (chivalry films) and now, at 75 years old, he appears in one more of them, “Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.” But this time, instead of being a gang member self-destructively loyal to his old comrades, Mr. Takakura plays a father self-destructively loyal to his estranged son.

His character, Takata, lives in a fishing village that’s as isolated and remote as he is. After being tricked by his daughter-in-law, Rie, into a failed attempt at reconciliation with his son, Kenichi, he returns home with nothing but a tape of his son in a television special about Chinese folk opera; he’s watching it when Rie calls to tell him his son has been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. On the TV screen, Kenichi is telling an opera singer in China’s Yunnan Province that he’ll come back next year and see him perform the opera “Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.”

Suddenly, Takata’s world telescopes into this one task: He will travel to Yunnan and videotape a performance of “Riding Alone,” hoping it will prove to Kenichi the sincerity of his desire to reconcile. But no sooner does he arrive in China than everything unravels and he finds himself running from pillar to post trying to complete his simple plan.

This is a radical reworking of one of Mr. Zhang’s earlier movies, “The Story of Qiu Ju,” about a stubborn peasant woman’s quixotic quest to receive justice for her husband, who’s been kicked in the crotch by the village chief. Driven from one ministry to another in a Kafkaesque nightmare, her journey is the reverse of Takata’s: No one wanted to help Qiu Ju, but everyone wants to help Takata. He’s instantly entangled in the webs of obligations woven by one overly accommodating Chinese person after another; by the end of the film, he’s caught in a net of connections that he’s tried to avoid his entire life.

Only Pedro Almodóvar can wring this kind of deeply distilled melodrama out of such slight material, but what Mr. Zhang does with his admittedly thin story is nothing short of magic.

At a time when Chinese-Japanese relations have reached a low, with anti-Japanese riots having swept China in 2005 and unfounded rumors of of Japanese pornographers exploiting Chinese children racing across the Chinese blogosphere today, it’s an act of bravery for Zhang to imagine a world in which empathy trumps nationality. Though it swerves dangerously close to easy sentimentality, this movie stays just this side of the border, and with all cylinders of its narrative engine pounding and its characters deftly outlined in just a few strokes. It’s not until the film reaches its end that you can step back and look objectively, realizing what a minimalist marvel it truly is.

If you only know Mr. Zhang from his martial arts extravaganzas like “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers,” then you ain’t seen nothing yet.