RAISE THE RED LANTERN
A film review by Jerry Boyajian
Copyright 1992 Jerry Boyajian
RAISE THE RED LANTERN is the latest film by the hot, young Chinese director Zhang Yimou (RED SORGHUM, JU DOU). It was nominated this year for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, and like JU DOU, it's been banned in its home country for being ideologically incorrect. Quite frankly, I was never able to figure out what it was about JU DOU that got the Chinese government so worked up, but with this film it's a bit more obvious.
Gong Li (star of Yimou's previous films) plays Songlian, a young woman in 1920s China who becomes the fourth wife/mistress of a rich man. Each of the four women occupy their own wing of the Master's mansion, with their own maids. Whichever one the Master chooses to sleep with on a given night has red lanterns lit and placed around her quarters and gets to be at the top of the pecking order for as long as the Master sleeps with her. Not surprisingly, the four women struggle against each other to be the apple of the Master's eye, and it's these power politics that form the core of the story.
On a higher level, though, Yimou's film is and allegory about the Chinese political and social system. Like that system, the Master's house is run with a rigid structure of rules and customs that must be obeyed at the risk of losing status (at best) or life (at worst). The Master himself is painted in rather vague terms: we never see him very well, he's either in medium or distant shots and/or is turned partly away from the camera, and his presence is felt more than shown. The most pointed aspect of the Master-as-government allegory is when one of the wives is killed for adultery and another one accuses the household servants of being murderers after she follows them and finds the body of the murdered wife. To her accusations, the Master says, "You saw nothing," much like the way Beijing denies the Tiannamen massacre.
Visually, the film is beautiful. Yimou's composition is exquisite, and moves the film at a very deliberate pace, so that it seems almost as if each the film is intended to be a series of paintings. I was particularly taken with one sequence where Songlian meets the Young Master (the son of the First Mistress) after following the sounds of his flute-playing. There is also a nice series of overlapping dissolves just before the closing credits that is simple yet wonderfully done.
(It should be noted that those with a feminist bent might find this film hard to sit through. Not because the film itself is sexist, but it portrays a highly patriarchal and sexist society, and so the dialogue is filled with various remarks about women's role in society as servants to the man.)
RAISE THE RED LANTERN is a major film from a man who is rapidly becoming a major figure in world cinema. I couldn't recommend it more highly.
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--- jayembee (Jerry Boyajian, DEC, "The Mill", Maynard, MA)
boyajian@ruby.enet.dec.com
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