Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm
This is a 16mm screening from the wonderful Cine-Real team.
Chicago Reader review:
Completing a loose trilogy that began with Red Sorghum and Ju Dou,
Zhang Yimou’s grim 1991 adaptation of a novel by Su Tong once again
stars Gong Li as a young woman who marries a much older man, and once
again tells a story that explicitly critiques Chinese feudalism and
indirectly contemporary China. This time, however, the style is quite
different (despite another key use of the color red) and the vision is
much bleaker. The heroine, a less sympathetic figure than her
predecessors, is a university student in the 1920s who becomes the
fourth and youngest wife of a powerful man in northern China after her
stepmother can no longer afford to pay for her education. She quickly
becomes involved in the various intrigues and rivalries between wives
that rule her husband’s world and family tradition: each wife has her
own house and courtyard within the palace, and whoever the husband
chooses to sleep with on a given night receives a foot massage, several
lighted red lanterns, and the right to select the menu for the following
day. The film confines us throughout to this claustrophobic universe of
boxes within boxes, where wives and female servants devote their lives
to scheming against one another; the action is filmed mainly in frontal
long shots. Zhang confirms his mastery and artistry here in many ways,
some relatively new (such as his striking sound track), though the cold,
remote, and stifling world he presents here doesn’t offer much
emotional release.
Joanthan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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