Raise the Red Lantern

A 19-YEAR-OLD GIRL, SONGLIAN, is forced to interrupt her university studies after her father's death and decides to marry a wealthy feudal lord who already has three other wives. She discovers quicldy that their daily life mostly focus on their love-sick rivalries and dirty intrigues. It's a sophisticated drama by the director of Red Sorghum and Mourning. The film has been banned in China but was awarded with the Silver Lion at the film festival in Venice in 1991.
Comment:
IN A COUNTRY CONTROLLED BY AN ideology which has monopolized history it's controversial to place the action of a film in a historical epoch - in this case the 20s China without even drowsily glancing at the contemporary political events. This is what Zhang Yimou does in Raise tbe Red Lantern. History is crossed out with exquisite colors. Even nature itself is concealed. We're brought to a fenced in property where the change of season is noticed only through the rain or snow that falls in the inner courtyards. Zhang began his career as a photographer. This is noticeable in his frequently fixed camera angles and magnificent framing of faces, interiors and architectural details, giving the images a dreamlike timelessness. These frozen moments enhances the single person's reactions to the powerstructure in a narrowly defined social field of force. Like in classical Chinese art, the world is mirrored in a drop of water: the individual microcosmos gives us ideas of a world permeated by oppression and ongoing struggles, regarded through the complications of a regulated erotic life. The order is hard as bone, patriarchal and straight out misogynist.
''Let me become a concubine. Isn't that a woman's destiny?'' wonders the main character Songlian, and nothing in the film contradicts her assumption. There is a stifling feeling that ''the second sex'' is incapable of influencing anything but the hierarchy inside her own prison. Songlian and the other wives live, each one in her own house, and are forced to compete with one another: it's a matter of making the master/husband spend the night with them. The red lanterns inside and outside the buildings are lit as a sign of the man's favour, a man whose power is emphasized by portraying him as an anonymous kind of prison manager without a face. There are degrees of hell: lit or dark lanterns makes the difference between a life in darkness or a life with privileges, as the longed for foot-massage. The wife whose lanterns are lit can order the servants around and manage the practical matters of the household. Lit lanterns - foot-massage: the words are repeated throughout the film like an emblem for the only thing that makes life endurable. The competition between the women become rougher and rougher, the intrigues crueler and crueler.
It's not strange that a person with her dreams still intact like Songlian, succumbs to these surroundings. When she is discerned for having simulated a pregnancy she is turned away from the others and is finally struck by a tiredness oflife called insanity, the result of a long painful process ending with a slow ceasure of the brain activity. It's paradoxical that this tiredness makes Songlian the only human character in the film. _
THOMAS ANDERSSON

Orig. titel
Dahong Denglong gaogao gua: Medverkande
Gong Li, He Saifei, Ma Jingwu, Qai Quifen: Producent
Chiu Fu-Sheng: Manus
Ni Zhen: Foto
Zhao Fei: Talat språk
Chinese