Zhang Yimou’s drama of four wives competing for favour is absorbing and deeply upsetting. Gong Li makes the cost of those household rituals painfully clear, though their repetition occasionally presses the point harder than necessary.
Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern makes the daily running of a wealthy household frightening enough to sustain an entire drama. Songlian, played by Gong Li, is a young, educated woman entering a marriage in 1920s China, where four wives compete for one man’s favour. We would recommend it to almost anyone prepared for a film about cruelty that proceeds without hurry. The interest lies in how quickly ordinary arrangements become intolerable once we understand who makes the rules and who has to live by them.
Ni Zhen’s screenplay, adapted from a novel by Su Tong, keeps our attention on the women and their struggles within the household. The lantern-lighting rituals make favour visible, so that something apparently private becomes a matter for everyone. We were unnerved by these ceremonies. Their orderly repetition makes the wives’ competition seem as routine as any other household duty. Zhang lets us learn the customs well enough to understand how they can be used against the people obliged to observe them.
Cinematographers Lun Yang and Zhao Fei use symmetry and stillness to make the restrictions palpable. The women occupy carefully allotted portions of the image, and our eye keeps returning to the arrangements around them. Strong colour gives us plenty to look at without making the place seem welcoming; the stylised sets further limit any sense of escape. The images are pleasurable, which matters, because Zhang needs us to understand the attraction of this wealthy household as well as its cruelty.
Gong Li prevents all this careful arrangement from turning the women into illustrations. Her first close-up is crucial: we attend to a person before we have learned to admire the surroundings. He Saifei’s Meishan and Cao Cuifen’s Zhuoyun give the rivalries enough force to keep us involved in individual grievances, even when the outcome of a dispute seems less important than the rules governing it. We can understand the women’s resentment without being asked to approve of everything they do.
Du Yuan’s editing gives the still compositions time to become uncomfortable, rather than treating them as pictures to be admired and passed over. The pace is patient, but the competition supplies a reason to keep watching. The music, credited to Naoki Tachikawa and Zhao Jiping, supports the unease without doing the emotional work for the actors. What holds our attention is the effort each woman makes to secure an advantage, and the small amount of freedom success could actually buy.
There is a cost to such control. Some of the repeated ceremonies make the same point, and Zhang’s symmetrical staging can leave too little room for surprise. Occasionally we feel that he has arranged the women to prove something we already understand about their lives. This is where the film comes closest to making them examples, although the performances keep bringing us back to their quarrels and frustrations.
As domestic melodrama, Raise the Red Lantern is more absorbing than its severe appearance might suggest. The intrigues have the pull of a soap opera, and Zhang allows us the pleasure of following them without making the women’s predicament seem trivial. There is enough individual temperament here to complicate any easy account of victims behaving well and villains behaving badly. Give it an evening when neither of you needs cheering up.
