Zhang Yimou can make the daily routine of a household frightening. We value his colour and careful compositions most when they bring us closer to the people, as they do in Raise the Red Lantern.
Fi1m perspective
Four wives compete for one man's favour, and the household carries on as though this were a reasonable way to live. In Raise the Red Lantern (1991), Zhang Yimou gives the daily arrangements of a wealthy home enough weight to sustain a deeply upsetting drama. Gong Li plays Songlian, a young, educated woman entering this marriage in 1920s China. We were distressed by the ease with which ordinary household routines became a means of cruelty. The film gives us time to understand the rules and then makes living by them seem intolerable, without needing to hurry us towards the next incident.
Zhang came to directing through cinematography, working on Yellow Earth (1984) before making his directorial debut with Red Sorghum (1988). His early films often put women inside hierarchies they cannot control, and Gong Li became a recurring collaborator. From the 2000s, films such as Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004) took him towards large-scale martial arts. The early dramas had already shown how clearly he could tell a story through colour and composition, with the restrictions on women's lives giving those choices something specific to express. The colour and choreography offer clear reasons to follow that change, though spectacle can leave too little room for the people whose struggles are supposed to matter.
It is worth remembering how much Raise the Red Lantern achieves within a single household. Red is one of Zhang's emphatic tools here, and the careful compositions keep us looking at a home we would not want to inhabit. Gong Li makes the cost of its rituals painfully clear, keeping our attention on the woman required to live through them. Zhang does occasionally repeat those rituals past the point where we need convincing. The cruelty has registered; another insistence on it can feel unnecessary.
That reservation matters because Zhang can make his meaning so clear that we have little left to discover for ourselves. Here, Gong Li gives us someone to watch even when we have understood what the household does to its inhabitants. Start with Raise the Red Lantern, provided a patient account of people making one another miserable is what the evening can bear.
Biography
Zhang Yimou is a Chinese film director. He studied at the Beijing Film Academy and is associated with the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers. His directorial debut was Red Sorghum (1988).
He directed Raise the Red Lantern (1991), To Live (1994), Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006). Several of his films have received international awards, including the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.
