chaos-rampant
This is a fascinating movie that you deserve to see mindfully. Zhang truly does it, in that he both gives us a clear picture whereby we can see ourselves with clarity and allows our gaze to wonder outside the walls of that picture. A fascinating interplay between these two notions of concentrating the gaze and letting float just so happens to power Chinese spiritual life, more on this in a bit.But now quickly to see what is it about, what clear picture emerges? A young girl has to enter a household as concubine, becoming one of four wives of a rich merchant who live inside a walled compound. So immediately the outside world of myriad possibilities and stories closes down behind her and us and life acquires a palpable order. Various rituals take place that together comprise a larger harmony. Magnificent red lanterns are lit outside the home of whichever wife the husband has chosen to spend the night with; the rest have to return disappointed to dark houses. A foot massage is given to the chosen wife that night, punctuated with a repetitive sound that echoes like temple chimes signaling the time for prayer. Other rituals: the camera itself doesn't roam freely but specific views are established. Looking down from the tiled roof, another facing the bed. The husband is never seen from up close, as if he exists outside this order.Taken together all these modes insinuate a world that is meticulously groomed and controlled, given structure and color that ritualize appearances. Very Chinese. Each time the lanterns are lit we know one woman has been chosen to be the center of this world for a fleeting night, life given a ceremonial glow.But is this harmony that we see? The obvious point is a critique of traditional mores left over from the old days and accepted unthinkingly, lives stifled by the walls imposed on them and how the four women scheme and vie for primacy in the order of things. It doubletimes just as well as a veiled critique of communist walls. Party censors thought as much and the work was banned in China.All of this will be readily available to the Western viewer from our own traditions of painterly beauty and institutionalized oppression. We can rest there and speak the usual platitudes about "the human condition", walk away thinking the film is all about how bad life was for women in China. Or we can - as with Mizoguchi before - attempt to cross into the world that gives rise to these images and reflects a more encompassing view.Zhang's meticulous abstraction (color - sound - camera - all of it bound by the cyclical turn of weathers outside) comes from a worldview where the same energy is felt to move through man and nature alike, not Western in the least. He's working in a long Chinese line of practiced abstraction with roots in the tea ceremony and the calligrapher's scroll where the effort is not decorative beauty for its sake. It's cultivated awareness that guides the spiritual realization that we are what we bring to life. The calligrapher controls his hand like someone who meditates concentrates his attention - so that it will begin to radiate effortlessly with what rises up from a unfettered, mindful heart.So if you don't just pass by like a visitor who looks pitifully at the cruelty of some faraway time and its victim? If you use the film to center within the walls of your own life that happened to you? In that case the film has wisdom in store, another view of seeing self and world.This is the notion that you have been born into this life and have now come to this house, circumstances made it so. Life could have been better, it could have been worse. We see a housemaid who'd love nothing more than to be a wife while the third wife manages to live a life without despair and regret that lets her sing freely. Will you add to the unhappiness, cause unhappiness to others, go mad?The title of this post refers to a mandala - a sacred space for the concentration of the gaze in Buddhism - frequently seen in Chinese temples; it depicts the universe as wheel and at the center lie craving and ego. See this like a mandala, see yourself in a life that you set in motion around the one ordained from above. Something to meditate upon
tieman64
This is a very brief review of "Red Sorghum" (1987), "Ju Dou" (1990), "Raise the Red Lantern" (1991), "The Story of Qiu Ju" (1992) and "To Live" (1994), five films by Zhang Yimou. Each film stars actress Gong Li, each works as a companion-piece to the other, and each deals almost exclusively with the oppression of women within early 20th century China.Zhang's debut, "Red Sorghum" stars Gong Li as Young Nine, a peasant who is sold to a wealthy leper. Things only get worse for Nine, who must fend off a series of rapists, mean men and the Japanese Army itself, all the while running a successful winery. Throughout the film, Zhang uses boxes, deep reds and tight squares to amplify Nine's sexist surroundings. Indeed, the film opens with Nine literally forced into a box, a social reality which she spends the film attempting to break free of or even transform. For Zhang, China wasn't "disrupted" by the Japanese invasion, it was hell long before. Like most of Zhang's films during this period, "Sorghum" sketches the cultural and socioeconomic conditions which spurred China, with hopeful arms, toward Maoism.Zhang's next film, "Ju Dou", covers similar material. Here Gong Li plays Ju Dou, a woman sold to a violent oaf ("When I buy an animal I treat it as I wish!") who owns a fabric dying establishment. After her husband is crippled, Ju Dou forges a relationship with Yang Jinshan, a relative. When Ju Dou and Jinshan have a child together, the kid grows up into a mean brute. Like "Sorghum", "Ju Duo" is a tragedy obsessed with rich reds, boxes and patriarchal violence. Whilst its plot superficially echoes Zhang's own adulterous, then-scandalous affair with Gong Li, Zhang seems more interested in the way Ju Dou and Jinshan hide their illicit affair from other villagers. For Zhang, the duo's tacit submission to social mores merely validates the notion that their love is scandalous and so merely validates the symbolic power of the crippled patriarch, a power which Ju Dou's son must – as per his mother's very own actions – thereby respect and avenge.The arbitrary nature of power, and how this power is always "symbolic" and always unconsciously maintained (via ritual, personal belief and shared delusions), is itself the obsession of Zhang's "Raise the Red Lantern". Here Gong Li again plays a woman sold to a wealthy man. This man has several other wives, all of whom begin to violently fight one another in an attempt to win the patriarch's adoration. "Is it the fate of women to become concubines?" a character asks, pointing to the film's deft critique of feudal relations. Zhang's first masterpiece, "Lantern" is again obsessed with reds, boxes and sequestered women, though here Zhang replaces the voluptuous colours, camera work and widescreen Cinemascopes of his previous films with something more restrained. Because of this, Zhang's conveying of claustrophobia and oppression, of mind and spirit pushed to madness, feels all the more powerful.Next came Zhang's "The Story of Qiu Ju". A near masterpiece, it stars Gong Li as Qui Ju, a peasant farmer who embarks on a quest to avenge her husband, who's had his crotch kicked in by a village leader. More emasculated by this attack than her own husband, Qui Ju's quest takes her all across China, dealing with a Chinese bureaucracy which seems quite helpful, polite and even rational. And yet still this bureaucracy does not please Qiu Ju. It thinks in terms of commodities, monetary recompense and punishment, whilst Qiu Ju (like Zhang Yimou himself, whose previous films were banned, without explanation, by Chinese authorities) seems more interested in acquiring a "shuafa", a simple explanation and apology. By the film's end, both the "primitive justice" of rural China and the "civilized justice" of modern China are simultaneously mocked, praised and shown to be thoroughly incompatible. Zhang's first "neo-realist" film, "Qiu Ju" was shot with hidden cameras, amateur actors, and so is filled with subtle observations, cruel ironies and beautiful sketches of peasant life.One of Zhang's finest films, "To Live" followed. It stars Gong Li as Jiazhen, the wife of a wealthy man (Ge You) who is addicted to gambling. When this gambling results in the family losing its mansions, riches and status, Jiazhen and her husband are forced onto the streets. Ironically, this set-back saves the family; the Cultural Revolution arrives, and with China's shift to nascent communism, all wealthy land owners are demonised, attacked and killed.Unlike most films which tackle life under Mao's Great Leap Forward, "To Live" carefully juggles the good and bad of what was essentially a nation shirking off feudalism, monarchs, uniting and then trying, clumsily, to cook up some form of egalitarian society. This quest results in all manners of contradictions and socio-political paradoxes: community, solidarity and a simple life save our heroes, but their world is one of paranoia, danger, and in which everyone and everything is accused of being "reactionary". The film ends with Jiazhen's daughter dying, a death which is the result of both unchecked consumption (a doctor dies gobbling food) and communist "reorganisation" (all competent doctors have been killed/jailed for being counter-revolutionary). This jab at communism got the film banned in China (further highlighting the insecurity of the regime). Ironically, Maoism saw massive positive health care reformations, and saw an improvement in mortality rates which at times surpassed even then contemporary Britain and parts of America (life expectancy doubled from 32 years in the 1940s to 65 years in the 1970s). But such things don't concern Zhang. Spanning decades, "To Live" is mostly a broad account of life, love, loss and growth (the personal and political), all unfolding upon a canvas that is devastatingly cruel. Significantly, the film's title is both adjectival and a command; this is "what life is", but one must nevertheless "always push on". Gong Li and Ge You in particular are excellent.8.5/10 - See "Black Narcissus".
