Word: dou
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...Rembrandt Research Project has fallen on paintings that no one with half an eye, after seeing this show, could go back to thinking of as Rembrandts: How did the light, high-colored, almost garish Feast of Esther by Jan Lievens, or the finicky execution of Gerrit Dou, ever get mistaken...
...very Chinese -- though this film, like Zhang's earlier Ju Dou, has yet to be shown on the mainland. The authorities see that both pictures, about rebellious young people crushed by mean old men, abound in dangerous political implications. And so, to their eternal discredit, the old men who run China have deprived their nation of the profound and pertinent pleasures that China's best filmmaker has provided for the rest of the world. Zhang is one in a billion. When will the billion get to see his work...
...DOU. The colors -- bright, sensuous, all enveloping -- tell the story of a young Chinese woman, her brutal husband and her timid lover. Fate enshrouds them, as it has Zhang Yimou's beautiful film: Ju Dou has never played publicly in China, and the authorities tried unsuccessfully to rescind its Oscar nomination as Best Foreign Film...
...story is primal, and so are Zhang's cinema strategies. Everything is told through gestures and colors. In the undressing scene, the beautiful Gong Li (who is the director's offscreen companion) wordlessly expresses the range of Ju Dou's feelings, from shame to rebellion to cool majesty. And with its sensuous color scheme -- reds, yellows, blues, in bold and subtle tonalities -- Ju Dou looks like a dream of carnage at sunrise. When the couple make love by the dye vat, a long bolt of red fabric unravels past Ju Dou's face: an ornament to her ecstasy...
...Dou is an austere thriller with one lingering mystery: Why was it shelved? Did the old husband -- brutal, impotent, self-deluding -- offer the Chinese rulers a disturbing mirror image of themselves? Did Ju Dou's child -- twisted, ruthless, utterly inhuman -- remind the authorities uncomfortably of the '60s Red Guard? Maybe the film was deemed too sexy for Chinese viewers. Though not much flesh is exposed, Ju Dou is a powerful essay on sexual longing, grounded in time-honored dramatic elements: fire, water, pain and lust...