Word: gongs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...movie seems enshrouded by fate, so are its characters. Jinshan (Li Wei) runs a dye factory in northwestern China in the 1920s. This vile old man has taken a young wife, Ju Dou (Gong Li), who is made a slave to his viciousness. In bed he gags and harnesses her and rides her like a donkey, and the night bleeds with her shrieks. But the degradations stir Ju Dou's willfulness and sensuality. Now she undresses before the avid eyes of Tianqing (Li Baotian), her husband's adopted son. By abandoning herself to him, she hopes to liberate the captive...
...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...
...particular haiku, for example, is dismissed with a single word--"mediocre." The comment is followed by another student's scrawl: "What is this? The Gong Show or something...
...Gong Xiaoxia, a student from China at theGraduate School of Arts and Sciences, said shelaughed when she first read the article...
...very frustrated," said Gong. "I don't believe Mr. Bush. How can we believe someone who has already cheated and sent high-level officials to China when he said he would not? We don't want our destiny put in someone else's hands...