Word: lantern
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...only stirring aspect of this slack, predictable movie is the fact that it won this year's foreign-film Oscar. There is something wrong with a system that rewards a movie as negligible as this with anything more than indifference -- especially in a year when Raise the Red Lantern was a nominee and Europa, Europa did not achieve even that status...
RAISE THE RED LANTERN Directed by Zhang Yimou...
...physical splendor of Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern can seem at best anachronistic, at worst reactionary. Even the film's nomination for this year's foreign-language Academy Award might attest to the bland gentility of its virtues, if only because Red Lantern reprises the dour theme and visual extravagance of 1988's big winner, The Last Emperor. But this obscures the point of a brave, passionate and highly entertaining work of art. In the best movies, style reflects substance. And in this story of a wealthy man in 1920s China and the four women he keeps...
...just come to be the fourth concubine of the master (Ma Jingwu). The first mistress is old and irrelevant; the second is ingratiating, lethal, with "a Buddha's face and a scorpion's heart"; the third a saucily imperious opera singer. Each day the chamberlain will raise the red lantern in front of one of their houses, and that woman will be blessed with the master's favors. His strategy, supported by millenniums of male domination, is divide and conquer. So the caged princesses must play power games, with their rivals as opponents and their servants as pawns. Subtly, sullenly...
...emotional anchor for all Zhang's films is Gong Li -- her face a map of cool insurrection, her figure proud and voluptuously Western. But Red Lantern offers other, more exalted orders of ogling. As it plays out its melodrama, it | radiates a ravishing color scheme; it delights in the symmetrical framing of gorgeous objects, human and architectural. For the Westerner, it offers a tour of exotic lands and customs: China in its last imperial gasp. How very sumptuous, you will say of the visual style -- though Red Lantern was made for an impossibly thrifty $1 million...