Word: lanterns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Today Zhang Yimou is China's ambassador to sophisticated moviegoers. He is a world-class artist who gives his films (Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern) heartbreak and visual grandeur. But people do not see Zhang's films so much as they read them, like fortune cookies, for signs and omens about the interior life of a forbidden country. Forbidden to him as well: the Chinese authorities have withheld release of some of his films. And yet Zhang still works in his homeland, against all odds and with great grace. Just like the heroine of his spare...
...played by the radiantly sullen Gong, who has starred in all of Zhang's features and who was declared best actress at last year's Venice Film Festival for this portrayal. As Qiu Ju or Ju Dou, as the bride in Red Sorghum or the balky mistress in Red Lantern, Gong has brought life and body to the director's ethereal cinema style. The Story of Qiu Ju relies even more on her personality than the team's earlier films. There Gong was swathed in luscious silks and period exoticism; here, in a glamourless contemporary role, she is swaddled...
...film art, Qiu Ju is no match for the wondrous Red Lantern. But as a rare glimpse into the last communist monolith, it has the fascination of an individual's -- and a People's -- tragedy...
...then, Peck dismantles this pretty image, exposing the unpretty reality it describes and dignifies: "When his body folded over at the waist...and his face smacked the tub's bottom, I didn't think it was like a rice-paper lantern being closed. I thought it was like the body of a six foot-two-inch man who weighed eighty pounds and who'd had all the shit and blood and water and air sucked out of him folding over in death...
Coppola composes movies as Wagner composed operas, setting primal conflicts to soaring emotional lines. The force of his will is as imposing as the range of his art. He goes for majesty over subtlety and, often as not, finds what he's looking for. Magic-lantern images are everywhere: in the blood pouring from an altar crucifix; in the Castle Dracula chauffeur garbed as Darth Vader; in the endless supertrain of the count's cape; in the placental gel and rat's-nest cocoons that encase the vampire. But more: in the wonderfully spectral mood that does justice...