Word: zhang
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sometimes people don't notice a good movie until somebody bad steps on it. To Western eyes, Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou might seem to be just another pretty retelling of a familiar triangle: a young woman, her elderly husband and her lover. Ju Dou plays like Phaedra mixed with The Postman Always Rings Twice -- until the woman bears a son who grows ripe with vengeance, and the movie becomes a bitter Bad Seed...
...insisted that it be withdrawn from consideration. (The Motion Picture Academy rejected the demand.) Nor have the Chinese allowed the film to be shown publicly on the mainland, though it has played to acclaim elsewhere in the Far East and in Europe. Suddenly, this spare melodrama acquired political significance. Zhang, 40, whose previous film, Red Sorghum, made him the brightest light of emerging Chinese cinema, became both an international cause celebre and a man without a local audience. "To get Ju Dou past the censors," Zhang says, "I have agreed to consider recutting some parts. But I never heard back...
...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...
China's film bureaucracy is notoriously stubborn. But Zhang, who as a young man sold his blood to buy his first camera, is determined to keep making films at home. "I don't think I could go on with my work abroad," he says. "Where could I find a place overseas that looks like the Chinese countryside?" That is the capping irony: China never looked more ravishing than it does through Zhang's camera eye. The censors never looked more myopic than when they suppressed and orphaned the most intelligently gorgeous film since The Last Emperor...
...Taoist adage tells of a sage who dreamed he was a butterfly and then awoke to find himself wondering who was doing the dreaming. Might he not be the butterfly imagining it was a philosopher? Zhang has reproduced that pretty reverie, combining it with Kafka's Metamorphosis and shading it with The Fly. The question is now threefold: Is the narrator a person dreaming he is a cockroach or a cockroach dreaming it is a contemporary citizen of the People's Republic, or is there no difference between them...