Concibune meets tragic end in 'Raise the Red Lantern'

Concibune meets tragic end in 'Raise the Red Lantern'

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): This stern and beautiful film directed by Zhang
Yimou was released in cinemas overseas several years ago but
never reached movie theaters here.

Now available for Indonesians on video and laser disc, this
Academy Award nominee is definitely a must for viewers who take
their films seriously.

The director's work has grown in status lately and, together
with his other films, has been regularly scrutinized for what it
seems to reveal about Chinese civilization, past and present.

Raise the Red Lantern creates a world of people who move
within the walls of a single large house, that of a rich family
in rural China. Someone new has arrived and she is Fourth
Mistress who takes up her place in the ritual of lamp-lighting
(red lanterns are raised at the house of the concubine chosen
that night) and the routine of petty competition exacted by every
mistress on each of the others.

Right from the start Songlian (played by Zhang's regular
female lead, Gong Li) shows that she too can deliver a slighting
remark ("Is she a hundred years old?"), but her stubbornness and
passive defiance are never the equal of the household's chief
conspirator.

Songlian is just 19 and a student when her father dies
suddenly. The family can no longer afford to keep her in the
university - in fact, circumstances are such that Songlian must
give up her studies and marry immediately.

Swept along by this catastrophe she herself seems not only
resigned but fatalistic and she declares (in a challenge to the
camera and to us?) that she will marry a rich man and allow
herself to become a concubine - isn't that a woman's fate?

No, her contemporary audience shouts back. But this is early
20th century China and while there are gramophone records and
cigarettes there are few of the other trappings of modernity.

Sensuous

Raise the Red Lantern is truly arresting to look at, with
images which are both geometrical and sensuous at the same time.
Zhang Yimou and his cameraman build a space of perfect symmetry.

In the opening scene Songlian is in close-up. A pair of thick
plaits frame her face and two pearly tears course down each
cheek. This left-right symmetry dominates the look of the entire
film: the camera squats, dead center, on the round in the
courtyard, or it observes the goings-on from a perch above,
placed so that the left and right hand sides of each frame are
mirror opposites. All the while the women mill around inside this
space, contained by the severe lines of the images of which they
are a part. The design quality has significance - in what it says
about the lives of the people who fill those spaces.

This is a film by a director renowned for the "look" of his
films. In Red Sorghum and in Ju dou, it is the landscapes and the
interiors and not just close-ups of the people's faces which
depict their predicaments. In Raise the Red Lantern, the camera
never leaves the confines of the house, once Songlian has entered
it, and it concentrates its attention on walls and doors and
small spaces to express her confinement.

Significantly, it is a long time before the husband is seen.
We see her face, but only his back! While we search in Songlian's
face for states of feeling, we do not get to see him until later.
Even when they share the wedding bed he is heard but we don't get
any glimpse of his face - instead the camera is fixed on Songlian
(and why not, she is beautiful). Put out the lanterns, she says.
No, he wants them to stay on so he can watch her too.

The point being that this is a film about a woman's world, or
that of several women, and that the character of the husband is
of little consequence. It is Songlian and her relationships with
Mistresses Two and Three (number One, played by Jin Shuyuan, is
perhaps too old or too well established to bother) and her
relationship with her maid Yan'er (the master's favorite played
by Kong Lin) which count in this story about petty struggles for
power. If a mistress is 'on' that night she gets the foot massage
(for her benefit, or her husband's?) and she can choose the menu.

In this world of petty rivalries unsisterly behavior is
practiced by all, and downright treachery is practiced by one.
Songlian may have been a student, but she is a new player to this
game and she begins to miss out on her favorite spinach and bean
curd soon after her arrival. It is right off the menu.

Her wedding night is interrupted with a message from Third
Mistress (He Caifei) that she is ill; another night she pulls the
same prank, but this time the master stays, only for Songlian to
be awakened by song, early in the morning. Third Mistress,
Meishan (they say she has been spoilt) was once an opera singer,
so she is colorful and diverting. From the outset she seems
likely to be the most trouble for Songlian. And, she also has a
young one.

However, Second Mistress, Zhouyun (Cao Cui), who is apparently
now cast aside, is older and plain, has 'only' a daughter to her
credit and seems resigned to her loss of status. She treats
Songlian kindly at first. But she is dangerous as a snake.

Meishan has taken the genial 'family' Doctor Gao as her lover.
Will the encounter between Songlian and Feipan (handsome grown-up
son of Mistress One) who visits occasionally, also bring about a
liaison?

She is attracted to him by his flute-playing (she also plays,
as did her father) and momentarily she stands in a doorway,
watching. She looks at him, he looks at her...but then she turns
away.

Another time she gets drunk. Celebrating her birthday? Coming
to terms with the fact she brought about the death of her sullen
maid?

Feipan has returned and visits her. This is a moment when she
could have turned to him for intimacy or support. But she turns
him out after refusing his impromptu gift - she knows it is a
traditional gift from a woman to a man, and not the other way
round. Is it indignation or desperation which makes her cast this
potential ally aside? We don't know, but her action turns against
her.

Her isolation is complete when Meishan's affair is exposed (by
none other, of course, than Mistress Two) and the third Mistress
is carried off to the household's house of death!

Typically, the scene when she was found in bed with Doctor Gao
- and the moment when Songlian finds her hanged body - are off
screen. No Hollywood melodrama this!

With Songlian crouching behind a low wall, we watch in horror
as Meishan is carried to her death, but we watch from a
(distancing) distance, with the focus of our horror - Meishan -
deep in the background.

Different

Early in the film the master said that 'educated girls were
different'. Different they may be but Raise the Red Lantern
affirms that their fate at that time in China was the same
whether opera singer or maid. Songlian, the film tells us, is an
every woman of her time and place. But so too is the maid Yan'er,
and the image of her in her maid's quarters, damaged red lanterns
alight around her (a punishable offense for a maid in this
household), is just as poignant as the image of a disheveled
Songlian, pacing her quarters like a caged animal.

Songlian's story is told within the span of one year, with
each season marked with an introductory title. The film is like a
four-act play, punctuated with signals that something new is
about to happen. Each season ushers in new color tones and new
textures (from the cool blue tinges exterior shots of autumn, to
the chill white of snow, to the dry and dust of summer), while
the routine of ordinary life remains the same.

If you have a taste for action film or suspense drama, stay
clear! You will not experience this film in the pit of your
stomach or at the tips of your fingers. But slowly and surely
Raise the Red Lantern will carry you along with its mounting
power, before it will leave you high and dry at its wrenching
conclusion.