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.