Raise the Red Lantern

Songlian’s world is all angles, all carved space. She exists caged, framed by doorways and courtyard walls. She has been de-classed by the death of her tea-merchant father, sold into marriage by her step-mother. She is fourth mistress, the latest, youngest and prettiest wife of a powerful master.

We are drawn into this world, slowly and gradually, until we are wholly immersed, seduced by director Zhang Yimou’s long takes, his contemplative style. Zhang’s camera rarely moves, his compositions are exquisitely balanced. At ground level, in the courtyards and chambers of the ornate palace, the space is angular and rigid, the images divided into static sections. The characters–especially the four mistresses–are framed by multiple doorways, traps within traps, cages within cages. But up on the roofs, the tiled edges and surfaces buckle and flow, and Zhang uses long lenses to compress them into chaotic, abstract patterns. When she’s on the rooftops, Songlian can escape, for a moment, the stifling reality of her life; it is only an illusion, a fact driven home by the end of the film.

Raise the Red Lantern is the story of a community of women living in 1920s China under conditions of plush oppression. The master, interested in nothing more than sex, companionship and male heirs, holds absolute power over them. And yet, throughout the film, we never get a good look at him, he’s photographed in long-shot, obliquely or behind the gauzy curtain of their bed. Instead, the movie belongs to the four mistresses, and the gaggle of servants in their orbit. The young Gong Li, at the height of her beauty, gives a wonderfully modulated performance as Songlian, letting us see just enough emotion, no more . . . in the opening scene she she stares full-on into the camera, discussing her upcoming forced marriage with her mother, who we never see. The entire film is present in that one scene, all the pain and fear, it foreshadows the entire picture, and we watch with anticipation and dread.

The other performances are equally fine, especially the lovely He Caifei as the doomed Meishan. The script–by Zhen Ni from the novel of Tong Su–carefully delineates the characters of the four mistresses, rendering them more three-dimensional–and thus more interesting–than the less-well-fleshed-out, yet absolute, power of the master.

This is one of the more beautiful movies I have seen. Director Zhang–and cinematographers Lun Yang and Fei Zhao–key the background palette according to the seasons, going from muted golds to grays and back again to golds. The titularCoosa Creek Mambo › Edit — WordPress lanterns–lit red when the master is in residence at one of the mistress’ homes–provide the only color in these almost-monochrome settings. They cast an ironic reflection upon the four mistress’ lives, which–in their brutal, nearly feudal existence–have no light unless the master is there.