Week 5: Raise the Red Lantern
Directed: Zhang Yimou
1991
125 minutes
Tuesday 18th October , The Study, Teviot
A young university student, Songlian, is sold – against her will – by her bankrupt family to a wealthy landowner as a “fourth wife”, or rather a third concubine. After arriving at the palace – a sealed-off world, a compound from which none of the women may leave – and meeting the three other wives, Songlian is soon initiated into the absurd games of power, deception and trickery which must be played in order to win and maintain each day the master’s favour and hence the few trifling joys available to them: the master’s company in bed, a foot massage, the choice of meals for the following day, red lanterns raised outside their chambers.
Zhang’s precise visual compositions exude the intense frustration of life wasted: wide shots of figures enclosed within the stone walls of the palace, or in enormous bedchambers so luxurious as to be a cruel mockery of the characters’ deep inner dissatisfaction, all framed with an eye for terrible crushing symmetry. The foreboding tower at one corner of the palace, where disobedient wives are sent to be dealt with, casts a sinister shadow over proceedings. Tales of the sad fates of those previous wives serve as a constant warning to Songlian; a threat to ensure that she plays by the rules of the house. Yet even those wives who resign themselves to such a life can only succeed for so long: the ageing first wife, all but forgotten by the master, is a constant reminder of the ephemerality of the beauty and sexual desirability upon which these women are forced to rely. Raise the Red Lantern is a moving tale of the slow, torturous suffocation of desire and the will to live.
Much has been said already (by people vastly more knowledgeable and articulate than I) about the visual beauty of the film – its painterly compositions, its sumptuous colours, and so on. But here you see I am falling back on those familiar, vague adjectives which are so fuzzy-edged as to be meaningless: an evasive technique, I know. For whatever reason beyond my ability to comprehend, Zhang’s visuals here have an unspeakable effect on the pleasure centres in my brain, and they are better seen than read about.
Written by Sean Ferguson