Ju Dou

Also known as Secret Love, Hidden Faces, Ju Dou is the second film from Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou who went on to make Raise The Red Lantern, The Story of Qui Jou and most recently To Live, all starring Zhang's reputed lover Gong Li.

In the rural China of the 1920s an impotent and middle-aged husband demands a child, a son in particular from his young wife (Gong Li). Unable to produce the goods, she is regularly beaten and seeks refuge in the arms of the old man's employee and distant relative in the textile mill. Their clandestine couplings produce a son, and, when the old man is crippled chasing after them, the lovers become bolder, showing off their affair in front of him. But as the son grows up believing the old man is his father, revenge is nigh.

The starting point for the Fifth Generation is Chen "Farewell My Concubine" Kaige's film Yellow Earth (1983) for which Zhang Yimou did the cinematography, and Ju Dou reflects this in its vision of the natural and social landscape which looks like paradise but is actually a kind of hell on earth. The photography is sumptuous and as the film is set in a textile-dying mill (Zhang worked in one during the Cultural Revolution) it allows the frame to be filled with gorgeous, intense colours.

As with any film that dares to show a glimmer of creativity in China the authorities banned Ju Dou and cut it for foreign audiences due to its implied erotic content. Despite being financed (and post-produced) by Japan, the authorities also tried to withdraw it from consideration for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award.

Review by Stephen Cox
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96