Pretty Good

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Ju Dou is Zhang Yimou's first Palme d'Or (Cannes) nominated film. It is also sandwiched between two celebrated films of his – Red Sorghum (1987) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991) – that won the Golden Bear (Berlin) and Silver Lion (Venice) respectively. Perhaps the most famous and acclaimed mainland Chinese filmmaker known to the West, Zhang took Chinese cinema to a new level of prominence in the early 1990s, spearheading the Fifth Generation movement together with a few other directors, most notably with Chen Kaige, who made Yellow Earth (1985) and Farewell, My Concubine (1993).Ju Dou is also the name of the lead character played by Gong Li. She is a woman in poverty who is bought by a rich old man who runs a dye mill together with his poor nephew, Tianqing. She is forced to marry him and bear a son. However, the old man is impotent and physically and sexually abuses Ju Dou every night because she could not give him a son. She seeks solace in Tianqing. Slowly, their relationship turns into an extramarital affair, leading to Ju Dou's pregnancy and birth of a newborn son, which she manages to convince the old man is his.Steeped in Chinese cultural values and tradition, Zhang's film is like a classical Greek tragedy set in 1920s rural China. The poor are exploited by the rich and capable, and it is only a matter of time that something tragic would happen. The son begins to call the old man his father, who becomes paralyzed after a fall, and later suffers a bizarre death. The son grows up to be a quiet and violent person, and appears to lay the blame on Tianqing for impregnating his mother, and causing his rightful father anguish.In the film's most bitterly ironic sequence, Ju Dou and Tianqing are forced to follow a Chinese custom – to weep, call out to their dead family member, and try to stop the coffin for 49 times. This sequence is edited in such a way that the scenes repeat themselves, highlighting the raw emotions of the two secret lovers and asking painfully of the question: What's worse than mourning for a loved one? To be forced to mourn for someone whom you do not love.Zhang's use of vibrant colors is astonishing, and has been an integral part of his visual style over the last two decades. Huge pieces of cloth dyed in red or yellow are suspended on a rung and left out to dry. These not only add to the visual beauty of the film but also take on a symbolistic meaning, representing themes of love (or lust), and angst. When a character dies, he drowns in red dye, as yards of red cloth drop and conceal him, like the drawing of stage curtains on a performer after a show has finished.Together with minimalist music and beautiful, composed shots of rural life, Zhang has created a film that within its picturesque landscape lies a haunting circular tragedy. It is a very bleak portrait of peasantry life ruined by the strict adherence to cultural traditions. It is also an indirect but potent critique of China's Cultural Revolution with the old man taking on the symbol of Maoist brutality and injustice, and "his" son as the symbol of the Red Guard, brainwashed from young to retaliate against the non-Maoist ideology – the right to individual freedom – as embraced by Ju Dou and Tianqing, but very sadly, cruelly denied.SCORE: 8.5/10 (www.filmnomenon.blogspot.com) All rights reserved!

Ju Dou is as sumptuously cinematic as it is woefully fatalistic. The film is a tragedy, focusing on the characters of Ju Dou (Gong Li), a beautiful young woman who has been sold as a wife to Yang Jinshan (Li Wei), an old cloth dyer.Ju Dou is a superbly torrid melodrama with similarities to The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946); the colours have a livid force and the storytelling holds you completely in its grip. The film was banned for a few years in China, but the ban has since been lifted. It was also the first Chinese film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1990.

The beautiful but mostly in this film unglamorous Gong Li plays the title character, a young woman forced into marriage with a much older silk dyer. She cannot conceive and gets abused for it. Her husband's nephew Tianqing admires her and, inevitably, they carry on an affair. She does conceive and gives birth to a son, her husband thinking its his. The old man ends up getting crippled in an accident, and Ju-Dou and Tianqing carry on their affair, almost gleefully under the husband's nose. All of this happens before the film is half finished. There are no heroes in this film, which is set in China in the 1920's. Its actually a tough film to watch because of it, since no one here is very likable. The theme that revenge is not all its cracked up to be really manifests itself as you go along, so the film is even a bit frustrating. The film was nominated for Best Foreign Film, but I didn't love it enough to applaud that nomination. Its good, and the acting is fine, but its a brutal film. Know that going in and its definitely watchable.

Controversial melodrama from China has a middle-aged man falling for the abused wife of his "adopted" uncle while working in a dye plant on the outskirts of town. Directors Fengliang Yang and Yimou Zhang have fashioned a no-holds-barred human tragedy here, painted in rich, vivid colors, but the downbeat tone of the whole thing is a bit wearing, especially since the film runs too long. Plenty of florid atmospherics--and smoldering Gong Li as the wife--still hold interest. Banned in its own country for showing the Chinese people in a negative light, the movie went on to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film. ** from ****