Raise the Red Lantern

[snousle]

I often wonder how films get onto my Netflix queue. There's so much time between choosing and watching that it's hard to know.

Anyway: Raise the Red Lantern. Part of me says "oh joy another dreary depressing foreign film". But it was interesting for several reasons:

1) Old-style Chinese architecture. It's stunning to see it in actual use by elegantly dressed people. So beautiful. And silent - Chinese cities were incredibly calm places before the automobile. You can see it on the map - countless little alleys have names reflecting their (once) otherworldly quiet. I'd become a concubine just to live there.

The Chinese have been terrible about its preservation, by the way - for the past twenty years beautiful homes have been destroyed en masse by bulldozers in neighborhoods all over Beijing, and almost certainly everywhere else in the country, in order to build high-rise apartments. The Cultural Revolution really did wipe the slate clean when it comes to anything involving beauty and good taste. The destruction of pre 20th-century Chinese buildings is one of the world's great architectural wastes.

2) Interesting questions about what constitutes "poverty" and "deprivation". Beautifully dressed pampered women that have almost all their needs met, behaving like trailer trash because they're so desperately unhappy. This is surely influenced by Marxism (must show that the lives of the rich suck, too) but it is also a deep and tragic truth about the nature of wealth and privilege.

3) Incredible drama unfolding in complete silence. It's like a cross between John Waters and haiku. So little happens on the surface, and so much in the inner lives of the characters. Behind their skulls run endless film-loops of conflict, chess-like in their complexity and fatal in their consequences, while their outer lives are completely serene and poised. The viewers, too, are drawn into it, wondering how to read the countless little feints in their war, and perhaps making morally compromising speculations themselves.

Worth watching, if only for the pretty pictures and squeaky opera singing. Also recommended for Mandarin learners, as the dialog is very clear and articulate, and meshes suspiciously well with typical language course vocabularies.

Comments

[robearal.livejournal.com]

I often wonder how films get onto my Netflix queue. There's so much time between choosing and watching that it's hard to know.

I actually suggested to Netflix a year or so ago that they should add a notes/comments field so we can notate why we put a movie on the queue. I have several in my queue that I can't remember why they are there.

[jawnbc]

This is my favourite Zhang Yimou film (well, maybe Ju Dou is a bit better). Stunning, dramatic, subtle, and Gong Li. Shave off the last 5 years of her career and I don't think you'll find a better actress anywhere in the world.

[progbear.livejournal.com]

One of three Gong Li films I’ve seen, and easily her best. Empress Dowager was good, too, but she was barely in it (she was just a slip of a girl at the time, one of her first films ever) and I really need to see a full-screen version with legible subtitles one of these days. We shan’t speak of Dragon Chronicles (which gets extra demerits for dragging not one, but two of my favourite actresses from the Far East down with it; it co-stars the always fabulous Brigitte Lin).

[darkphuque.livejournal.com]

There aren't many foreign films that I really like, but Raise the Red Lantern is an all time favourite. Its a good example of how the Chinese wealthy lived before the revolution. This man must have had BIG bucks to afford the number of wives he maintained.

[bluebear2.livejournal.com]

It's sad that those nice buildings were torn down. Shanghai had some very unique architecture, a nice mix of Chinese and Art Deco. I heard that a few buildings were bought for one yuan, dismantled and rebuilt out of the country but not many.

[virdilak.livejournal.com]

I will check this out for sure. I had so little experience with foreign film before Netflix, it's really a wonderful service. I recommend Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles.