Titillating tootsies and war (and booze - lots of it)
紅高梁 Hong Gaoliang [Red Sorghum], dir. 張藝謀 Zhang Yimou, starring 鞏俐 Gong Li & 姜文 Jiang Wen 1987
Well, it's a Zhang Yimou and Gong Li-iful night. This was Gong Li's first movie, and I remember my first introduction to the film itself being a mention by S of one of the early scenes in the film - a red slippered foot of a bride, too much for not one but two men to resist holding and squeezing.
I was very much struck by how much 五魁 [Wu Kui/The Wooden Man's Bride] (1993) owed to this film - the resemblance in many plot points, setting, even filming to some degree was quite striking. I hadn't seen Red Sorghum until tonight, but I've watched Wu Kui a number of times. The two films have very different bents to them, though, so while the similarities are more than superficial and I'm sure Wu Kui owes much to Red Sorghum, it's not just a poor man's rehashing.
In any case, I think the movie can safely be divided into two parts: pre-Japanese invasion and post-Japanese invasion. The whole of the movie is narrated by the grandson of Gong Li & Jiang Wen's characters (so he calls them 我奶奶 and 我爺爺 - my paternal grandmother & paternal grandfather). The setting is 1930s Shandong - a pretty barren landscape, all told, punctuated by a big field of sorghum. Outside of this, everything's pretty sparse and isolated Gong Li plays a girl who is bartered off to a winery-owning leper in exchange for a donkey (I think - she certainly goes to the leper to be married off, I'm not sure how the donkey fits in); while on her way to the wedding, carried along in a red litter, the party of girl-in-litter and lots of men get ambushed by
A guy with a bag over his head.
No, really.
Gong Li proves herself to be something of a spitfire, laughing at the guy after he reaches down and fondles her slipper.
Things turn out all right and the brawny litter carriers beat the crap out of Mr. Bag. Gong Li and Jiang Wen's characters exchange meaningful looks, and we get tootsie squeeze number two.
The leper 'mysteriously' dies after a short while of connubial non-bliss, and Gong Li takes over the winery. This part of the film is - as someone described it - 'lusty.' There's a certain joie de vivre about the peasant wine making life - I quite rather enjoyed it, though I could practically feel the testosterone radiating through my computer screen.
They discover that pissing in the liquor makes it taste better (who knew?). Things are bawdy, pretty jovial over all, lots of imbibing and other stuff. Then the Japanese show up.
Well, invade.
The depiction is of incredibly brutal men - now, the first half of the movie has some rather violent scenes (Gong Li's character is raped, after all, 'claimed' as someone's woman), but she's not exactly adverse to it. Unlike the skinny old butcher who is forced to skin his boss like a cow - at least, forced to start at bayonet point.
I thought it was an incredibly powerful scene, with the boss - who is in fact Mr. Bag from one of the early scenes - hung up from a pole with his arms being twisted backwards, screaming ”狗！日本的狗！翻臉不認人！狗！" [Dog! Japanese dog! Turning against a friend! Dog!] and the old butcher obviously not wanting to do it ... indeed, after plunging the butchering knife into his boss and killing him, he turns to the Japanese and screams “我操你日本祖宗！" [I'll make trouble for your Japanese ancestors!'] - of course getting mowed down by machine gun fire. The camera doesn't show this, but his younger assistant staggering in horror having to witness this.
As if attempting to skin one person wasn't enough, they have another person they want to skin, so they drag the poor young assistant - at this point wailing and saying "I can't! I can't! Sir, I don't dare do it!' to skin the next victim, who is beloved 羅漢大哥 Big Brother Luohan (Ten Rujun) - who ran off some time previous, apparently jealous of Jiang Wen's character?
Both men killed for planning and uprising, put through brutal torture, then other people are mentally tortured to - and for what? Making a point, an incredibly brutal, brutal point. There's a line between executing someone, and making a helpless butcher do the slow and torturous work of treating men like cattle.
So the remaining vinyarders make the resolve to not be treated like cattle any longer. With fires burning in the little compound, they sing their song to the 鬼神 of winemaking and vow to give 'em hell or die trying.
Of course, things end badly. Gong Li is gunned down in cold blood, just about everyone (other than the narrators father and his father, 'My grandfather,' dies). And we are left with the rather powerful and creepy scene at the end of an eclipse, where everything is turned red. A creepy effect indeed.
Music for the film was fabulous. Peasant songs, this very traditional and ... violent-sounding drum beat ... really added something to the film.
I also wonder how this movie was received in Japan (or was it at all?). The Japanese are portrayed in an entirely unflattering light and frankly, I have a hard time blaming Chinese film makers for really socking it to them, especially in light of the Japanese governmental method of 'deny! deny! deny!'.
Well, while the Japanese invaders are presented as wholly brutal people in this film, it's hard not to blame the young butcher - sympathetic though he is - what happened to 'there are some things I hate worse than death and some things I value more than life'? But it's the overwhelming sense of brutality from that Japanese that sticks with me - after viewing the second half, I barely remembered the rather convivial, if brutal in its own way, life 'before.'
Gong Li was fabulous in this film - quite an impressive debut. I had a long chat with my danbanke laoshi today about Gong Li & her less-than-stellar choices for English language films. 'I don't get it,' I said, 'She's fabulous. So why does she pick such awful projects?' Hannibal Rising? Miami Vice?! My danbanke laoshi posited that maybe it's because she's been famous since she debuted - unlike Maggie Cheung, who burst to prominence after years of TV and not-great-movie roles. You'd think the opposite would be true ....
Anyways, it wasn't handled as subtly as I think Huozhe was - of course, Red Sorghum is earlier - but it's an interesting depiction of the peasant life in a rural area of a northern province. The language was a bit out of the norm for me, but I still followed along without much trouble - it's very rough, coarse language, which of course we don't actually study in school!
There's also a ton of symbolism (colors, obviously - numbers, too, among other things) that I'm not equipped to discuss. Would love to read an academic discussion of those sorts of issues from someone who has studied those cultural aspects more than I have.