Final Rating: 4/5
In the 1980s, the world would follow the birth of a new generation of Asian filmmakers. Those who graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982 are the fifth generation of Chinese cinema. Hence, it is the first film group post-Chinese Cultural Revolution, shaping the identity for a national cinema production in the country.
The two most famous names of the fifth generation are the ones who achieved international success with their work. Chen Kaige is the first Chinese filmmaker to win the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or with his Farewell, My Concubine in 1993. Additionally, Zhang Yimou is the first Chinese director to win the Berlinale Golden Bear with his debut Red Sorghum in 1988. In 1992, he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival with The Story of Qiu Jiu.
In his third feature, 1990’s Ju Dou, Yimou earned China’s first foreign film nomination at the Academy Awards. Similar to his internationally acclaimed films, Ju Dou stars Gong Li, the face of the Chinese Fifth Generation. Hence, the director, who reached an impressive level of acclaim at that point, delivers a provocative erotic drama. In the story, set in a Chinese village in the 1920s, a fabric dyer, Yang Jinshan (Li Wei), who is famous in the community for his violence, infamously beat his two past wives.
Alongside him, his adoptive nephew, Yang Tianqing (Li Baotian), works with the fabric and takes care of the animals on the farm. Suddenly, Jinshan acquires a new wife, Ju Dou (Gong Li), a young and beautiful woman whom he wishes to have a son. Impromptu, Tianqing becomes a comfort for Ju Dou, who finds the love absent in her marriage in her affair with her husband’s nephew.
The Chinese master, Zhang Yimou, designs a melodrama set in a pre-Cultural Revolution China. Based on Liu Heng’s novel ‘Fuxi Fuxi‘, the Fifth Generation icon co-directs his erotic drama with Yang Fengliang. The duo invests in an emotionally charged picture, where violence is the central element to the character’s motivation. For Jinshan, it is the negotiation point to convince his new wife to have a son. On Ju Dou’s side, the constant beatings and imprisonment justify an affair with his nephew, who kindly helps his new aunt with her necessities in the first panorama, but these needs scale to the carnal ones.
Consequently, the film features a novelistic structure, going back and forth between the character’s actions and the reactions to those acts. In this sense, it creates a moral clash, which features the paternal necessity of the violent husband, and the unfaithful wife who gets impregnated by his nephew. Responding to the melodramatic conventions, the script escalates the complexity of the consequences in each of their choices, resulting in a massive bomb that threatens to explode.
Therefore, the film thrives on the majestic performance of Gong Li, who delivers another masterful work in Ju Dou, alongside notable appearances in Miami Vice and 2046. The so-called face of that Chinese filmmaking generation interprets a woman, who is a trade, a product in the patriarchal structure, but exceeds the system, searching for pleasure in the man next door.
Yet, Li achieves different tones, ranging from a vulnerable, abused woman to a sexually confident lady throughout her increased freedom as her husband’s health declines. The actor is essential to Yimou’s vision of the provocative eroticism in the film, exuding bodily involvement and chemistry, but never being portrayed fully nude. The director’s eroticism works through his suggestive camera work, teasing a highly sexual relationship that never reaches it graphically.
In the end, Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou is a highly crafted erotic drama that combines the melodrama characteristic of the Chinese fifth generation. Also, the director extracts marvelous work from Gong Li, the face of that cinematic movement.
Thank you to Film Movement Classics for the screener.
