Ju Dou - 2003-02-19

Ju Dou - 2003-02-19 Director: Zhang Yimou Cast: Gong Li, 1990, Color, 93 minutes After the massive success of "Red Sorghum," Zhang Yimou brings to the screen the compact narrative and extraordinary cinematography of "Ju Dou," a powerful story of lust and punishment. The story revolves around a traditional dye workshop owner named "Jinshan," a wicked man who has a habit of torturing his wives to the brink of death. He also has a son named "Tianqing," who is kind-hearted and pure, in contrast to his father, and manages the workshop. One day, Jinshan takes a beautiful young woman named "Ju Dou" as his concubine and immediately begins to abuse her. Tianqing falls in love with his new stepmother. Ju Dou seduces him and bears a son whom everyone believes to be Jinshan's, but in reality, he is Tianqing's biological father. In the film's first ironic twist, we see that traditional bonds are stronger than biological ones. The quiet but fiery boy becomes close to Jinshan and takes a stand against his natural parents, thus becoming an unambiguous tool of social justice. As Zhang leads this captivating and visually stunning film toward its mesmerizing conclusion, he keeps the dark love story of the stepmother alive with sparks of gut-wrenching humor, fleeting moments of pleasure, and subtle sexual tension. However, above all these analyses, the film showcases the beautiful style of the unparalleled master of Chinese cinema in handling rhythm, sound, and color, giving this emotional story a grace and poetic precision rarely seen in filmmaking since Robert Bresson. Although the story is set in the 1920s, the film's anti-traditional theme and its devastating ending were particularly troubling for state censors after the Tiananmen events, leading to its ban, and the Chinese government futilely attempted to prevent "Ju Dou" from being nominated in the foreign film category at the Oscars.