Raise the Red Lantern

Run the subtractive test and the film resists it more than most. The four seasons are the plot: arrival, rivalry, catastrophe, replacement. Each ritual is set up and then turned. The lantern call becomes Songlian’s ambition, then her fraud, then the black covers that seal her house. The foot massage, its small hammers and bells heard across the courtyard, is first a pleasure, then a token of standing, then a sound the others are made to hear. Yan’er’s hidden lanterns pay off in the snow; Meishan’s opera on the roof pays off in the room on the roof. What gives: the autumn has more scheming than the design needs, the effigy, the doctor and the haircut being three moves of one kind, and the repeated lantern call is sometimes only repetition.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a system of favour dispensed by an absent power turns those it oppresses into its instruments, and each woman polices the others for the right to be chosen next. Songlian enters contemptuous of the household and becomes, within a year, its most skilful player, betraying Yan’er and then Meishan; her madness is the price of knowing it. The rule is not the master but the household: its ritual, its architecture and the old servants who enforce it. The lanterns make favour visible to every courtyard at once, so the system governs by being seen. Held below the top by the charge, argued since the early 1990s, that the rituals are invented for the film and offered as custom, and by an allegory whose terms, once grasped, are fixed.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The register is cold and composed, and elevation comes as beauty and as dread, often at once. The lanterns carried in procession and hung at dusk down the length of a courtyard; Meishan singing opera alone on the snowy roof; the hammering bells heard from a dark house that was not chosen; Yan’er’s lanterns burning in the snow; the black covers drawn over Songlian’s lanterns, one by one; Meishan taken across the roof at dawn to the locked room, and Songlian’s scream seen from a distance in the grey; the last summer, Songlian in her student clothes walking the courtyards. The frequency is high, but the range is narrow: the film rises in one key, ceremonial terror, and a beauty so even that it sometimes flattens the peaks.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The myth is built, not cited. The house is a closed cosmos with its own seasons, law and god: the master is heard, obeyed and almost never seen, an absent deity whose favour is signalled by fire. The locked room on the roof, where earlier wives died, is Bluebeard’s chamber, and the film makes it load-bearing: Songlian opens it, and then sees it used. The cycle closes as myth closes, the year ending where it began with a new bride arriving, and Songlian taking the place of the madwoman the house keeps. The particular stays particular: bean curd, a gramophone, a doctor’s bag, a school uniform. Held at the bar because the archetypes, harem, walled garden and sacrificial wife, are old, and the film arranges them more than it deepens them.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The inheritance is the Fifth Generation’s own: Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984), and Zhang’s Red Sorghum (1987) and Ju Dou (1990), the last of which already has Gong Li as a young wife in a tyrant’s house, colour as passion and an enclosed space as a social order. Behind it stand the family melodrama of Chinese cinema, Xie Jin above all, and Su Tong’s novella. The turns are real: the exterior almost removed, the master faceless, a strict frontal symmetry in place of Ju Dou’s tactile closeness, an invented ritual in place of the novella’s plain domestic intrigue. So was the stake: made in the years after 1989, with foreign money, after Ju Dou had been restricted at home. But the wager was placed on Zhang’s own proven path, the formula that had already won abroad.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The frontal, symmetrical framing down the courtyards makes the house a grid in which each wife has a fixed place, and the viewer sees, as the household does, who is lit and who is dark. The master, kept to long shot and the edge of the frame, makes power impersonal: no face to hate, only a rule. The camera’s confinement to the compound makes the walls the world. The seasonal parts make the plot a cycle rather than a story, so the ending is not a resolution but a return. With close-ups of the master and the town outside, it would be a melodrama about a bad husband. Held from the top because the grid sometimes holds the women at a distance the drama wants closed, Songlian’s collapse above all.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Thirty-five years of a large literature, in English and Chinese, have not settled the film. Rey Chow’s Primitive Passions (1995) read Zhang’s films of this period as a self-exoticising ethnography for the West; others answered with national allegory, the house as the state after 1989, with feminist readings of complicity, and studies of the architecture and the score. The questions stay open: whether the film critiques the gaze it courts, whether Songlian’s madness indicts or aestheticises, whether the allegory is political or merely available. The form yields on return, in the rhymes of the lanterns, the roof and the seasons. Held at the figure because much of the writing argues about the film’s position, who it was made for, more than it finds new meaning in the film.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force: the film brought the Fifth Generation’s use of colour and space to its most rigorous and abstract form, and showed that ritual and architecture alone could carry a political argument. It culminates a movement; it did not begin one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Ju Dou and Farewell My Concubine (1993) it made mainland Chinese cinema a fixture of the festival and art-house circuit for a decade; and its look, saturated colour, symmetrical courts, women under ritual, became a template, and a charge, for the Chinese period film after it, Zhang’s own Hero (2002) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) among them. It redirected the reception of a national cinema more than it reorganised what film could do.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole, in the one cut as released, and any restoration is repair. The presence across thirty-five years is continuous: in world-cinema teaching and survey courses, in repertory programmes and on home video, and in the canon lists of Chinese cinema. It is wide in cinema but not far beyond it. The surface ages little: a period film in an invented ritual does not date as a contemporary surface does, though its saturated colour now reads as a style of its own festival moment as well as of the 1920s. Thirty-five years demonstrate survival, and they are not centuries; the axis stands where that span of evidence puts it, clear of the bar.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Zhao Fei’s photography turns a Shanxi merchant compound into a set of stages and the red of the lanterns into the film’s light source and its drama. The design keeps each wife’s house in its own palette until the black covers. Zhao Jiping’s score of Peking-opera percussion and voice is both music and the sound of the house’s law, and the foot-hammers are a detail of sound that becomes a weapon. Gong Li moves Songlian from contempt through cunning to vacancy with little dialogue; He Saifei’s Meishan is sardonic and defiant. The costs: some supporting performances are broad, the Second Mistress’s smiling malice legible at once; the autumn slackens; and the frame’s distance sometimes leaves Songlian’s madness a composition rather than a state.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Songlian’s first night, the lanterns lit and her feet massaged, a pleasure; and Meishan’s death in the room on the roof. One law governs both: what the house gives is the house’s to take, and favour and death are dispensed by the same ritual and seen by the same courtyards. The haircut that cuts an ear, the faked pregnancy, the snow that kills Yan’er, the gramophone that plays Meishan’s voice after her death all obey it. The film never breaks its tone, ceremonial and cold from the first summer to the last. But the range is narrow: one compound, one class, one register, almost no comedy beyond Meishan’s mockery. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure is held for it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Several orders are held, and the household’s ritual binds them. The family, as a hierarchy of wives, children and servants; gender, as an economy of favour; class, in Yan’er, who wants to be a mistress and dies for burnt lanterns; the economy, in Songlian’s sale into concubinage after her father’s death and in the household’s wealth; ritual and something like the sacred, in the ancestral rules and the locked room; consciousness, in Songlian, whose interior the film reaches mostly by her face. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: history is absent by design, the 1920s, the warlords and the republic kept outside the walls; the natural order appears only as seasons and snow; the master and the men have no interior; and the state is present by allegory only, available rather than achieved.

Score: 7.6 / 10