Red Sorghum (1988)
Directed by Zhang Yimou
An old leper who owned a remote sorghum winery dies. Jiu'er, the wife bought by the leper, and her lover, identified only as "my Grandpa" by the narrator, take over the winery and set up an idealized quasi-matriarchal community headed by Jiu'er. When the Japanese invaders subject the area to their rule and cut down the sorghum to make way for a road, the community rises up and resists as the sorghum grows anew.
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What critics compared Red Sorghum to
All this is a reminder that director Zhang, despite his start with thoughtful films such as “Red Sorghum” and “Raise the Red Lantern,” has devolved into a director known (witness his work on the opening and closing Beijing Olympic ceremonies) for spectacle more than anything else.
Now 66, veteran Chinese director Zhang Yimou is the man responsible for the 1991 masterpiece Raise the Red Lantern, which was preceded by the equally strong Red Sorghum (1987) and Ju Dou (1990) and followed by the profoundly moving film, To Live (1994).
A depressing thought considering 2017 is the 30th anniversary of Zhang’s debut film, Red Sorghum , which launched a magnificent run of emotionally opulent dramas including Ju Dou (the first Chinese film ever nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar) and Raise the Red Lantern .
No Golden Bear from the Berlin International Film Festival, a trophy he won for his 1987 directorial debut, Red Sorghum .
The director is Zhang Yimou, who last tried for a big action hit with this summer's "Hero," an opulent production starring Jet Li that some, myself included, saw as an apologia for Mao, surprising coming from Zhang, who'd stood for opposition to the regime in many of his earlier, brilliant pictures, such as "Red Sorghum" and "Raise the Red Lantern."
Not that Zhangs films ever worked that well when they were so obviously didactic (Red Sorghum and Not One Less excepted), but his emphasis now is almost wholly style over substance.
House of Flying Daggers (its title in Chinese the loaded "Ambush from Ten Directions"--essentially an ambush from everywhere) is at its essence an allegory for rape and the Chinese tradition of concubinage that Zhang has already explored to varying degrees in Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Shanghai Triad, and, of course, Red Sorghum, in which a young woman played by Gong Li (Ziyi's predecessor as Zhang's muse) is saved from rape by a young man with whom she later runs a winery.
Zhang, whose extraordinary list of films include "Ju Dou," "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Red Sorghum," mixes old-school inventiveness with cutting-edge special effects.