Robert J. Maxwell The film opens with the narrator's telling us that a father has just arranged the marriage of his daughter -- the egregiously beautiful Gong Li -- to a wine merchant who is rich but leprous. We see the bride-to-be carried in a bright red sedan by half a dozen men, followed by another small band playing Chinese music on tinny instruments. It's not a Hollywood movie. The procession doesn't move solemnly across the arid landscape as it might if, say, Gene Tierney or Susan Hayward were being carried. The men holding the sedan have heavy round wooden dowels across their shoulders and are ridiculing the young lady, bouncing her up and down, singing riotously about how she will soon catch leprosy. None of this causes Gong Li any pleasure, and she discretely tucks a pair of scissors into her blouse.After the wedding and a few odd interruptions, somebody apparently kills the leprous winery owner and Gong Li is now the owner. She begins with a clean slate. From now on, she won't be called "boss" but by her real name. The men will burn everything the leper touched and will sprinkle sorghum wine all around the plantation because the wine is known to cure all evil. At this point it was beginning to sound like an endorsement of communism but the dozen workers react with such unencumbered joy, screaming drunkenly and splashing the wine all over the place, that visions of "Viridiana" came to mind. What are they going to do next, somehow desecrate Confucius? Gong Li was apparently raped on her way to her wedding by the narrator's grandfather. After she takes command of the winery, she is kidnapped by bandits and apparently abused again before being ransomed. Meanwhile, the narrator's grandfather, penniless, has been wandering the countryside. He's not too smart, gets belligerent in a roadside beef house run by the bandits.Cut. Forty-eight minutes into the story, the video clip ends with no parts to follow. And so we leave grandpa, surrounded by murdering bandits who want to cut out his tongue for non-payment of a bill at a Chinese restaurant. He's reckless, lawless, and stupid but I hope he keeps his tongue in the future in this colorful story -- such as it is.

GyatsoLa This is the first film from Zhang Yimou and Gong Li, the launch pad for a series of superb films which introduced many in the West to modern Chinese cinema. It is the story of a young woman who marries a dying man and then inherits his winery (actually a distillery) famed for its Baiju (red sorghum spirit). The story is simple, with little dialogue, helped along by a near continuous voice-over of a storyteller. Normally this would be an intrusive device, but somehow it works for such a visual film which aspires to an almost epic scale. I can't help thinking Zhang may have been influenced by Terrence Malick films like Badlands and Days of Heaven. But it is certainly an original and striking debut, if not quite as good as his later masterpieces, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern. Of course, what all three of those films share is a near obsession with primary colours, but for visual effect and symbolism.Gong Li of course is charismatic and luminous, it can never have been a doubt from this film onward that she would be a star. But the real star here is the lush, erotic photography. It is a bit of a pity that the final third of the film loses its focus somewhat and becomes a more conventional melodrama. But that is forgivable for a film made in the circumstances. It still holds up very much as a film worth watching.

sc8031 Here is a solid film by Yimou Zhang, from the fifth generation of Chinese directors. Red Sorghum is told as a flashback, a narration by the main character's grandson. Gong Li plays an attractive lower-class Chinese woman who is sent, against her will, to be married to an old leper who runs a winery.The story takes place on the eve of the Japanese occupation before World War II and later features some ugly scenes from their invasion. There is an underlying motif regarding feminism (a lot of this generation of Chinese directors seemed to deal with this) and the inability of females to be even remotely empowered in this time and place. I enjoyed seeing the class boundaries and customs of late-Qing China, the occasionally goofy sense of humor, and the almost lawless, ruthless communities out in the desert.The film takes place in only a handful of locations, but features some gorgeous cinematography. The vibrant red colors (perhaps an allusion to Communist rule and foreshadowing bloodshed? It's hard to tell whether this film is for or against Communist China) are illustrated vividly by the sorghum wine and the long views of the sun setting across the Chinese desert. The pacing is slow but efficient and the story is a memorable one.It's quite indisputable (to me, at least!) that, although this was Yimou Zhang's first film, it's loads better than his later movies, "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers". Hopefully one day he'll catch up to where he started.

robzilla2001 Credit goes to Yimou for stripping this epic 2 novel series down to this spare and gorgeous little hour and a half. For all the recent fantastic forays into Chinese fantasy, this story (which is allegedly true) shown as it is, is as close to a fairy tale as it gets, at least until the very end. Every shot is a painting. For some reason this film is still near-impossible to find on DVD. I truly hope it is not being suppressed for anti-Japanese sentiment expressed in it. That would be a terrible shame. This film was released shortly before Tienanmenn (sp) and it has a boldness and frank humor rarely seen in Chinese film since.