Red Sorghum
If you drink our wine, you won't kowtow to the emperor
Directed by Zhang Yimou
China, 1988
Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987) marks his directorial debut. What starts out as a low-budget, seemingly simple folk tale, evolves into something else: a vivid spectacle of sound and colour. In a way, this mirrors Zhang’s career as by the turn of the millennium he would helm lavish historical blockbusters – Hero, House of the Flying Daggers – and direct the opening ceremonies of both the Beijing Summer and Winter Olympics.
The film opens in the barren, rocky landscape of Northeast China. A sedan chair, draped in red fabric, is being carried by shirtless men, followed by musicians playing a discordant tune. The men sing:
Look closely… pitted pockmarks
A squashed nose and piggy, piggy eyes
A chicken neck, an ugly face
A head crawling with lots and lots of lice
A wedding song, apparently. But the cruel words contrast sharply with the appearance of the young bride in the chair, Jiu’er (played by Gong Li, in her first lead role). The look on her face speaks of passion and rebellion. Daughter of a peasant, Jiu'er has been sold into marriage by her father in exchange for a mule. Her husband-to-be is the elderly, leprous owner of a distillery that turns red sorghum into wine.
This is a story relayed by an unseen narrator – Jiu’er’s grandson – who recounts events passed down through generations. However, his grandfather is not the distillery owner – Jiu’er fends him off with a pair of scissors. Instead, we assume Grandpa is one of the sedan-bearers, the nameless man who rescues her when bandits attack in the sorghum fields. In a striking moment, he tramples the six-foot-high sorghum stalks to create a flattened, circular bed…
Jiu’er’s husband? Well, he dies in mysterious circumstances, leaving her a widow in charge of the distillery, which has been pretty much run into the ground. With the workers on the point of abandoning her, Jiu’er persuades them to stay by offering them a share of her profits.
Wine production flourishes and in the raucous, Bacchanalian celebration that follows the culmination of their work, the mis-en-scene is awash with a riot of reds as wine bowls are smashed and drink is spilled. And then, as reality blurs into folklore, a brash and drunken Grandpa urinates in the finished wine, miraculously enhancing its quality.
The wine is flowing and Jiu’er now has a son, but hopes of a happy ending are dashed as the playful, comedic tone takes jarring turn. The red of the wine gives way to the red of blood as Japanese troops arrive – this is the era of the Second Sino-Japanese war. The sorghum fields are flattened again, but this time by the peasants to build a road and in a harrowing sequence, two rebels are flayed alive, ‘pour encourager les autres’.
Red Sorghum leaves us with a climactic ending: the workers who had perhaps killed off the last vestige of Chinese feudalism – in the form of the distillery owner – are led by Jiu’er and Grandpa in a collective act of resistance against the Japanese army. Jiu’er drops to the ground in a hail of gunfire as the peasants use their primitive tools against the mechanised military might of Japan. There are just two survivors, Grandpa and his son (the father of the narrator). They stand together mud-caked, in the field of swaying sorghum, a moment of stillness and horror, watching as a solar eclipse makes the whole landscape bleed, crimson red.
Red – the colour of birth and death, love and war – dominates what is a visceral experience. Zhang Yimou’s cinematography becomes increasingly expressionistic as the story unfolds, but through it all Gong Li’s character is framed in the centre, stoic and yet a highly charged presence. Red Sorghum is a story told in flashback, a memory, although the narrator was not there. How much can we trust his account?
Zhang Yimou: After seeing it, many people said that it preserved folk customs very well. What folk customs? I made it all up.
Bit mad… a very red film - N
Reids’ Results (out of 100)
C - 69
T - 76
N - 65
S - 74
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Coming next… Tokyo Sonata(2008)
