July 21st 2012
菊豆 /Ju Dou (1990) by Zhang Yimou
Titling a film by the name of a central character usually means we'll be deeply invested in their psychology and livelihoods, constantly sitting on their shoulders or in their minds throughout the majority of the film. In Zhang Yimou's third feature film, Ju Dou is the third wife of fabric dyer Master Yang, bought as a possession in the 20th century rural China pretext of the story. Already some foreign audiences may be struck by such stark realities and horrified at such backwater conditions, and although such conditions are far from ideal, such underlying cultural traditions are to be cautiously examined by the camera, not polemically attacked.
Zhang Yimou does a fine job as director in illuminating without slipping too far into outright critic, although it's understandably hard to avoid with such content. The long ban imposed on the film in China notwithstanding, Ju Dou is powerful because it brings such a rural universe - abstract even to many Chinese city-dwellers and citizens themselves - closer to us as viewers to experience. The obsession with tradition is omnipresent and all important, especially when gossip among neighbors dictates the social dynamic and maintaining the family line means everything. Such information allows us to see why Master Yang bought multiple wives: his previous two couldn't produce a son for him, and he's counting on Ju Dou to deliver. Maybe he never learned that physical abuse and sexual mistreatment are not ideal circumstances for pregnancy, but he forked out the money for her and thus reigns unchallenged. The Yang household and its fabric dyeing trade only include one another member, the Master's nephew Tianqing. He's diligent and loyal, prompting many in the town to remark that he's "like a son to Yang", only to have the elder man express disappointment at the absence of a true heir and return to beating his wife at night.
Naturally Tianqing is both enchanted and disturbed by the newest member of the household, and as his aunt's audible suffering fills the Yang compound late at night, the young adopted male is seen scurrying through various chambers and diving through haystacks. In the repressed social settings of the rural universe, sexual tension lingers at every turn, and the beginnings of Zhang Yimou's signature cinematographic style clearly start developing in Ju Dou (and certainly build off of his 1987 debut film Red Sorghum). The technicolor properties of the camera allow for great color saturation, and given that Yang's trade the great pools of rich dye colors, drying racks, and wooden apparatus are both subtle and stunning. Not reluctant to rely on visual symbolism, Zhang Yimou does well to pair strong emotional outbursts with the appropriate scenery, effectively using his camera to reinforce passion, energy, and reckless abandon.
Although there are brief optimistic moments, Ju Dou remains a tragic story about the Master's third wife. Zhang Yimou paces his work well to illustrate that husbands come and go and son's are born and grow up, but her suffering and misfortune remain irrevocable. Fate has the final say in everything, and parallels and binary opposites appear frequently to emphasize how a familiar wooden platform or stone table can harbor both love and consummation, and grim suffering several years later. Tianqing both openly celebrates in his uncle's face when discovering Ju Dou's son is his own, then is plunged into depression when the child refuses to call him father. In turn Master Yang openly enjoys this ironic turn of events and basks in his sudden position of power, yet his days of manipulating such social circumstances are numbered when he is killed in his own household.
Try as they might, the lovers hide and reveal and hide their secret many times, until the one ugly truth gives way and becomes something else entirely. An example of this strange evolution is when Ju Dou and Tianqing are hesitant to unveil the past to their son, only to have this matter replaced by withholding the secret of a casual fling on the mountain side that happens to be spotted by a fellow villager. Their son grows old enough to wield a knife and frighten any sensitive onlooker, and his incessantly blank expression and muteness intensify his discomforting determination and the tragedy as a whole. Uncle and nephew - like father and son, despite never being of one bloodline - end up in a remarkably similar place, and whether Ju Dou lives or dies is less of a certainty than her continued suffering.
Not many rural livelihoods anywhere are easy and especially so in mainland China. Cultural traditions remain steadfast because village dynamics rarely come into contact with anything else. In the thematic and visual outburst of Ju Dou's final scene, the sound of singing children can be heard. For a central core of the story that dominates and mobilizes much of the events and tragedy and suffering, there is a noticeable absence of children on screen during the film's ninety-plus-minute length. Ju Dou and Tianqing's son remains our only dependable representative, and the absolute lack of depth that Zhang Yimou hands to us is no accident. Left with no words, but bearing witness to the results of his symbolic and physical destruction, we as viewers of Ju Dou can at best only guess what this says about the Chinese family at the turn of the 21st century, when rigid tradition and open modernization converge.