Raise the Red Lantern review – Gong Li gives a decade-defining performance in an addictively ruthless masterpiece

Gong simmers with rage, loneliness and humiliation as the ‘fourth mistress’ navigating the intimate political savagery of her husband’s compound in Zhang Yimou’s 1991 drama

Revisiting Zhang Yimou’s grippingly addictive psychological drama from 1991, adapted from a novella by Su Tong, is a reminder of what a great impact this movie made on western audiences. They responded to its arguably westernised tale of a young woman’s desperate loneliness in a sinister environment that resembles something by Charlotte Brontë or Daphne du Maurier. Like Jung Chang’s memoir Wild Swans from the same year, Raise the Red Lantern opened our eyes to 20th-century China’s secret theatre of cruelty and misogyny; elaborate domestic rituals of submission and servitude coexisted with infinitely subtle plotting, resentful manoeuvring and covert denunciation, habits of thought that could so easily be absorbed into Maoism.

Gong Li gives one of the great performances of the 1990s as Songlian, a beautiful, intelligent young woman in 1920s China who is forced to abandon her university studies after just six months because her father has died and there is no longer money for the fees. In the unforgettable opening scene, which unfolds with a single unbroken shot of Gong’s pale face, incandescent with shock and pain, Songlian announces to her callous stepmother (who remains off camera) that she is ready to accept marriage – and then her eyes brim with tears. Her suppressed rage, loneliness and humiliation are to simmer below the surface for the rest of the film.

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