“Uncle bought another wife. Her name is Ju Dou. Pretty looking… expensive.” So begins our first introduction to Gong Li’s titular character, and the film’s ethos is introduced. Depending on your outlook, Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou is either a cynical, cautionary tale about the immutable vengeance of the gods, or it is a tragic story of love and class solidarity. Either way, Zhang’s third feature, which is now 35 years old, captivates anew in 4K.
Ju Dou’s Inherent Contradictions Are Sometimes A Gift Of Moral Reckoning

The first Chinese film to garner an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, Ju Dou almost plays like a film noir, except it’s shot in glorious color film by Gu Changwei and Lun Yang. Taking place in a “small village somewhere in China in the 1920s,” Ju Dou is exceptionally bleak in spite of its vibrant palette. A beautiful, young, newly purchased wife by the much older Yang Jinshan (Li Wei), the patriarch of a family in desperate hope for a male heir, Ju Dou’s arrival signals a massive shift in the life of a small dye mill. Jinshan operates his business mostly off the back of his adopted nephew, Tianqing (Li Baotian), whom he treats with abject cruelty. He also treats his new wife even harsher, tying her up and raping her repeatedly. An insinuation is made that Jinshan’s past two wives have died by his abuse. Perhaps because of their mutual suffering, Tianqing and Ju Dou are smitten almost immediately upon their first meeting, and a dangerous lust is born. Zhang would go on after this to craft some of China’s most memorable Wuxia, a Chinese historical fantasy genre centering martial artists (including Hero, House of Flying Daggers, the Matt Damon vehicle The Great Wall), as well as huge prestige dramas (Raise the Red Lantern, To Live). Ju Dou’s captivating intimacy is nonetheless overshadowed by most of those works. Not yet the rounded dramatist he would become, Zhang’s film is morally confusing.

Liu Heng’s script, based on his own novel Fuxi, Fuxi, begins by engendering us to this star-crossed couple via the evil Jinshan, who is a caricature of patriarchy. But the film strays from its easy depiction of class conflict through the introduction of Tianqing and Ju Dou’s demonic-like love child, Tianbai (played by Zhang Yi and Ji-an Zheng at various ages). Tianbai is an immediate threat to the couple’s potential happiness and is sociopathic even as an infant. At first, the love shared between Ju Dou and Tianqing seems dubious. Ju Dou may be using Tianqing as a way to get rid of her abusive husband, and Tianqing may be using Ju Dou as a means of forcing his own potential inheritance. But as the film goes on, their love is both more believable and more desperate, their sexual unions less like sensual love-making than violent physical clashes. And when Tianbai is born, the two are forced to conceal their relationship, even more so than when there was no child in the picture. One day, Jinshan is badly injured in an accident that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down, and, in the couple’s bitterness and understandable hatred towards him, they resort to long bouts of mockery. Zhang, shifting perspectives between the three corners of his triangle, makes us feel for both abuser and abused, while frequently making us reconsider who is what. The murkiness of Zhang and Li’s moral direction is intriguing, if not all that believable as purposeful, and it stands in stark contrast to the sharp binaries of the film’s starring element: its color. Ju Dou is first introduced in a gloriously deep red dress, but is seen in a faded pink shortly after Jinshan first raped her. Deep, moody blues are cast over the mill’s central areas as Tianqing and Ju Dou slowly encircle one another before they first consummate their love. Which, when they do, is shot against the backdrop of cascading threads in red dye — either a visual metaphor for deepening lust or else a foreshadowing for everyone’s inevitable collapse. The start of the couple’s coupling is an act of voyeurism. Tianqing has carved a small hole from the inside of the barn so that he can watch as Ju Dou bathes. The young woman is quick to catch on to being watched, and after a series of Jinshan’s beatings, she decides to reveal herself in spite of, or perhaps because of the knowledge of Tianqing’s covert eyes. “Look at what’s being done to me,” she seems to be say. Ju Dou, despite much of its uneven surface, is ultimately a story about the levers of justice and how they cannot be pulled until pain is recognized for what it is. Without that recognition, it risks permeating even the deepest of color dyes. Ju Dou is being re-released in theaters on October 3.

Release Date

September 22, 1990

Runtime

95 Minutes

Director

Zhang Yimou

Writers

Liu Heng