User Reviews

I am a lover of history, and historical films, too, but Ju Dou has a lot of faults. Most of all this movie fails in story telling, by using weak characters and weak plot development. The only areas in which this film deserves the 10, given by many reviewers, in in cinematography, setting, and costume. One reviewer compared this movie to a Greek tragedy, but I don't know of any Greek tragedies that have endings as bad as this one. The only characters that seem to develop in a normal way are the uncle, Jin-shan, and his wife, Jo Dou. The attention that was paid to this awful relationship overshadowed the lack of detail paid to the characters in the rest of the movie.

Jo Dou is the only character with a healthy motivation, and her fall is the "T" in the tragedy here. "Uncle" is only motivated by his drive to have an heir. His ancestor-worship calls attention to this, and thus the movie can be taken as religious criticism.

Nephew Tian-qing's character was extremely weak, and only flourished in a single act of challenging his uncle. This, coupled with his physical unattractiveness caused the move to be difficult to watch, in spite of the color themes. I don't really understand much about Chinese color symbology, but this is a plus. In one scene, a customer comes to order cloth, 15 yellow (tradition) and 3 red (luck, fire, and energy). There is a lot more yellow than red. This is the main point I think the director is trying to make.

Tian-qing's weak character is probably the main thing that made this move hard for me to watch. Second to that is the treatment of the autistic son, Tian-bai. One gets the idea from watching this that in society, and Chinese society especially, some people feel that their children are dropped from trees, and that the only way a child can develop a personality is from encountering other children and playing with them. "Uncle" finally gets a retrieve, when he develops a notion of parenting. This calls attention, perhaps, to the "dirty little secret" not being confronted in our society about autism - that it really has a lot to do with neglecting children. The details of Tian-bai's upbringing that lead to his murderous behavior are almost entirely eliminated from the story.

At this point the movie goes upside down, the Uncle's develops moral superiority as well as ownership of the child, and for Tian-qing and Ju Dou, everything is downhill from there. I might revise my opinion of this if there was a list of "top-ten downer movies of all time".

In ten or twenty years, Zhang Yimou will be regarded as one of the greatest foreign directors. I think his film Raise the Red Lantern is one of the greatest films ever made, easily. Ju Dou is just one step below it.

Its positive points are too numerous to mention in any great detail. Just let me warn you that, like almost every movie ever put on video, this film's video/DVD box lies horrendously about what you're about to experience. Ju Dou is not a passionate story of forbidden love. It is not Romeo and Juliette, and you're not going to desire to watch it every Valentine's Day. It is not erotic, but brutal. It is an utterly complex film which is consistently challenging.

SPOILERS AHEAD

The film starts off pretty conventionally with a mean old man purchasing a young wife in the hopes of producing a son with her. He spends several days beating her into submission. During this period, the old man's nephew, who is treated horribly by his uncle, begins to obsess over his new aunt's beauty. The aunt notices his obsession, and welcomes him as a sort of savior from the cruelty of her husband. We expect a plot where these two find a way to escape their common nemesis, or maybe even kill him. He seems like any other villain to us. The nephew and his aunt produce a child, which is passed off as the old man's. Soon after this, the old man is in an accident and is paralyzed below the waste.

Now the young couple has their common tormentor at their mercy, and they use that to their full advantage with horrifying physical and mental torture. They almost instantly tell him that his son is actually the son of his nephew. They build him a tub with wheels (the Chinese version of a wheelchair), and when he misbehaves, they suspend him from the ceiling. This behavior confuses us deeply. What would we do in a similar situation? Maybe the same thing. But when we see it done, we cannot help but be horrified. Cruelty has begotten cruelty, and everything is spinning out of control.

Meanwhile, the young child ages. He has not talked yet, and silently and painfully watches as his mother and cousin cavort, not hiding their lust in the least (it does turn from passion to lust very quickly). The child does not feel that these two have any feelings for him, so he connects to the old man, whom he believes is his father. In fact, his first word comes when the old man is plotting to murder him: "Daddy," spoken to the old man. The old man is ecstatic, not so much because his "son" has just spoken as because he knows the implications of the child knowing him as his father instead of his cousin.

I won't go any further, but this film becomes more painful by the second.

My complaints need to be voiced, too. They are few, but key. First, I think that the first half hour or so should have been fleshed out a bit. The relationships and even the characters could have stood to be more developed earlier on. I do not like how Yimou uses slow motion in this film. It does not feel right. My final complaint is with the very end of the film. It is a bit of a cop out, to end the story by burning the house down. I think the only problem in Raise the Red Lantern was also the very end, where Gong Li's character just goes insane. I think it is better to know that the character exists and will have to live with his/her mistakes forever. That is much more powerful, and a better ending. Anyhow, this film is a 9/10.

Ju Dou is as sumptuously cinematic as it is woefully fatalistic. The film is a tragedy, focusing on the characters of Ju Dou (Gong Li), a beautiful young woman who has been sold as a wife to Yang Jinshan (Li Wei), an old cloth dyer.

Ju Dou is a superbly torrid melodrama with similarities to The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946); the colours have a livid force and the storytelling holds you completely in its grip. The film was banned for a few years in China, but the ban has since been lifted. It was also the first Chinese film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1990.

This is a very brief review of "Red Sorghum" (1987), "Ju Dou" (1990), "Raise the Red Lantern" (1991), "The Story of Qiu Ju" (1992) and "To Live" (1994), five films by Zhang Yimou. Each film stars actress Gong Li, each works as a companion-piece to the other, and each deals almost exclusively with the oppression of women within early 20th century China.

Zhang's debut, "Red Sorghum" stars Gong Li as Young Nine, a peasant who is sold to a wealthy leper. Things only get worse for Nine, who must fend off a series of rapists, mean men and the Japanese Army itself, all the while running a successful winery. Throughout the film, Zhang uses boxes, deep reds and tight squares to amplify Nine's sexist surroundings. Indeed, the film opens with Nine literally forced into a box, a social reality which she spends the film attempting to break free of or even transform. For Zhang, China wasn't "disrupted" by the Japanese invasion, it was hell long before. Like most of Zhang's films during this period, "Sorghum" sketches the cultural and socioeconomic conditions which spurred China, with hopeful arms, toward Maoism.

Zhang's next film, "Ju Dou", covers similar material. Here Gong Li plays Ju Dou, a woman sold to a violent oaf ("When I buy an animal I treat it as I wish!") who owns a fabric dying establishment. After her husband is crippled, Ju Dou forges a relationship with Yang Jinshan, a relative. When Ju Dou and Jinshan have a child together, the kid grows up into a mean brute. Like "Sorghum", "Ju Duo" is a tragedy obsessed with rich reds, boxes and patriarchal violence. Whilst its plot superficially echoes Zhang's own adulterous, then-scandalous affair with Gong Li, Zhang seems more interested in the way Ju Dou and Jinshan hide their illicit affair from other villagers. For Zhang, the duo's tacit submission to social mores merely validates the notion that their love is scandalous and so merely validates the symbolic power of the crippled patriarch, a power which Ju Dou's son must – as per his mother's very own actions – thereby respect and avenge.

The arbitrary nature of power, and how this power is always "symbolic" and always unconsciously maintained (via ritual, personal belief and shared delusions), is itself the obsession of Zhang's "Raise the Red Lantern". Here Gong Li again plays a woman sold to a wealthy man. This man has several other wives, all of whom begin to violently fight one another in an attempt to win the patriarch's adoration. "Is it the fate of women to become concubines?" a character asks, pointing to the film's deft critique of feudal relations. Zhang's first masterpiece, "Lantern" is again obsessed with reds, boxes and sequestered women, though here Zhang replaces the voluptuous colours, camera work and widescreen Cinemascopes of his previous films with something more restrained. Because of this, Zhang's conveying of claustrophobia and oppression, of mind and spirit pushed to madness, feels all the more powerful.

Next came Zhang's "The Story of Qiu Ju". A near masterpiece, it stars Gong Li as Qui Ju, a peasant farmer who embarks on a quest to avenge her husband, who's had his crotch kicked in by a village leader. More emasculated by this attack than her own husband, Qui Ju's quest takes her all across China, dealing with a Chinese bureaucracy which seems quite helpful, polite and even rational. And yet still this bureaucracy does not please Qiu Ju. It thinks in terms of commodities, monetary recompense and punishment, whilst Qiu Ju (like Zhang Yimou himself, whose previous films were banned, without explanation, by Chinese authorities) seems more interested in acquiring a "shuafa", a simple explanation and apology. By the film's end, both the "primitive justice" of rural China and the "civilized justice" of modern China are simultaneously mocked, praised and shown to be thoroughly incompatible. Zhang's first "neo-realist" film, "Qiu Ju" was shot with hidden cameras, amateur actors, and so is filled with subtle observations, cruel ironies and beautiful sketches of peasant life.

One of Zhang's finest films, "To Live" followed. It stars Gong Li as Jiazhen, the wife of a wealthy man (Ge You) who is addicted to gambling. When this gambling results in the family losing its mansions, riches and status, Jiazhen and her husband are forced onto the streets. Ironically, this set-back saves the family; the Cultural Revolution arrives, and with China's shift to nascent communism, all wealthy land owners are demonised, attacked and killed.

Unlike most films which tackle life under Mao's Great Leap Forward, "To Live" carefully juggles the good and bad of what was essentially a nation shirking off feudalism, monarchs, uniting and then trying, clumsily, to cook up some form of egalitarian society. This quest results in all manners of contradictions and socio-political paradoxes: community, solidarity and a simple life save our heroes, but their world is one of paranoia, danger, and in which everyone and everything is accused of being "reactionary". The film ends with Jiazhen's daughter dying, a death which is the result of both unchecked consumption (a doctor dies gobbling food) and communist "reorganisation" (all competent doctors have been killed/jailed for being counter-revolutionary). This jab at communism got the film banned in China (further highlighting the insecurity of the regime). Ironically, Maoism saw massive positive health care reformations, and saw an improvement in mortality rates which at times surpassed even then contemporary Britain and parts of America (life expectancy doubled from 32 years in the 1940s to 65 years in the 1970s). But such things don't concern Zhang. Spanning decades, "To Live" is mostly a broad account of life, love, loss and growth (the personal and political), all unfolding upon a canvas that is devastatingly cruel. Significantly, the film's title is both adjectival and a command; this is "what life is", but one must nevertheless "always push on". Gong Li and Ge You in particular are excellent.

7.9/10 - See "Yellow Earth" (1984).

Any Zhang Yimou movie is great, and this one is particularly good. It's not "Raise The Red Lantern," mind, but very good, and obviously a lot of the movie was done as a sort of precursor to Raise The Red Lantern, which also features the awesomely sexy Gong Li.

The basic plot line involves a miserly old man, Jinshan, and his adopted nephew, Tianqing. Jinshan purchases a new wife, Ju Dou, played, of course, by Gong Li. It turns out he's a brutal sadist who makes up for his impotence by torturing his wives. Ju Dou turns to Tianqing, with whom she conceives a son. The movie is basically about Tianqing and Ju Dou trying to find happiness, in spite of a son who won't recognize Tianqing as his father (and later kills him), a society that won't let them marry or see each other, and a husband who, before he dies (also killed, accidentally, by the son), is just as cruel as ever, physically and psychologically. It's a very intriguing movie, with characters who, although complex, are driven by a very basic goal all of us share.

It seems like some of the other reviewers didn't actually watch the movie, though; the son, Tianbai, is not evil. It's just that he feels strong loyalty to Jinshan, the husband of his mother and the man whose house he is carrying on. He fetches no plot to kill anyone, although he does.

This is, all the way through, excellent Zhang Yimou and excellent Gong Li. A must-watch for anyone who's a fan of either.