Zhang Yimou’s first film as a director is loud, bawdy and lit like a furnace, and Gong Li, also in her first film, holds the middle of it without saying much. The men are broadly drawn, but the last half hour still hits hard.
Red Sorghum opens with a voice telling us this is a family story, and then a red sedan chair sets off across a bare yellow plain. Zhang Yimou had not directed a film before this one. He had worked as a cameraman, and it shows in the best sense: he knows what a wide field and a swaying curtain will do, and he trusts them. The script, adapted by Zhu Wei, Chen Jianyu and Li Kezhi from Mo Yan’s novel, is a family legend told the way families tell them, with the dull parts left out and the shameful parts left in. The film runs 91 minutes and feels shorter.
Gong Li, in her first film, plays Jiu’er, a bride being delivered to a distillery owner she has never met. She spends the opening sequence inside a box, seen through a gap in the curtain, while the bearers outside bounce the chair and sing about what her husband will do to her. Jiang Wen, as the lead bearer Yu, grins through all of it, stripped to the waist and covered in dust. Gong does almost nothing. She looks out, she does not cry, and by the time the chair is set down we already know who is in charge of this story.
The scene that decided the film for us comes soon after, in the sorghum. A masked man carries Jiu’er off the road and into the crop, and the stalks are stamped into a circle, and Zhang holds on the field itself, the tops of the sorghum tossing in a wind that seems to be doing the acting. Zhao Jiping brings in drums and the wail of horns and nothing else. It is not a delicate scene and it is not meant to be. We were unsettled by it, and then moved, because the film makes plain that what happens in that circle is her choice, and Gong’s face, when we see it again, is a different face.
Gu Changwei shoots the whole thing in a palette of three or four colours. The chair is red, the bridal veil is red, the wine that comes out of the distillery’s stills is red, and the plain is a dry ochre under a white sky. Inside the distillery he lights with fire and steam, so the workers move through orange fog with their shirts off. It is not subtle. It is also not a look we had seen before in a Chinese film, and the sequence in which Teng Rujun’s Uncle Luohan leads the men in a song to the new wine, bowls raised, is as happy as anything we know in the cinema of the period.
The film is funnier and cruder than its reputation suggests. Yu turns up drunk to claim his woman and is dumped in a wine vat. Later he does something to a batch of the good stuff that we will not describe in a family publication; the workers’ reaction, and the outcome, made us laugh out loud and then wonder whether we were meant to. Ji Chunhua’s Sanpao, the local bandit, arrives in the middle stretch like a plot device wearing a hat, and that stretch is the weakest: Jiu’er has her distillery, Yu has Jiu’er, and for a while the film has nowhere obvious to go.
Then it does, and the second half takes a turn we will not spell out. What we can say is that the tone hardens, Du Yuan’s cutting gets quicker after an hour of long, held shots, and the colour red begins to mean something other than weddings and wine. Zhao’s score brings the drinking song back in a different key. The final ten minutes are as blunt as a hammer, and they left us shaken.
There are things to hold against it. The narration keeps telling us what we have just watched, as if Zhang did not yet believe his pictures. The men are types: the swaggerer, the loyal foreman, the villain. Jiu’er is looked at a great deal more than she is heard, and although Gong makes that work, a little more talk from her would not have hurt. The politics, when they arrive, are drawn with a very thick brush.
Zhang went on to make smoother films, and better-shaped ones. He did not make many that feel this alive. Watch it on the biggest screen you have, with the sound up, and give it a quarter of an hour to settle before deciding. The sedan chair earns your patience.
