To call director Zhang Yimou (House of Flying Daggers, Curse of the Golden Flower, Hero), a "celebrated 'fifth generation' Chinese filmmaker" is like calling Miles Davis "a talented trumpet player." He has won no fewer than 44 major international film awards for small character pieces as well as great epics.
Zhang trained as a cinematographer before he turned to directing, which shows in every color-drenched, exquisitely composed frame of this romantic tragedy. Ju Dou is from Zhang's earlier period of films like Raise The Red Lantern and Red Sorghum, all lush and intimate dramas of complicated romantic entanglements shot with museum quality imagery.
In this dark, sensual and visually sumptuous drama set in in 1920's China, Ju Dou, the magnificent Gong Li, is forced into marriage to Yang Jin-Shan (Li Wei), the wealthy owner of a silk dying mill. She is repeatedly mistreated and tortured by her elderly husband for failing to bear him an heir, even though he is infertile.
Her suffering attracts the sympathy of her husband's young nephew, the gentle Yang Tian-Qing (Li Bao-Tian), who is the sole employee in the lonely factory. Their tender friendship blossoms into love and the two begin a secret affair.
When Ju Dou's elderly husband becomes wheelchair-bound, the young lovers take their affair out into the open, producing a child that he must claim as his own to save face.
Ju Dou was banned in China, where party leaders saw it as an unflattering metaphor for modern Chinese life, a society ruled by a coterie of aging, controlling men. Acclaimed throughout the world, this film almost didn't come to the screen at all. Chinese officials tried to hide Ju-Dou behind a wall of censorship - an act that prompted Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and other major filmmakers to speak out in support of this remarkable work.
Reviews:: "Zhang's film has a blazing ferocity; it's a prodigious achievement..." -Rolling Stone "Memorably lurid...[Gong Li] shines..." -New York Times "Visually ravishing...This essay in color composition throws into contrast the sumptuous cloths of the dye factory and the drab lives of the lovers..." -Film Comment "Ju Dou has a vibrant look...The reds and yellow in this film have a fairy-tale aliveness..." -Los Angeles Times
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