Summary: Two parts family melodrama, one part Chinese nationalist history. An unseen narrarator weaves the tale of his grandmother, a poor rural Chinese girl sold into marriage to a leprous winemaker. After her husband's death, the grandmother transforms the winery into a idyllic community of productive laborers, only to have her progress rent asunder by the invading Japanese. Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin film festival.
Review:
Sweeping historical epics are not what regular foreign-filmgoers have come to expect from China. Quiet little intimate stories, yes. But a raucous, wild and woolly picture hat is, much of the way, very much like a John Ford western? No.
Nevertheless, here comes "Red Sorghum," the Golden Bear winner at last year's Berlin Film Festival, and both visually and emotionally it packs a wallop.
WHILE MANY OF THE CHINESE films shown in the United States have demonstrated much promise, most of them have been plagued by structural, acting, or narrative flaws. So when the 1988 New York Film Festival premieres Hong Gao Liang ("Red Sorghum") on its prestigious closing night and Donald Ritchie compares it to Kurosawa's Rashomon, one cannot help but assume that the seminal Chinese film has finally arrived. Hong Gao Liang is not that film, however. Its breathtaking color cinematography cannot mask the reality that this film is as plagued by structural shortcomings as its cinematic brethren.
"Red Sorghum" is the sort of scenic, romantic, violent, symbolic melodrama that flowered in the early years of the cinema. The fact that it was made in 1988, and shot in China in CinemaScope and color, doesn't make it a modern film, but that is quite all right. There is a strength in the simplicity of this story, in the almost fairy-tale quality of its images and the shocking suddenness of its violence, that Hollywood in its sophistication has lost.
Chinese director Zhang Yimou's cup runneth over in "Red Sorghum." His images intoxicate your eyes. His sounds are tonics from a vivid world. You get so drunk on his artistic bouquet, you worry about driving home.
It's almost comforting that "Sorghum" has structural shortcomings -- if Yimou's debut were any better, he'd have to be tested for artistic steroids. This omniscient sweep through the China of the 1920s and 1930s is fragmentary, shifting abruptly between vignettes. But Yimou uncorks a sensuality that transcends continuity, warms you under the skin; reaches you from a far-off continent and another era.
Red Sorghum
by Zhang Jia-Xuan
Excerpt: "The aftermath of the cultural revolution gave birth to a new age in Chinese cinema which, in recent years, has produced films such as Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth and The Big Parade, Wu Tianming's Old Well, and Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Horse Thief, all winning great acclaim at international film festivals. Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum, however, won the Golden Bear At the 1988 Berlin film festival, thus becoming the first Chinese film to achieve the highest honor at one of the leading international festivals."
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