To Live - Zhang Yimou - 1994 - Starring Li Gong, You Ge

There have been many accolades for this film, and you can watch it and judge for yourself, but I think this film is too heavy-handed, melodramatic and argumentative. It beats you over the head with lessons it wants to teach you (historical and moral) and it is a highly political film fostering one viewpoint.

It is also filled with totally improbable and far-fetched situations in order to manipulate your emotions in the most obvious and mawkish manner. The ending, for instance, where Red Guard doctors allow a woman to bleed to death, is farcical and not tragic.

The film uses the horrific abuses of the Cultural Revolution to attack and mock the dedication of many of China's poor to Mao, without appreciating that there was a sincere devotion to Mao at that time. Without Mao the Peoples Liberation Army would not have defeated Chiang Kai Chek's Kuomintang Army, and there can be no doubt about the corruption and cruelty which followed Chiang and his army around.

Please remember 1927, in Shanghai, when Chiang betrayed his Communist allies in the war against Chinese warlords, and slaughtered thousands of innocent people.

So if you want to see a badly flawed film that the Western critics loved (for some reason) click below. The film was a financial and critical flop among audiences.   

 

Red Sorghum by Zhang Yimou 1988

Sorghum is the most proletarian of plants.  It's tough and can be used as a staple food even in arid climates. To talk about using sorghum to make wine takes us right into the state-sponsored commie-pinko symbolism that pervades this film.  Red Sorghum (sorghum wine) symbolically represents the elevation of the proletariat to a higher level - at least rhetorically.

Indeed, Red Sorghum was the first big Chinese film of the contemporary era to break into the western market.  Albeit it was the art film market, but I can vaguely recall going to see this film at the Music Box theater in Chicago toward the late 80s.

In retrospect, I'm a little shocked this film was taken so seriously since it is, as I intimated above, little more than Chinese Communist Party propaganda from the late 80s.  There's no real aesthetic theme - indeed, there are two big POLITICAL (writ large) themes in this film.

Jiu'er (the young female hero of this film) is sold to the 50 year old owner of a distillery, by her father, as a bride.  To really make the audience aware that 'capitalism is bad', the old guy private business owner buying the girl has leprosy (nice subtlety in the symbols here huh?  The author of this novel won the Noble Prize for literature, but since Obama recently won for peace we know how valuable Nobels have become).

A worker gets horny for Jiu'er, knocks her up in a sorghum field (semi with and against her will), and kills Mr. Leper-Bigbucks. So Jiu'er and the workers take over the distillery and viola!!!!  the distillery becomes more successful under the eager hard labor of the proletarians than Mr. Capitalist Leprosy could ever make it.

So that's political message one.  Thank God, ooops, Thank Marx and historical materialism that all these capitalist lepers are gone and that China is now a workers' paradise!  Look how happy everyone is now to do the same back-breaking labor!

Political message two is more problematic.

To this day the Chinese government uses WWII atrocities committed by the Japanese military to galvanize its population against that nation.  Never mind that all the war criminals were hanged and that there is nary a war criminal left in Japan.  Forget that Japan (until Abe came along) was very much a pacifistic country.  The Chinese government regularly looks for excuses to scratch the old wounds and there is no indication they ever intend to stop. Indeed, it could be argued that folks like Abe came along because, frankly, some Japanese folks are getting tired of this wound scratching.

So in the second part of the film the evil Japanese come along and force a Chinese butcher to skin a Chinese worker to death.

So this film won the Golden Bear Award from Berlin (West Berlin believe it or not) and was a successful film here.  Basically it boils down to facile political propaganda that becomes maliciously anti-Japanese at the end.

This is a shame since I have liked some of Zhang Yimou's other stuff - please watch Raise the Red Lantern, which I also have posted somewhere on this blog.

Here's some nice commie propaganda for you to watch.
Access Red Sorghum here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=415CReI3zps