Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (49 page)

This is the kind of film that needs to be seen in a meditative frame of mind. It doesn't much matter what happens in the story, but it does matter how well we are able to empathize with it, how successfully we are able to enter into the state of mind of an angel. Leaving the movie, I reflected that sometimes we are bored by life, and feel as if nothing exciting is happening. But if we had spent eternity as an angel, observing life without feeling it, and then were plunged into a human body with its physical senses, think what a roar and flood of sensations would overwhelm us! It would be almost too much to bear. It would be everyday life.

MARCH 27, 1992

he fourth wife of the rich old man comes to live in his house against her will. She has been educated, and thinks herself ready for the wider world, but her mother betrays her, selling her as a concubine, and soon her world is no larger than the millionaire's vast house. Its living quarters are arrayed on either side of a courtyard. There is an apartment for each of the wives. She is quietly informed of the way things work here. A red lantern is raised each night outside the quarters of the wife who will be honored by a visit from the master.

So opens Raise the Red Lantern, a Chinese film of voluptuous physical beauty and angry passions, set circa 1920. It is one of this year's Academy Award nominees in the foreign category, directed by Zhang Yimou, whose Ju Don was nominated last year. This film, based on the novel Wives and Concubines by Su Tong, can no doubt be interpreted in a number of waysas a cry against the subjection of women in China, as an attack on feudal attitudes, as a formal exercise in storytelling-and yet it works because it is so fascinating simply on the level of melodrama.

We enter into the sealed world of the rich man's house, and see how jealousies fester in its hothouse atmosphere. Each of the four wives is treated with the greatest luxury, pampered with food and care, servants, and massages, but they are like horses in a great racing stable, cared for at the whim of the master. The new wife, whose name is Songlian, is at first furious at her fate. Then she begins to learn the routine of the house, and is drawn into its intrigues and alliances. If you are only given one game to play, it is human nature to try to win it.

Songlian is played by Gong Li, an elegant woman who also starred in quite different roles in Zhang Yimou's two previous films. In Red Sorghum, she was the defiant young woman, sold into marriage to a wealthy vintner, who takes over his winery after his death and makes it prosperous with the help of a sturdy peasant who has earlier saved her from rape. In Ju Dou, she was the young bride of a wealthy old textile merchant, who enslaved both her and his poor young nephew-with the result that she and the nephew fall in love, and the merchant comes to a colorful end in a vat of his own dyes.

Zhang Yimou is obviously attracted to the theme of the rich, impotent old man and the young wife. But in Raise the Red Lantern, it is the system of concubinage that he focuses on. The rich man is hardly to be seen, except in hints and shadows. He is a patriarchal offstage presence, as his four wives and the household staff scheme among themselves for his favor.

We meet the serene first wife, who reigns over the other wives and has the wisdom of longest experience in this house. Then there are the resigned second wife, and the competitive third wife, who is furious that the master has taken a bride younger and prettier than herself. The servants, including the young woman assigned to Songlian, have their own priorities. And there is Dr. Gao (Cui Zhihgang), who treats the wives, and whose medical judgments are instrumental in the politics of the house. The gossip that whirls among the wives and their servants creates the world for these people; little that happens outside ever leaks in.

Zhang Yimou's visual world here is part of the story. His master shot, which he returns to again and again, looks down the central space of the house, which is open to the sky, with the houses of the wives arrayed on either side, and the vast house of the master at the end. As the seasons pass, the courtyard is sprinkled with snow, or dripping with rain, or bathed in hot, still sunlight. The servants come and go. Up on the roof of the house is a little shed which is sometimes whispered about. It has something to do with an earlier wife, who did not adjust well.

Yimou uses the bold, bright colors ofJu Dou again this time; his film was shot in the classic three-strip Technicolor process, now abandoned by Hollywood, which allows a richness of reds and yellows no longer possible in American films. There is a sense in which Raise the Red Lantern exists solely for the eyes. Entirely apart from the plot, there is the sensuous pleasure of the architecture, the fabrics, the color contrasts, the faces of the actresses. But beneath the beauty is the cruel reality of this life, just as, beneath the comfort of the rich man's house is the sin of slavery.

MARCH II, 1994

ere is a film so placid and filled with sweetness that watching it is like listening to soothing music. The Scent of Green Papaya takes place in Vietnam between the late 19405 and early i96os, and is seen through the eyes of a poor young woman who is taken as a servant into the household of a merchant family. She observes everything around her in minute detail, and gradually, as she flowers into a beautiful woman, her simple goodness impresses her more hurried and cynical employers.

The woman, named Mui, is an orphan-a child, when she first comes to work for the family. She learns her tasks quickly and well, and performs them so unobtrusively that sometimes she seems almost like a spirit. But she is a very real person, uncomplaining, all-seeing, and the film watches her world through her eyes. For her, there is beauty in the smallest details: a drop of water trembling on a leaf, a line of busy ants, a selfimportant frog in a puddle left by the rain, the sunlight through the green leaves outside the window, the scent of green papaya.

We understand the workings of the household only through her eyes. We see that the father drinks, and is unfaithful, and that the mother runs the business and the family. We see unhappiness, and we also see that the mother comes to think of Mui with a special love-she is like a daughter. As Mui grows and the family's fortunes fade, the routine in the household nevertheless continues unchanged, until a day when the father is dead and the business in disarray. Then Mui is sent to work as the servant of a young man who is a friend of the family.

She has known this young man for a long time, ever since they both were children. He was the playmate of her employer's son. Now he has grown into a sleek and sophisticated man-about-town, a classical pianist, French-speaking, with an expensive mistress. Mui serves him as she served her first family, quietly and perfectly. And we see through small signs that she loves him. These signs are at first not visible to the man.

The Scent of Green Papaya, which is one of this year's Oscar nominees in the foreign language category, is first of all a film of great visual beauty; watching it is like seeing a poem for the eyes. All of the action, indoors and out, is set in Saigon in the period before the Vietnam War, but what is astonishing is that this entire film was made in Paris, on a soundstage. Everything we see is a set. There is a tradition in Asian films of sets that are obviously artificial (see Kwaidan, with its artificial snowfalls and forests). But the sets for Green Papaya are so convincing that at first we think we are occupying a small, secluded corner of a real city.

The director, Tran Anh Hung, undoubtedly found it impossible to make a film of this type in today's Vietnam, which is hardly nostalgic for the colonial era. That is one reason he recreated his period piece on a soundstage. Another reason may be that he wanted to achieve a kind of visual perfection that real life seldom approaches; every small detail of his frame is idealized in an understated but affecting way, so that Mui's physical world seduces us as much as her beauty.

Some will prefer the first two-thirds of the film to the conclusion: there is a purity to the observation of Mui's daily world that has a power of its own. Toward the end of the film, plot begins to enter, and we begin to wonder when the young pianist will notice the beautiful woman who lives under his roof, and loves him so. There is an old, old movie tradition of the scene where a man suddenly sees a woman through fresh eyes, and realizes that the love he has been looking for everywhere is standing right there in front of him. These scenes can be laughable, but they can also sometimes be moving, and when that moment arrives in Scent of Green Papaya, it has been so carefully prepared that there is a true joy to it.

There is another scene of great gladness, when the man begins to teach the young woman to read. So deep is the romanticism of the film that we almost question whether this is an advancement for her: her simplicity, her unity of self and world, is so deep that perhaps literacy will only be a distraction. It is one of the film's gifts to inspire questions like that.

I have seen The Scent of Green Papaya three times now-the first time in May 1993 at Cannes, where it was named the best film by a first time director. It is a placid, interior, contemplative film-not plot-driven, but centered on the growth of the young woman. As such, you might think it would seem "slower" on later viewings, but I found that the opposite was true: as I understood better what the movie was, I appreciated it more, because like a piece of music it was made of subtleties that only grew deeper through familiarity. This is a film to cherish.