“Eat Drink Man Woman” - Ang Lee (1994)

Taiwan-born Ang Lee (pinyin: Li An) has been a highly successful film director whose versatility over the years has been demonstrated with productions undertaken across several different continents and with themes spanning multiple different genres and social contexts – for example: The Wedding Banquet (1993), Sense and Sensibility (1997), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Lust, Caution (2007), and Life of Pi (2012).  But I think Lee’s greatest film was one of his earliest, Eat Drink Man Woman (1994).  This is a compelling work that, despite its Taiwanese/Chinese cultural context, is concerned generally with how romantic concerns can interact with family values, and so it can be appreciated by just about everyone [1,2,3,4,5,6].  

The film’s story about a master chef in Taipei and his three grownup daughters was scripted by Ang Lee, James Schamus, and Hui-Ling Wang.  And the film’s overall production values, including the acting, were excellent, but extra special praise should be singled out for the cinematography by Jong Lin and the film editing by Ang Lee and Tim Squyres.  In some respects it is the cinematography and film editing that help elevate this film to a truly high status.

The film opens with a detailed presentation of Lao (“Old”, an honorific in Chinese) Chu preparing an elaborate dinner for his three grownup daughters.  The daughters are unmarried and so live at Chu’s home, but they are often out attending to their own personal affairs.  However, Lao Chu expects, indeed demands, that they all unfailingly attend the Sunday dinner that he prepares for them every week, as a ritual and as a precious instrument for family bonding.  Chu has been a widower for the past sixteen years and has largely raised his three daughters during that time on his own.  And like many parents, he is concerned that his daughters, who are all exposed to modernist influences of contemporary Taiwanese society, will start drifting away.  So for Chu, the weekly Sunday dinner is crucial; but for the three daughters, the dinner is boring and almost a form of torture.

For the rest of the film, the viewer is treated to four parallel and interlaced narratives that trace the mostly separate and interpersonal concerns of Chu and his three daughters.  We soon discover  the following basic information about them.

• Lao Chu (played by Sihung Lung) is an aging but famous chef in Taipai and is the master chef at a huge and important hotel in Taipei.  In fact it is widely said that Chu is Taipei’s finest chef, and he is generally used to being in command of those around him.  However Chu is now losing what is critical for a chef, his sense of taste.  So he has to rely on his old friend and fellow master chef Lao Wen (Jui Wang) to sample all his food concoctions to make sure they have been seasoned properly.
   
  
• Jia-Jen (Kuei-Mei Yang), Lao Chu’s oldest daughter, is about 29-years old and works as a high school chemistry teacher.  She is sensitive and reserved and, compared to the other sisters, an upholder of traditional values.  In addition, she has recently become a devout conservative Christian.  Jia-Jen has a close woman friend, Liang Jin-Rong (Sylvia Chang), who was a former school classmate and with whom she often gets together to share concerns, such as Jin-Rong’s drawn-out divorce process.  Jia-Jen’s other friends, worried that she is getting old to find a marriage partner, try to help her in this area, but Jia-Jen shows no interest in dating anybody.  She still hasn’t gotten over a failed love interest when she was in college nine years ago.
   
  
• Jia-Chien (Chien-Lien Wu) is the second-oldest daughter and quite different from Jia-Jen.  Unlike her attractive but quiet and modestly dressing older sister, Jia-Chen is glamorous and outgoing.  She is an energetic, rising executive for an airline company, and she is accustomed to expressing her opinions when she feels like it.  She is also the least tolerant of their father’s Sunday dinners and intends to move out of the home as soon as the new apartment she has purchased is ready.  On the romantic front, she is confidant and bold, e.g. she has a purely sexual relationship with a male friend, Raymond (Chit-Man Chan),  that involves no commitments from either party.  She treasures her independence.
   
  
• Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen Wang), the youngest sister, is 20-years-old and works at a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant while attending college classes.  She is generally upbeat and usually deferent to her more opinionated older sisters.
  

So all four members of the Chu family, though different, are relatively well-balanced; and in accordance with family traditions, they are expected to share with each other what is happening in their respective lines when they get together on Sunday for dinner.  But over the course of this film, we see that all four develop romantic relationships concerning which they feel guarded about sharing with each other on Sundays.  And the presented subtlety of those guarded feelings is part of what makes this a great film.  

In this connection there is an early scene in which a Chu family Sunday dinner is interrupted by an emergency at Lao Chu’s posh hotel.  We learn that a big feast for an important gathering at the hotel is in preparation but due to some cooking hitches is evidently headed for disaster.  Lao Chu is summoned to rescue this desperate situation, and in a highly professional way he does indeed save the day – and, in the process, demonstrate his impressive culinary prowess.  Afterwards, Lao Chu and Lao Wen become somewhat inebriated and reflect on what they have learned over the courses of their long lives.  In a reflective moment of gloom, Lao Chu asks his friend,

“Eat drink man woman.  Food sex . . . Is that all there is?”

The rest of the film offers an answer to that question.

As the interlaced narratives of the four Chu family members unfold, the viewer learns about the evolving romantic relationships that develop for them. 

• Jia-Jen is not looking to date anyone, but she has an accidental encounter with her school’s new volleyball coach, Ming-Dao (Chin-Cheng Lu), and further encounters stir an interest on Ming-Dao’s part,  Ming-Dao is naturally outgoing, and his interest shown is gradually reciprocated by the shy Jia-Jen.
   
  
• Jia-Chien finds herself attracted to Li Kai (Winston Chao) a handsome and suave new manager at her airline company.  It looks like they are certain to become lovers, but at the last minute she learns that Li Kai was the man who broke Jia-Jen’s heart nine years ago.  So Jia-Chen has to call things off with Li Kai.  About this time Jia-Chen also learns that Raymond has chosen to break off his relationship with Jia-Chen and get married to another woman.  So now for the time being at least, Jia-Chen is bereft of lovers and “alone”.
   
  
• Jia-Ning’s close friend and coworker at Wendy’s, Rachel (Yu Chen), appears to be in the process of dumping her heartbroken boyfriend Guo Lun (Chao-jung Chen), and knowing that Guo Lun will always be waiting for her outside of Wendy’s after work, she asks Jia-Ning to shoo the lovesick boy away.  But Jia-Ning’s sympathetic encounters with Guo Lun soon lead to a mutual attraction between the two.  It turns out later that Rachel was only toying with her boyfriend and didn’t want to lose him, but her turnaround is too late.
   
  
• Lao Chu does not appear to be looking for any romantic liaisons, but his three daughters worry that he must do so or he will wind up lonely once the daughters eventually all leave home and attend to their private lives.  Lao Chu’s isolation is only worsened when his longtime friend and confidante, Lao Wen, suddenly dies of a heart attack.  But when the daughters learn that their friend Liang Jin-Rong’s widowed mother, Madame Liang (Ah-Lei Gua), has just returned to Taipei from overseas and is now sometimes socializing with Lao Chu, they optimistically assume that, even though the woman appears to be pushy and overbearing, she would be a suitable marriage partner for their father.  However, Lao Chu devotes most of his attention to affectionately spoiling Liang Jin-Rong’s young six-year-old daughter, Shan-Shan (Yu-Chien Tang), by secretly making the girl tasty lunches to take to school every day.  For Shan-Shan, Lao Chu is like a substitute daddy.
  

Finally, mostly at Sunday dinner confessions, the viewer learns how these relationships have turned out.  Jia-Ning announces that she is leaving home to marry her secret lover, Guo Lun, by whom she is already pregnant.  Jia-Jen marries Ming-Dao and even gets him to convert to Christianity.  

But most shocking of all is what happens with Lao Chu.  At a family dinner to which the Liang family (Madame Liang, Liang Jin-Rong, and Shan-Shan) have been invited, Lao Chu makes a marriage proposal not to the one everyone expects – Madame Liang, but to Jin-Rong, with whom Lao Chu has been having a secret affair.  This explains why Lao Chu has been showering Shan-Shan with paternal affection for awhile.  And it also means that the daughters will not be abandoning their father to loneliness.

So romantic love appears to have conquered all, and, in particular, to have overshadowed traditional family mores.  Is that the film’s final message?  Not entirely [6].  Jia-Chen, the most glamorous and attractive of the three sisters, was always the one who was least affected by traditional values.  She always found her father and his Sunday dinners insufferable, and she was the first daughter to announce her plans to move out of the family home.  But by the end of the film, she has changed.  She abandons her affair with Li Kai out of concerns for her older sister’s feelings.  And she declines a promotion from her airline company to be an overseas vice president, because she wants to stay closer to her family.  In the final scene she is shown cooking a meal for her father at the old home and showing hitherto unseen warmth for him.  So traditional family values now apparently have meaning for her.
 

Consequently we can say that what we have here is not just a battle between Modernism and Tradition or between East and West.  Overall, what makes this a great film is the display of subtle and complex interacting feelings presented by the main character actors.  My favorite performance was that of Kuei-Mei Yang as Jia-Jen, but they are all compelling, and you may have another favorite.

Also outstanding is the cinematography.  There are many emotive closeups that help convey the feelings in this story.  I would also like to call your attention to three extended tracking shots that I thought were very effective.  One is a two-minute shot showing an early conversation between Jia-Ning and Guo Lun.  A second is s 90-second shot of a conversation between Jia-Jen and Liang Jin Rong.  And a third sequence that lingers in my memory is a two-minute shot of Jia-Jen and Li Kai conversing while walking through a store.

So getting back to Lao Chu’s question that he asked early on in the film,

“Eat drink man woman.  Food sex . . . Is that all there is?”

We can say that the film’s response is,

“No, there is much more.  And it all comes from love in all its various guises and modes.”  

Love can be manifest in both traditional and modern circumstances.  The key thing is that, no  matter what the situation, love represents the most sincere and authentic aspects of who we are.  And this is what Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman puts on display for us.

★★★★

Notes:

1. Hal Hinson, "‘Eat Drink Man Woman’", Washington Post (19 August 1994).   
   
2. Desson Howe, "‘Eat Drink Man Woman’", Washington Post, (19 October 1994).   
   
3. Marjorie Baumgarten, “Eat Drink Man Woman”, Austin Chronicle, (19 August 1994).  
   
4. Janet Maslin, “FILM REVIEW; Avoiding Basic Human Desires, or Trying To”, “The New York Times”, (3 August 1994).   
   
5. Norman N. Holland, “Ang Lee, ‘Eat Drink Man Woman’ (1994)”, A Sharper Focus, (n.d.).   
   
6. David Sorfa, “Eat Drink Man Woman: Summary & Analysis”, Jotted Lines, (23 February 2020).   
   

“Parasite” - Bong Joon-Ho (2019)

One of the most lauded films of the past few years has been the South Korean thriller Parasite (Gisaengchung, 2019) by the popular writer-director Bong Joon-Ho.  The film portrays a bizarre set of interactions between two families of vastly contrasting wealth statuses and social standings.  One family (the Park family) is wealthy and refined, while the other family (the Kim family) lies, from just about any perspective, at the bottom of the social heap.  Over the course of these interactions, we would expect the lower-standing family to be hopelessly disadvantaged.  But they have an arrow in their quiver that can always be used to counter the often-prejudicial social norms of those in power – duplicity.  And this is what seems to fascinate so many viewers of this film.   

Indeed Parasite has been almost universally praised by critics [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] and has amazingly won just about all the top awards.  In particular, it won the Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival; and at the 92nd U.S. Academy Awards that year, it won Oscars for Best Picture (the first non-English Language film to do so), Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film – making only the third time that a film won both the Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Picture.  

Nevertheless and despite all these accolades, I feel Parasite is somewhat overrated.  True, the film has lots of plot twists (based on Bong Joon-Ho’s original story and the script by Bong and Han Jin-Won), dynamic cinematography (by Hong Kyung-Pyo), and good acting.  But it takes  more than that to make a great movie – in particular it takes a compelling and meaningful narrative.  In this connection, it’s noteworthy that many viewers find close similarities between Parasite and Hirokazu Koreeda’s 2018 Palme d’Or winner, Shoplifters, although I think there are distinct differences in the tones of these two narratives and the way the characters in these two films are portrayed.

 

Parasite’s narrative has two major segments.

1.  The Kim and Park families

At first we are introduced to the impoverished Kim family living in an urban basement hovel.  They are father Kim Ki-Taek (played by Song Kang-Ho), mother Chung-Sook (Jang Hye-Jin), and their two early-twenty-something offspring – son Ki-Woo (Choi Woo-Shik) and daughter Ki-Jung (Park So-Dam).  They work in temporary, menial jobs folding pizza boxes for a food delivery company, but they still don’t have enough to make ends meet.  

Then, however, Ki-Woo’s college-educated friend Min-Hyuk pays him a visit before leaving to study overseas and offers to recommend that Ki-Woo take over his job as the English tutor for a wealthy family’s teenage daughter.  Min-Hyuk has romantic interests in the girl and doesn’t want anyone else to move in on her.  So even though he knows that Ki-Woo will have to lie about his educational qualification, Min-Hyuk trusts his friend.  But as we will soon see, trusting anyone in the Kim family is a dubious proposition.  

Soon Ki-Woo gets the job and  is tutoring the daughter of the affluent Park family, Da-Hye (Jung Ji-So), and arousing romantic fascination from both Da-Hye and her innocent mother, Choi Yeon-Gyo (Cho Yeo-Jeong).  Continuing his activities in deception, Ki-Woo manages to get the unsuspecting Park family to hire his sister Ki-Jung, who uses an assumed name and poses as an art teacher, to tutor Da-Hye’s kid brother, Da-Song (Jung Hyeon-Jun).  Before long, Ki-Woo and Ki-Jung have finagled the Park family into firing both their chauffeur and their live-in housekeeper, Gook Moon-Gwang (Lee Jung-Eun) and replacing them with their father (Ki-Taek) and mother (Chung-Sook), again using assumed names and pretending to be unrelated to the other members of their family.

So now, by means of their relentless deceptions, the Kim family has embedded itself with posh positions working for the Park family.  When the Park family goes off on a camping trip, all the Kims come over to the Park mansion to feast themselves.

2.  Another Parasite

But while the Parks are still away, the former housekeeper Moon-Gwang shows up at the door  of the mansion, saying she left something in the basement.  When she is given permission to look downstairs, it is revealed that there is an underground bunker below the house that was built by the original owner and architect of the mansion, unbeknownst to the Parks when they moved in.  Living secretly in this bunker for the past four year has been Moon-Gwang’s husband, Oh Geun-Sae (Park Myung-Hoon), who is hiding out from creditors.

This sets up a conflict.  The Kims want Moon-Gwang and her husband out of the mansion, but Moon-Gwang discovers that the Kims are frauds and that their lies were responsible for her getting fired.  She says she will inform the Parks about this if they force her out.

So now we have three levels of humanity in conflict.  At the top level is the clueless Park family, and below them is the deceitful Kim family, who are feeding off them.  At the bottom are Moon-Gwang and Geun-Sae, who want to feed off the upper two levels.

But now the narrative shifts from one dominated by deception to one overwhelmed by lethal violence.  What ensues is a series of incredibly brutal interactions between the various contestants, with a number of killings, the bloody violence of which seem to lack motivation.  In the end, many of the characters I have mentioned above are dead.  This shocking violence may appeal to some viewers, but I found it gratuitous.  I will leave it to you to watch the film and see how it all comes out.

In the end, with no truly satisfied characters at the conclusion of this story, we might inquire into any underlying themes in this film.  I would say that one could point to the following themes:

• Deception. 
  The Kim family lives entirely by deception.  Everything that they do or claim to be is fraudulent.  One might wonder if Bong is suggesting that perhaps all the attributes people claim to have in society are not much more authentic and worthy of belief than those of the Kims.
   
  
• Economic Exploitation.
  The Kims, Moon-Gwang, and her husband are all victims of an economic system based on winner-take-all exploitation.  This leads to severe inequality and desperation on the part of those who are at the bottom.  Our lower-class characters in this film innovatively came up with their own schemes, but they were exploitative, too.  What we really need is a social system built around teamwork and community – one that goes beyond the zero-sum-game mechanics of what largely prevails in today’s increasingly gig-economy.
   
  
• No Planning. 
  Kim Ki-Taek believed in a life devoid of planning, and he explicitly advocated that policy to his son, KI-Woo.  Now it is true that being opportunistic and ready for change has its advantages, but Ki-Taek took this commitment to avoid planning way too far and into the realm of absurdity. And ini the coda at the close of the film, Ki-Woo expresses his determination to move in the opposite direction and commit himself to a hopeless plan that has no chance of succeeding.  What was Bong saying here?  I don’t know.

Altogether, Parasite’s most entertaining moments occurred, for me, in the early stages of the film when the Kim family members took advantage of off-the-cuff gambits of deception in order to worm their way into paid activities in the Park family mansion.  These scenes are probably what prompt some people to call this film a comedy.  But as I mentioned at the outset, there are some weaknesses that keep this film from reaching a top level:

• Missing motivations for the murders. 
  There are a number of anger-filled murders that take place in the latter part of the film, but these are not well-motivated.  Even in cheap revenge films, there is more time and effort spent in developing an understanding of what fires the vengeful actions depicted than is done here in this film.
   
  
• Aimless camera tracking. 
  Although Bong and his cinematographer Hong Kyung-Pyo are skilled in concocting elaborate moving-camera shots, this card is overplayed in Parasite.  In many cases these camera-tracking shots seem to have no purpose and are merely distracting.
   
  
• Deflating Coda.
  The last few minutes of the film present a somewhat deflating coda depicting Ki-Woo’s hopeless long-term plan to buy the mansion.  But this closing segment seems only to detract from the dramatic intensity that has come earlier [7,8].         
   
  
• No sympathetic protagonists. 
  A compelling narrative has to have at least one character that attracts the viewer’s (or reader’s) empathetic interest.  However, Parasite is devoid of such characters.  Almost all of the characters here are opaque and deceitful.  So the overall story has a random nature to it.

Thus, although Parasite has some individual scenes that are skillfully executed, for me, they don’t all come together to make an outstanding film.

★★½

 

Notes:

1. Brian Tallerico, “Parasite”, RogerEbert.com, (7 September 2019).   
   
2. Manohla Dargis, “‘Parasite’ Review: The Lower Depths Rise With a Vengeance”, The New York Times, (10 February 2020).  
   
3. Richard Whittaker, “Parasite”, Austin Chronicle, (25 October 2019).  
4. Justin Chang, “Review: Thrilling and devastating, ‘Parasite’ is one of the year’s very best movies”, Los Angeles Times, (9 October 2019).   
   
5. Micah Bucey, “Parasite (Gisaengchung)”, Spirituality & Practice, (n.d.).   
   
6. Peter Howell, “‘Parasite’ is a savage, surprising class satire that pricks the conscience”, Toronto Star, (17 October 2019).   
   
7. Stephen Dalton, “'Parasite' ('Gisaengchung'): Film Review | Cannes 2019", The Hollywood Reporter, (21 May 2019).  
   
8. James Berardinelli, “Parasite (South Korea, 2019)”, ReelViews, (1 November 2019).     

“Departures” - Yojiro Takita (2008)

Departures (original title: Okuribito, meaning “One Who Sends Off”; 2008) is a Japanese film directed by Yojiro Takita that has been immensely popular, both inside Japan and abroad [1,2,3].  It swept the Japanese film production awards, and it won the US Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of 2008.  Many viewers are brought to tears by the film, and Marc Savlov, of the Austin Chronicle, said the film was “particularly sublime” [1].  Roger Ebert saw the movie three times and listed it among his all-time great movies [3].  But I had a somewhat different take on the film.  The problem, you see, is that Departures is a film about death, and the issues I have are about the degree to which the film authentically engages with that profoundly troubling topic.

The story of the film concerns a young man who, though trained as an orchestral cellist, winds up stumbling into the profession of “casketing” – an assistant to a funeral director who ritually cleans and prepares dead bodies prior to their final placement in a casket.  This can also be referred to as “encoffinment”, and throughout the film we see a number of corpses being processed in this fashion.  As the viewer is informed early on in the film,

 “The rite of encoffinment is to prepare the deceased for a peaceful departure.”

Naturally, this process is for the remaining living, those relatives and loving friends who witness this encoffinment ceremony at the funeral and use it to say their final good-bye to the deceased.  

The story of Departures passes through three main stages.

1.  Finding a New Role
Daigo Kobayashi (played by Masahiro Motoki) is a young cellist for a symphony orchestra.  When his struggling orchestra is shut down, Daigo is suddenly without a job.  He and his loving wife Mika (Ryôko Hirosue) decide to move back to Daigo’s old home town of Yamagata in he north of Japan and into Daigo’s boyhood home that his recently deceased mother has willed to him.  There they at least won’t have to pay rent while Daigo is looking for a job.  Daigo has to sell off the expensive concert cello he had recently purchased on credit, and now in his mid-thirties, he realizes he has to start all over.

Looking through the job ads in the newspaper, he comes across one for an “NK agent” to work on “departures” and with no prior experience required.  Assuming this is a job for a travel agency, Daigo rushes off to the job site, but when he gets there, he is shocked to learn that ‘NK’ is short for ‘nokan’ and means casketing.  Nevertheless, he is coaxed into staying for an interview, and after only a few words are exchanged with the boss, Ikuei Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), Daigo is hired to start working for him immediately.

2.  Learning the Trade
As Sasaki’s apprentice, Daigo begins watching and learning what is involved in the ritual of encoffinment.  With the mourning relatives looking on intently, the casketer solemnly attends to the corpse, which is fully covered in sheets and shawls, before him.  The casketer reaches under these sheets and carefully and delicately cleanses the corpse’s entire body.  Then he carefully makes up the corpse’s face, shaving it with a razor if the deceased was a man.  Then the corpse is delicately lifted and placed inside an open coffin.  The decorative coffin can cost $1,000-3,000.

All this ceremonial cleansing is a ritual just for the onlooking mourning relatives, because immediately after the funeral, the coffin with its contents will be incinerated.  In Japan, 99.97% of the deceased are cremated [4]. 

After watching Sasaki do this several times, Daigo learns how to perform this ceremony, himself.  And it turns out that his experience as a skilled cellist is a natural fit for the meticulous nature of his new craft.  Although he has to overcome his instinctive revulsion at the sight and smell of decaying dead bodies, he gradually gets used to it.  However, he knows that despite the intrinsic place that casketing has in traditional Japanese death rituals, other people will generally feel the same natural revulsion for what he does that he, himself, felt when he started.  So he hides the nature of his work from his friends and associates.

At home, Daigo even conceals it from his wife, Mika, but he enjoys living in his old home again, and he even starts playing the old cello he used to play as a child.  In fact when he first opens the old cello case, he discovers the old “stone-message” he had received from his dad when he was only a little boy.  We later learn that exchanging stone-messages was an ancient practice that predated the advent of writing.  The stone that you gave to your recipient was one whose shape, size, and texture represented your inner feelings.  On that stone-message exchange with his father long ago, Daigo had also given his own personally chosen stone-message to his father.  However, his childhood memories bring to his mind how much he still hates his father, who deserted his family thirty years ago when Daigo was only six years old.  He tells Mika that he doesn’t care if his father is now alive or dead. 

Nevertheless, as it inevitably had to, the secret of Daigo’s profession eventually does come out, and his friends all snub him.  When Mika finds out about his handling of dead bodies, she he is horrified with revulsion; she leaves him and returns to her parental home.

3.  A Resolution of Sorts
Daigo continues his casketing work alone, and the viewer witnesses more examples of his work.  After several months, Mika returns to her husband and announces she is pregnant with his child.  When she witnesses his careful encoffinment of the just-deceased mother of one of his old friends, she sees how compassionate and dedicated he is to his practice, and she forgives him for pursuing this work.

Circumstances eventually work out that Daigo is informed of the imminent casketing of his father, who has just died.  Daigo and Mika go there, and Daigo reverently takes over the process of encoffinment of his own father.  When Daigo opens the clenched fist of his father, he discovers that stone that he had given to his father as a stone-message thirty years earlier.  Hopefully, this will help reduce the long-held resentment he had felt for his father.  At the close of the film, Daigo symbolically gives that stone as a message to his still unborn child.


Although many viewer are moved by that ending, it is not clear to me what the overall intent of this film is, and I think there were a number of missed opportunities.  As The New York Time’s A. O. Scott remarked [5]:

“It operates, from start to finish, in a zone of emotional safety, touching on strong feelings like grief and loss without really engaging them. . .”

It is true there are some virtues to the production.  Takeshi Hamada’s cinematography, featuring many high- and low-angle shots, has an atmospheric interpersonal quality to it.  And the cello-based music of Joe Hisaishi throughout moodily evokes the delicacy of Daigo’s work.  But I did have problems with some of the acting in the film.  In particular, the acting on the part of the two principal male actors – Masahiro Motoki as Daigo and Tsutomu Yamazaki as Mr. Sasaki – was disappointing.  Although some reviewers seem to have liked their performances, I found the work of these two actors to be flat and superficial.  After all, we’re dealing with death here, but Motoki just perpetually addresses everything with mouth-agape stares, and Yamazaki only offers blank-faced frowns.  We need more subtlety here.  On the other hand, the acting of the two main women, Ryôko Hirosue and Kimiko Yo, is much more emotive and realistic to the dramatic situations.  But beyond the acting, there are two other concerns I have about Departures the lie on the thematic level: the treatments of ritual and death.

With regard to ritual, it is my understanding that ritual has long been an important aspect of Japanese culture.  The Japanese tea ceremony, for example, is not just a nice practice for drinking tea.  Instead, the tea ceremony is a ritualistic instrument for helping to generate a Zen-like mindfulness on the beautiful aspects of everyday being [6].  One is supposed to perform the tea ceremony with total absorption in the existential purity of life [7].  In Departures we are presented with the ritual of stone-messaging, but that seems to be primarily only a game.  The main ritual here is encoffinment in front of the grieving  mourners, and one would think that the film would offer an occasion for exploring the depth and meaning of this ritual.  But the film skirts around this possibility, and it just shows a train of opaque, glum-faced mourners.  Are we just supposed to be left with the notion that the encoffinment ceremony merely offers an opportunity for each mourner to have his or her own personal moments of grief?  This, to me, would be a cop-out, but even this consideration is not made clear.  So examination of the nature of ritual was a serious opportunity lost in this film.

A second issue concerns the theme of death and the evolution of Daigo’s notions on its meaning.  Although this is something that is frequently touched on in the film, it is never really developed well.  The only moment of reflection on this topic is when the local cremator, i.e the person who sets all the coffins ablaze, remarks,

“maybe death is a gateway. . . you go through it and on to the next thing”.

But that and other possible ideas are never considered further.

As for Daigo, after being shown his initiation into the encoffining of corpses, we are sometimes shown sequences depicting  Daigo’s concerns about the deaths of animals.  On one occasion he is shown watching and presumably pondering salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die.  Another time he and Mika are disturbed to discover that an octopus they had purchased for cooking is still alive and wiggling.  And on still another occasion, the sight of a freshly killed chicken on his dinner table moves him to vomit uncontrollably.  Thus the thought that the meat he eats at his dinner table comes from the corpses of sentient beings not so different from the human corpses he is continually placing in coffins must clearly dawn on him. 

So one might expect that Daigo’s reverent practice on human carcasses might lead him to have a feeling that all dead animals once had conscious existences, i.e. we could imagine them to have some sort of souls, like humans.  And this realization would then hopefully engender in him a feeling for universal altruism and lead to a decision to forswear the consumption of meat [8].  But this is not what happens.  Instead he watches his boss Sasaki lustily tearing his teeth into animal flesh when they share a meal together, and Daigo gradually imitates his mentor.  Sasaki seems to think that death is just a normal aspect of the world, and we might as well not dwell on the idea.  So in the end, Daigo just seems to get used to death and killing.  It is as if he simply puts death out of his mind, even though he is constantly dealing with it in an intimate way.  This turning away from the key theme of the film represents another missed opportunity in Departures.

In the end, I get the feeling that rather than this film showing us a caring casketer who reflects and projects his altruistic love to all beings, living or deceased, it instead shows us a self-absorbed practitioner who deals with the dead bodies he has been assigned to treat in the same operational way that he had earlier treated his musical instrument.

★★½

Notes:

1. Marc Savlov, “Departures”, Austin Chronicle (28 August 2009).   
2. Roger Ebert, “Departures”, RogerEbert.Com, (27 May  2009).   
3. Roger Ebert, “Departures”, Great Movie, RogerEbert.Com, (11 December 2011).   
4. “List of countries by cremation rate”, Wikipedia, (13 December 2019).   
5. A. O. Scott, “Making a Living Handling Death”, The New York Times, (28 May 2009).   
6. Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea, Duffield & Company, (1906).
7. “The Book of Tea”, Wikipedia, (6 December 2019).   
   
   •  “According to Tomonobu Imamichi, Heidegger's concept of Dasein in Sein und Zeit was inspired – although Heidegger remained silent on this – by Okakura Kakuzo's concept of das-in-der-Welt-sein (being-in-the-worldness) expressed in The Book of Tea to describe Zhuangzi's philosophy, which Imamichi's professor Ito Kichinosuke had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having followed private lessons with him the year before.”
8. Matthieu Ricard, Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, Little, Brown and Company, (2013; English translation by Charlotte and Sam Gordon, 2015).  

“Red Sorghum” - Zhang Yimou (1987)

Red Sorghum (Hong Gaoliang, 1987) was Zhang Yimou’s first directorial outing (he started out earlier as a cinematographer), and it was also the first modern Chinese film to be commercially released in the U. S. [1].  Although earlier films by fellow Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers, such as Tian Zhuangzhuang and Chen Kaige, had received significant critical admiration on the Western art-house circuit, they apparently didn’t have the eye-popping blockbuster production values of Red Sorghum (such as its spectacular, brightly-hued wide-screen cinematography) to attract mainstream commercial distributors.  They also didn’t have the magnetic allure of Zhang’s dramatic star and artistic partner, Gong Li.  Anyway and for whatever reasons, Red Sorghum did go on to win the Golden Bear Award (Best Film) at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival in 1988.

Certainly Red Sorghum does have narrative and production features likely to appeal to a broad audience spectrum, but just what is its overall intended meaning has been the subject of a variety of interpretations.  The general topic could be said to be that of aspirations of heroic masculinity, but is the underlying tone worshipful, reproachful, or ironic? 

The story of the film is loosely based on 2012 Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan’s first novel Red Sorghum Clan (1986), but the film adopts its own distinctive perspective.  In the story here, we follow the changing circumstances and experiences of a young woman who inherits and operates a liquor distillery during the 1930s.  The focalization is persistently on her, but the action of the film consists of a series of events imposed on the woman arising from traditional Chinese (and Japanese) notions of masculinity. 

Because masculinity is such an important underlying theme in this film, it might first be best to mention the wider cultural lens through which masculinity is sometimes viewed in China.  This is associated with the traditional Daoist yin-yang dualism.  According to this conceptualization, the world is permeated with two complementary conceptual forces:

• yang – associated with: light, warmth, summer, daylight, masculinity, ascent, and action
   
• yin – associated with: darkness, coldness, winter, night, femininity, descent, and inaction

So yang can be considered to be an abstract conceptualization of masculinity, and yin is an abstract conceptualization of femininity.  According to most traditional accounts, both yang and yin are necessary and just need to be maintained in a proper balance.  However, Confucian sage Dong Zhongshu (179-104 B.C.) is said to have held that yang is essentially good and yin is detrimental, to wit [2]:

"The yang is benign while the yin is malign: the yang means birth while the yin means death.  Therefore yang is mostly present and prominent: yin is constantly absent and marginal."

In any case, one could certainly argue that Red Sorghum’s treatment of masculinity needs to be considered from the larger Daoist perspective.  Moreover, as Yeujin Wang has remarked [3]:

“One distinction that marks the contemporary Chinese New Wave cinema is its sense of cultural urgency couched in the collective consciousness, and the impossibility of there being private isolation in this critical moment of historical transformation that will eventually implicate every individual. In this context, issues of masculinity and femininity acquire more social and symbolic resonances than they may in the West.“

Apart from any specific Daoist considerations, though, there have been three main stances that critics have adopted with respect to the general depiction of masculinity in Red Sorghum:

• Celebration of heroic masculinity
  
  Critic Roger Ebert, for example, saw the film as a throwback to the old Hollywood-style “shoot ‘em up” action movies, like the old Hollywood Westerns, that featured heroic good guys going up against bad guys [1].  For him, the movie was a celebration of heroic masculinity among the common people.
     
• Condemnation of crude, narcissistic masculinity
  Others have seen the film as a portrayal of reprehensible male narcissism, with the female protagonist in the story shown being continually subjected to the ego gratification activities of males with whom she is forced to interact [4].
       
• Masculinity seen through a feminine perspective
  But one can also see the film from the feminine perspective.  After all, the focalization of the film is entirely on the female protagonist, and she is not entirely passive.  Within the social constraints imposed on her, she expresses her own feminine assertiveness and personal responses to the masculine-dominant world surrounding her.  In fact in this regard [3]

  “Female sexuality is represented not through the frank sexual scenes which are kept off-screen, thus defying the male spectators' voyeuristic impulse, but rather by focusing on the female presence as the locus of discourse. Gong Li, who plays Jiuer, has a temperamental look of rapture and ecstasy that is always there.”

The story of Red Sorghum plays out through five sections, or “acts”; and to help trace this masculine-feminine theme that I have been discussing, I will identify moments in the narrative that show expressions of masculinity (with “(M)”) and feminine assertiveness (with “(F)”).

1.   1929 – An Arranged Marriage
The film begins with an unseen narrator saying that this tale is about his grandmother, Jiu’er (played by Gong Li).  As a very young woman, she is sent off on a marriage palanquin to the remote home/business of her new bridegroom, Li Datou, who, we are told (he is never seen in the film), is a 50-year-old man who owns a liquor distillery and suffers from leprosy.

The palanquin carriers are workers from the groom’s distillery, except for the leader, Yu (Jiang Wen), who is a professional sedan carrier.  Yu is a brawny, super-confidant fellow who leads the other carriers in singing ribald songs to taunt and embarrass the unhappy bride inside the closed palanquin (M).  Jiu’er is anguished by these antics, but we see that she is secretly carrying a pair of scissors with her, which she apparently intends to use in case things get out of hand (F).

Along the way, the palanquin is carried through a wild sorghum field (the sorghum plants have tall stalks and thereby provide concealment for anyone who wants to hide among them), and they are ambushed by a masked bandit, who wants all their money and to carry off Jiu’er into the sorghum field (M).  However, Yu manages to fight off the bandit and kill him (M).  Finally Jiu’er is delivered to Li Datou’s remote home.

2.  Jiu’er Visits Her Parental Home
Following custom, Jiu’er must visit her own parents three days after her wedding, so her father comes to fetch her and escort her back to her parents’ home on the back of a donkey.  With her father trying to walk beside her on foot, Jiu’er rushes ahead on the donkey and out of her father’s sight (F).  When she gets to the sorghum fields, she is again attacked by a masked bandit.  But this one turns out to be Yu, a person Jiu’er had earlier been eyeing.  When Jiu’er sees who her attacker is, she willingly succumbs to his  demands for sexual intercourse in the sorghum field (M), (F).

Later Jiu’er makes it to her parents’ home, but there she renounces her father for having arranged her unwanted marriage to a leper just so he could secure a valued dowry (F).  She tells him that she never wants to see him again.

3.  Jiu’er Returns to the Distillery
When Jiu’er returns to the distillery, she learns that Li Datou has been murdered.  The voiceover narrator says he presumes that the murderer was Yu, whom he refers to as his grandpa (M). 

Since Li Datou had no heirs, Jiu’er inherits the distillery.  Although she has no experience running a distillery, she convinces all the workers, who have been packing their bags preparing to leave, to stay and help run the distillery in communal fashion (F).

Then an inebriated Yu comes to the distillery and drunkenly boasts to everyone that he had had sex with Jiu’er (M).  He tries to barge into Jiu’er’s quarters, but she has him thrown out (F).  Then the workers dump the passed-out Yu into a large empty clay jug.

4.  Sanpao, the Bandit
Suddenly the notorious gun-wielding bandit Sanpao (Ji Chunhua) and his gang now attack the distillery.  Sanpao abducts Jiu’er and holds her for ransom (M).  Yu, now sober, can only cower in helplessness.  Later, though, after the ransom is paid Yu daringly tracks down Sanpao and after a scuffle, gets the bandit to confirm that he did not have sex with Jiu’er (M).

Now feeling more macho than ever, Yu comes to the distillery during a new-liquor ceremony and contemptuously urinates into all the new-liquor vats (M).  Then after wrecking some distillery equipment, he proudly carries Jiu’er off into her bedroom to have sex with her (M).  The workers only watch helplessly.

Later, however, the distillery foreman happens to taste the pissed-in liquor and discovers that it has an exquisite taste.  He reports this news to Jiu’er, and they start producing liquor according to this new formula.

5.  1938
The scene shifts forward nine years, and the distillery is shown to be booming, thanks to its secret formula.  Jiu’er is the happy mother of a nine-year-old son, Dou-Guan, the narrator’s father. 

However, the Second Sino-Japanese War has begun, and invading Japanese troops come to the distillery locale and force all the villagers in the area to trample the sorghum fields so they can build a road there (M).  The Japanese soldiers are shown here to be cruel and inhuman, and revelling in torture, which reflects general Chinese feelings concerning the holocaust that the Japanese inflicted on them at this time [5].

The Japanese then order a local butcher to skin alive the captured bandit Sanpao.  When he resists them by killing Sanpao quickly, the soldiers shoot the butcher.  Then they order the butcher’s assistant to skin alive the captured former distillery foreman, who had left earlier and apparently joined the Communist forces (M).  All the locals, including Jiu’er and Yu, are forced to watch this horror in silence.

That evening, Jiu’er gets Yu and the distillery workers to swear to avenge this cruel murder (F).  They go out at night to set up an alcohol-based bombing ambush on the Japanese truck for the next morning.  However, in the morning the Japanese truck still hasn’t come, and Dou-Guan reports back to his mother at the distillery that the ambushers are getting hungry.  So Jiu’er prepares some food for her team and brings it out to them (F). 

Just when she arrives, though, the Japanese truck shows up, and she is machine-gunned.  The attack is triggered too early and botched, and in the ensuing mayhem almost everyone is killed.  The only ones to survive are Yu and Dou-Guan, who are shown at the end staring forlornly at the devastation.


The film ends in despair, with Jiu’er finally succumbing to one of the many acts of masculinity-fed brutalization that had plagued her throughout her life.  But there are images and sequences that resonate in the mind long afterwards.  So before returning to the key issue of Red Sorghum’s portrayal of masculinity, we might comment on the excellent wide-screen cinematography of photographer Changwei Gu (Farewell My Concubine (1993) and Ju Dou (1990)) and director Zhang Yimou, himself a former cinematographer.  The color red is a symbolic image in the film and is featured in various places.  At one point, after Yu has had sex with Jiu’er in the sorghum field, he sneaks along, hidden in the sorghum stalks, and sings to her a ribald song extolling the virtues  of red.  In it he says that red is the color for (a) the blaze of love, (b) the bride’s chamber, (c) a virgin’s blood, and (d) red sorghum liquor.  More generally, Yeujin Wang comments [3]:

“Redness bespeaks desire, passion, blood (itself signifying birth and death), beauty and cruelty, destruction and construction (in that the homogeneous color scheme destroys the previous world of color and re-orders a new world).”

Thus red might be considered to be representative of the Daoist notion of the yang force, but at the same time it is associated with images of femininity that invite lustful masculine thoughts.  This powerful but ambivalent nature of red with respect to the masculine-feminine dualism is what seems to lie at the heart of Red Sorghum.

So returning to the three main critical stances in connection with the film, I would reject the “celebration of heroic masculinity” line adopted by some critics like Roger Ebert.  Yu shows some bravery in this story, but he is also crude, boorish, and narcissistic towards women.  He sees femininity as just there to be exploited for his pleasures.  The other manifestations of masculinity – the leprous Li Datou, the bandits, and the Japanese soldiers – are even worse.  As Yeujin Wang remarks, Jiu’er is seen as an object [3]:

“Jiuer is carried off by men four times in the film: first as an unwilling bride carried by a group of lusty chair-bearers to the leprous bridegroom; a second time as a potential rape victim in the sorghum field; a third time as a willing mate on her second trip through the sorghum field; and finally in her kidnapping by the local bandit for ransom.“

At the same time, I don’t see the film as a “condemnation of crude, narcissistic masculinity”, either.  Jiu’er is shown to have an affinity for men who can be cooperative and work with her.  And we do see occasions of positive masculine responses to her team-spirit approach.  Consequently I would go along with the stance of seeing the film as “masculinity seen through a feminine perspective”.  Again, Yeujin Wang has some appropriate comments in this regard [3]:

“The film Red Sorghum - ostensibly about the uninhibited manners of masculinity - is ironically and structurally contained in a discourse about the maternal which is narrated by a first-person voice-over.
    . . .
In other words, it is through a feminine vision of totality that the masculine past is re-constructed and obtains coherence and meaning.“

Nevertheless and despite Gong Li’s magnetic performance, this feminine vision doesn’t truly come together in the film.  Over the course of the story, Jiu’er is subjected to a sequence of masculinity-fuelled actions of oppression, but is there any sense of narrative progression here?  She has her own feminine assertiveness, but in the end she simply falls prey to urges for revenge, the same kind of crude impulse characteristic of her male antagonists.  She just used her male coworkers as instruments for her revenge.

But the real problem with Red Sorghum’s storytelling is with its characterization of Yu.  He is the major figure of Jiu’er’s attention, but I am unable to empathize with his point of view or otherwise “get inside” him.  And why she is attracted to him is a mystery to me.  Moreover, he doesn’t strike me as a figure worthy of being a representative of the Communist common man.  So although the film has its fascinating attractions, it doesn’t quite add up.  Zhang Yimou, however, would soon go on to make some truly outstanding works of a universal nature.

★★★

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “Red Sorghum”, Roger Ebert.com, (28 February 1989).
2. Dong Zhongshu, “The Noble Yang and the Base Yin”, Chunqiu Fanlu Yuyin, quoted in
   
   • Zhang Dainian, “Zhongguo Zexue Dagang (An Outline of Chinese Philosophy)”, (Beijing: China Social Sciences and Humanities Press), quoted in
   • Yeujin Wang, “Mixing Memory and Desire: “Red Sorghum” A Chinese Version of Masculinity and Femininity”, Public Culture, Vol. 2, No. 1: Fall 1989, Duke University Press, pp. 31-53.
3. Yeujin Wang, “Mixing Memory and Desire: Red Sorghum A Chinese Version of Masculinity and Femininity”, Public Culture, Vol. 2, No. 1: Fall 1989, Duke University Press, pp. 31-53. 
4. Chris Berry, “Neither One Thing nor Another: Toward a Study of the Viewing Subject and Chinese Cinema in the 1980s”, New Chinese Cinemas, (ed. by Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, Esther Yau), Cambridge University Press, (1994), pp. 88-113.
5. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking, Basic Books, (1997).

“Yellow Earth” - Chen Kaige (1984)

The Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakimg was made possible by the ending of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and the subsequent reopening of the Beijing Film Institute for study in 1978.  Among that first group of students graduating in 1982 were future leaders of the Fifth Generation movement: Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and Tian Zhuangzhuang. These young cineastes had ambitions to pursue new forms of cinematic expression in a Chinese context, and the first major film to emerge from this group was Yellow Earth (Huang tu di, 1984), which was directed by Chen Kaige and photographed by Zhang Yimou.

Upon its release, Yellow Earth was not a major hit in China, but it quickly attracted attention outside China [1].  Indeed, because the film abandoned the prevailing government censorial preference for socialist realism, it was probably fortunate that the film was even approved for release in China at all.  Nevertheless, the film did have an immediate impact on the filmmaking community in China.  In this connection, Tian Zhuangzhuang remarked in 1986 that [2]

“If it wasn’t for Yellow Earth, then there wouldn’t have been the whole debate about film aesthetics . . . [the film] represents the future of Chinese cinema now.”                     

And ever since then Yellow Earth has been, over the years, the subject of scrutiny concerning various aspects of its presentation and of multiple interpretations concerning its underlying meanings [3,4].  I will get to some of those interpretations later, but first I will give a basic picture of the film’s narrative, which can be considered to play out through five segments.

1.  Early Spring, 1939

In 1937 the opposing Kuomintang Nationalist Party (KMT) forces and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forces realized that they would have to cooperate in order to fight against the invading Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War.  By 1939 the KMT had recognized the autonomy of the CCP soldier to cross over the Shaanxi-Gansun-Ningxia border region.  In the early spring of that year, a soldier from the CCP’s Eighth Route Army, Gu Qing (played by Xue Bai), is shown to have travelled 200 miles from CCP-controlled Yan’an to the northern KMT-controlled area of Shaanxi, Shanbei.  His mission is to collect local peasants’ folk songs that the CCP soldiers can then sing and affirm their commonality with the local people.

In the opening shots, Gu is seen walking over the barren Loess Plateau of that region.  When he happens upon a peasant wedding procession, he takes out his notebook and prepares to record the festivities.  The people involved in the procession appear to be enjoying the party, but the red-hooded 13-year-old bride looks glum when briefly seen and clearly represents just an artefact, not a person, in this social setting.  Gu is invited to the wedding banquet, where the guests are served plates of wooden fish, because real fish are not available to these people. During the feast Gu jots down a wedding song he hears sung by a village crooner.
 
We next see another 13-year-old girl from the same village, Cuiqiao (Wang Xueqi), carrying out her routine task of walking three miles with buckets to the Yellow River in order to fetch water for her poor family.  Along the way, she sings a plaintive song:

“Among human beings, a girl’s life is the most pitiable. 
  Pity the poor girls, the poor girls.”   

2.  With Cuiqiao’s Family

Gu Qing decides to remain in that village to collect songs, and he winds up staying with Cuiqiao’s small family, which includes her widowed father (played by Tan Tuo) and her shy, almost mute, younger brother, Hanhan (Liu Quiang).  Gu starts out helping the family members with their plowing and chores, and he gradually gets to know them better.  Their conversations exhibit the contrasts between the modernist Communist and traditional peasant ways.  On one occasion Gu tells the father that in the Communist south, girls are liberated and free to choose their marriage partners.  In the south, Gu tells him, girls are not for sale.  Then they have the following exchange that tellingly reflects their contrasting perspectives:

Gu Qing:     “The world must change.  The south has changed. 
                      North China must change, too.”

The Father:  “We fathers have our own rules”

On another occasion when Cuiqiao mentions to Gu that noone in their village is literate, he  tells her that in the Communist-held south, all boys and girls are being taught how to read and write.  These positive comments, along with Gu’s general upbeat demeanor, seem to inspire both Cuiqiao and Hanhan and make them more cheerful.  Gu even gets Hanhan to talk and sing, which leads to the boy singing a bizarre bed-wetting song.  Gu responds to this by teaching the boy to sing an optimistic Communist song.

3.  Upcoming Events
However, Cuiqiao, who was betrothed to an older man as a small child, learns that her future in-laws want the arranged marriage to take place soon, in April.  This is evidently alarming to her, and when she has a chance to speak with Gu alone, she asks him if his army needs any women who can sing.  (Gu answers in the affirmative.)  In fact all along, Cuiqiao has been shown singing beautiful songs when she is alone, often with lyrics that she has composed herself, and we know  that she is a good singer.  But the songs of these people tend to be sad songs, reflecting their generally fatalistic perspectives on life. 

Then Gu announces that it is time for him to leave the village and return to his army in the south.  When he departs, both Hanhan and Cuigiao separately sneak out to join him on the road and go with him.  Gu sends Hanhan back home, but when he meets Cuiqiao further on down the road, she tells him she wants to join his army (and thereby flee the grim servitude of a loveless marriage). Gu tells he is not allowed by his superiors to take her with him, but he will seek official permission from his unit and return for her later.  Cuiqiao asks him to promise to return by April, and then as he walks away, she sings an optimistic song for him.

4.  Departure

In April, Gu hasn’t arrived yet, and Cuiqiao is briefly shown being subjected to the traditional bride-demeaning wedding ceremony like that which we had seen at the beginning of the film.  Cuiqiao’s glum circumstances are contrasted with parallel scenes showing Gu back in Yan’an watching soldiers from the Eighth Route Army performing a vigorous coordinated dance celebrating their ferocity.  In the north it is all passivity, while in the south it is potency.
  
Shortly thereafter, Hanhan is seen carrying out the chore that used to be done by Cuiqiao, going to the Yellow River to fetch water.  At the river bank he sees Cuiqiao, who has sneaked over there with the intention of escaping by crossing the big river in a small boat and going to join the Eighth Route Army on her own.  Hanhan warns her that it is too dangerous to cross the big river on her own, but Cuiqiao can’t be deterred.  She gets into the boat and rows off into the river waters, singing an optimistic Communist song as she goes.  As she disappears into the evening dusk, Hanhan on the shore can still hear her singing, but her voice suddenly ceases in mid verse.  Hanhan calls out with alarm into the darkness

5.   Gu Qing Returns

In something of a coda to the film, Gu Qing is shown returning to the village and finding Cuiqiao’s home empty.  All the male peasants have gone out onto the loess hills to pray fervently to the Dragon Lord in the sky for rain.  The fanatical supplicants are all bare-chested and wearing ceremonial head wreaths of leaves.  Among the crowd is Hanhan, who turns his head and sees Gu Qing on a hill way in the back.  He tries to go back towards Gu, but he is unable to work his way through the swarming crowd that is sweeping everyone forward towards some unseen destination dictated by their superstitious ritual.  The final shot of the film shows the empty loess hills and Cuiqiao’s wistful voice in the background singing a verse of hope for a Communist future.


Thus the ending of Yellow Earth yields a somewhat problematic verdict concerning the efficacy of the Communist message on the stubborn peasants’ way of life.  Cuiqiao appears to have died trying to escape her confining circumstance and find imagined liberation with the Eighth Route Army.  And Hanhan seems unable to reunite with Gu at the end.  In fact the way those final shots are composed suggests that the image of Gu at the end may be only a mirage.  So the path to salvation is elusive here. 

Even Chen Kaige, himself, seems to have been, in retrospect, of two minds about the film’s message [5].  He had started with Ke Lan’s uncomplicated novel Echo in the Deep Valley, but after spending a month in northern Shaanxi in early 1984 researching the local way of life there, he made considerable adaptations to Ke Lan’s story [4].  And he added to the story a moody tone, which is reflected in the film’s evocative folk-song motif, the atmospheric soundtrack music by Jiping Zhao, and Zhang Yimou’s context-grounded cinematography.  In particular, Zhang Yimou’s many long shots giving considerable screen space in the foreground to the hilly and dusty loess terrain maintain a context and feeling of desolation throughout the film.

So although a straightforward interpretation of Yellow Earth might see the film as just a stark confrontation between modern thinking and backwardness, when we watch the film we can see that it is not quite that simple.  In fact we might say that there are two main perspectives that are present in the film [4]:

• Sympathy for the authentic integrity of the native people and their connection to the Chinese essence.
   
• Categorical, reductionist judgement of the native peasants’ backwardness and need of reform.

And critics suggest that both perspectives are present here at the same time.  Commenting in this regard, W. K. Cheng has said [4]:

“‘Yellow Earth’, therefore, is courageous, not just in the sense that it shuns the comfort of certainty by shirking the socialist formula, but also because in doing so, it exposes itself to the nether world of ambiguities, incongruities, uncertainties and anguish that has accompanied the Chinese quest for modern nationhood in resalable memory.  What makes ‘Yellow Earth’ so intriguing and, for many, emotionally arresting is not that it restores certainty to the Chinese collective identity, quite the contrary to Chen Kaige’s apparent intent, but rather that the film’s symbolic intensity reenacts the internal tensions in the modern predicament of national reconstruction.”

Other critics have looked at the film, from a postmodernist perspective, as a piece of abstract text to be analysed [6,7].  In this connection Esther Yau has mulled over the curious fact that two of the most dramatic elements in the narrative – Cuiqiao’s grim marriage ceremony and Cuiqiao’s ultimate disappearance in the water – are glossed over and barely covered in the cinematic presentation [7].  Hence apparently to her, the hidden meaning of the film must be found elsewhere.

But I think perhaps the most fruitful critical path to follow lies in the Daoist direction.  Along this line of thinking, the modernist Communist and traditionalist peasant perspectives can be considered to be embodiments of the Daoist yin-yang polarity [8,9].  According to this formulation,

• yin symbolically suggests the notions of femininity, dark, wetness, cold, passivity, disintegration, etc.
   
• yang symbolically suggests the notions of masculinity, light, warmth, dryness, activity, etc.

According to this way of seeing things, the peasant, traditionalist perspective embodies the yin principle, and the Communist, modernist perspective embodies the yang principle.  But it is not as though one should choose one of these to the exclusion of the other.  Both yin and yang are needed and must be maintained in the proper balance.  In this connection Mary Ann Farquhar has remarked [9]:

“A Daoist reading of Yellow Earth gives a meaning that is seen and felt directly, a meaning beyond the images and words. The complexity and depth of the human lives are rendered in stark images against the vast backdrop of the natural world. Minimalized tone, colour and composition are reminiscent of the restraint of classical Chinese painting. Songs and silence overlay the imagery and evoke the lyricism and elusiveness of traditional Chinese poetry.“

Anyway, whatever take you want to adopt, Yellow Earth offers a fascinating view of the complex Chinese society undergoing dramatic change.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Walter Goodman, “China’s ‘Yellow Earth’", The New York Times,  (11 April 1986).   
2. Yang Ping, “A Director Who is Trying to Change the Audience; A Chat with Young Director, Tian Zhuangzhuang”, in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, (ed. and trans. by Chris Berry), British Film Institute”, (1991), p. 127.
3. Dan Edwards, “Framing the Heavy Weight of History: Yellow Earth”, Senses of Cinema, (May 2015).       
4. W. K. Cheng, “Imagining the People: ‘Yellow Earth’ and the Enigma of Nationalist Consciousness”, The China Review, vol. 2, no. 2, (Fall 2002), pp. 37-63.  
5. Chen Kaige, “Quanli zou Shaanbei” (“Trekking Northern Shaanxi for a Thousand li”), Dianying Yishu, no. 4, (1985).
6. Chris Berry, “Neither One Thing nor Another: Toward a Study of the Viewing Subject and Chinese Cinema in the 1980s”, New Chinese Cinemas, (ed. by Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, Esther Yau), Cambridge University Press, (1994), pp. 88-113.
7. Esther C. M. Yau, “‘Yellow Earth’: Western Analysis and a Non-western Text”, in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, (ed. by C. Berry), British Film Institute, (1991), pp. 22-33.
8. Roy Stafford, “Yellow Earth (China 1984)”, The Case for Global Film, (3 May 2007).    
9. Mary Ann Farquhar, “The ‘hidden’ gender in ‘Yellow Earth’”, Screen, volume 33, issue 2, (1 July 1992).