You Love to See It: Raise the Red Lantern

Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern opens with a close shot of Songlian (Gong Li) assenting with stoic misery to end her university career and marry in accordance with her father and stepmother’s wishes. We never see her parents, just as we never see a clear shot of her wealthy husband’s face. Instead we linger on Songlian as she says what she knows is expected of her, tears running in silence down her sullen but immaculately composed face. For the remainder of the film we will see her almost exclusively from a distance, swallowed by the monumental courtyards and cold, expansive rooms of her husband’s family estate.

That lack of visual intimacy defines the film’s approach to the relationships between women caught together in domestic captivity. The four wives of Chen Zuoqian, usually referred to as “the master”, live in isolation from the world in a palace of soaring brick and stone. In their apartments they sit at low tables beneath high, pale ceilings. In their courtyards they appear as scuttling insects, dwarfed by the walls around them. Even on the rooftops of the compound Zhang keeps the camera low, never letting us see too much of the sky or of the outside world. The compound, never departed even by so much as a step after Songlian’s arrival, takes on a kind of floating, ethereal feeling.

The compound’s rigid hierarchy and isolation, along with the family tradition of bestowing special privileges upon whichever concubine the master has slept with most recently, encourages competition between Songlian and his other mistresses. We never see a functional area of the compound — no kitchens, baths, or laundries — only the concubines’ dorm-like apartments, the courtyards between them where they are made to wait each night to see who their husband will favor, and the long, cold corridors which connect them. The palace swallows not just the concubines but their relationships to one another. When Songlian cuts Zhuoyun’s ear in a fit of pique, we know it only by Zhuoyun’s scream. When the master’s servants hang Meishan for adultery we never so much as see the body. Again, only a scream tells us what happened in the disused little room hidden away in a rooftop corner.

The death room is the film’s single most potent image of domestic horror. It isn’t just that it’s a place where women have died, but that it’s a place for killing women. It exists within the compound not just because it would risk scandal to kill a concubine outside its walls but because even in death they still belong to the Chens. The palace enfolds them entirely, first hiding their lives and at last dragging their bones down into its hidden bowels. In Raise the Red Lantern’s minutes-long final shot we see Songlian, her mental health broken by the trauma of Meishan’s death, walking vacantly around one of the compound’s courtyards. As the camera pulls back she continues her aimless wandering, fading in and out of focus as time passes in indeterminate smears. Only the house endures unchanged.