This early effort by the acclaimed Zhang Yimou is a masterfully crafted tragedy set in rural China, at the same time gritty and poetic. It tells the story of a rich and sadistic man whose newly purchased wife falls (conveniently?) in love with the nephew of her husband. It is a story where no one is innocent, and everyone a victim.
It is a visual masterpiece, even though the aspect ratio is quite a double-edged sword: the fullscreen contributes to the idea of enclosure of the characters, but the gorgeous shots in technicolor of the hanging drapes would have been much more striking in widescreen.
Speaking of enclosure, I truly admire how the rich man's life is depicted. The more he loses his body, the more he is absorbed by wood, the skeleton of his family business, and gains power. First losing his legs and being enclosed in a barrel, and that's when he starts to have influence on the family heir; then enclosed in the coffin, literally trumping over his kin and fostering the revenge bound to strike. The final flames are but a welcome purifying force, in a world where even the most innocent child is burdened with the schemes and sins of his family, resulting in the embodiment of grudge.
However, I must say that I struggle to understand the social and family order depicted in the movie, and just a basic form of communication would have prevented the creation of the parricidal monster. The characters' passivity is hard to condone.
It is a visual masterpiece, even though the aspect ratio is quite a double-edged sword: the fullscreen contributes to the idea of enclosure of the characters, but the gorgeous shots in technicolor of the hanging drapes would have been much more striking in widescreen.
Speaking of enclosure, I truly admire how the rich man's life is depicted. The more he loses his body, the more he is absorbed by wood, the skeleton of his family business, and gains power. First losing his legs and being enclosed in a barrel, and that's when he starts to have influence on the family heir; then enclosed in the coffin, literally trumping over his kin and fostering the revenge bound to strike. The final flames are but a welcome purifying force, in a world where even the most innocent child is burdened with the schemes and sins of his family, resulting in the embodiment of grudge.
However, I must say that I struggle to understand the social and family order depicted in the movie, and just a basic form of communication would have prevented the creation of the parricidal monster. The characters' passivity is hard to condone.