Volume 40, Number 12 · June 24, 1993
Unjust Desserts
By Jonathan D. Spence
The Story of Qiu Ju
a film by Zhang Jimou
Can there be any justice in today's China? It is the deepest question that the film director Zhang Yimou has asked so far. His best-known earlier films, sexually supercharged, suffused with violence or the threat of it, always found some politically neutral ground by pretending to have nothing to do with the People's Republic. Red Sorghum,[1] set in the banditravaged northeast of China during the warlord period of the 1920s, reached its hellish climax with the Japanese invasion of World War II; Ju Dou was placed in a time of unspecified 'feudal exploitation' where poverty and passion precluded politics; Raise the Red Lantern[2] etched a claustrophobic vision of the sexual politics of the past that only edged into recent times with some flickers of the 1930s, revealed episodically in details of dress and snatches of dialogue.
Review, 2292 words
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