Ju Dou movie review & film summary (1991)

The infant grows into a hateful, strong-willed little monster, while the old man grows older and eventually cripples himself in an accident. He has a cart built, in which he pushes himself around his domain, while the nephew and wife continue their affair. Their deception becomes even more dangerous when the child grows old enough to understand what is going on; ironically, he resembles the sour merchant more than the lusty young man who fathered him.

The ending of "Ju Dou" is as lurid and melodramatic as anything conceived by Poe or filmed by Bunuel, and it exhibits justice completely untempered by mercy. But long before the gory finale, the Chinese censors had apparently already decided to suppress this film, which was directed by a young turk named Zhang Yimou. The film was suppressed in China, but went on the international festival circuit, and won a best director award at Cannes and the Golden Hugo at Chicago before becoming one of this year's Oscar nominees in the foreign language category, over the official objections of the Chinese.

Why did the Chinese film establishment find "Ju Dou" so offensive? It is tempting for us to read it as a political parable, to see the old merchant as an example of the old order of Maoism, and the hateful boy as a symbol of the Red Guard. But the Chinese might just as easily have been offended by the sexuality, which is frank for a Chinese film and for a puritanical society.

The film appealed to me for two reasons. First, because of its unabashed, lurid melodrama, in which the days are filled with scheming and the nights with passion and violence. Second, because of its visual beauty. When the Technicolor company abandoned its classic three-strip process for reproducing color on film, two of its factories were closed down but the third was packed up and sold to China, and that is why the bright colors in the vats of the textile mill will remind you of a brilliance not seen in Hollywood films since the golden age of the MGM musicals. Not that this story would have been very easily set to music.

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