In line with our efforts to round out my film education by watching more films from China, this is the first film by Zhang Yimou to be covered in this blog. Appropriately enough this is also both Zhang’s directorial debut and the acting debut of Gong Li. I’ve never watched this before but my wife has many times, though she is happy to watch it again. I’ve simply never watched any of Zhang’s early films that made him famous.

Gong Li plays Jiu’er, a young woman who is forced by her father to marry the old and leprous owner of the local distillery. She lives in a rural village whose landscape is dominated by a vast field of wild sorghum. While being carried on a litter from her home to the distillery, she gains the affection of one of her future’s workers. The narrator suggests that he murders her husband to spare her from a sad fate. This leaves Jiu’er as the owner of a distillery that she knows next to nothing about. Fortunately for her, her humble personality allows her to inspire her workers to stay on and run the distillery for her. The film ends with the Japanese invasion and the poster doesn’t leave much room for doubt as to how that turns out.

Red Sorghum shares obvious parallels with Yellow Earth, on which Zhang served as cinematographer, including a strong “color” theme. The color red carries multiple meanings here. One is communism. After Jiu’er inherits the distillery, she runs it as a sort of workers’ cooperative, telling the employees they all have a share in it. She is the boss in name and the workers respect her for it, yet they largely run the company according to their own devices. Another is red, hot-blooded masculinity. There’s a sometimes embarrassingly large amount of naked and sweaty male flesh on display in this film, all of it tinged red, as we watch the workers go about their work. This shows up in the lustily song songs as the workers declare the many benefits of the liquor they make and the way that the besotted worker asserts himself and claims Jiu’er as his own. Finally and predictably, the red also stands for the blood that further stains the sorghum fields as the workers heroically sacrifice themselves to fight against the invasion.

Much like the previous film, the depiction of peasant life in rural China has a sense of the exotic. I was especially fascinated to watch the interactions between the characters, which felt unintuitive to me. One subplot involves the local bandit who at times also feels like the local strongman since he owns a butcher shop. The worker who loves Jiu’er goes to confront him after the bandit kidnaps her for a ransom. By all rights, the bandit should kill for the insult, yet he appears to let him live, perhaps out of respect for his manliness. I’m not even sure that there is much of a government in the area. Yet the workers seem to respect property rights enough to acknowledge Jiu’er as the legal owner of the distillery even though she inherited it under rather shady circumstances and has absolutely no idea how to run it. It’s all rather puzzling to me.

Overall while I found Red Sorghum to be quite good, it is markedly inferior to Yellow Earth in all respects. It has no real insights about peasant life to add and its propagandist tone is much more apparent. Its final exhortation that the people should rise up and strike a blow against the Japanese even at the cost of their own lives and even if they don’t seem to accomplish much is very in keeping with its “red” theme but it is both off-putting and dumb to me.