As befits a film with the word 'red' in its title, Raise The Red Lantern is drenched in colour - reds, yes, and associated oranges, but also notably deep, rich blues (though sometimes almost garishly so, leading me to wonder about the quality of the transfer to the dvd) shaded with black. It's drenched, too, in what I can only describe as a sombre hue - a heaviness and sense of abject constrainedness that Asian directors (here, Zhang Yimou) seem so often to do so well; it's a beautiful and unshakeable film and its suffocating gilded-cage atmosphere is part of that effect. (Beauty as an effect? Well, never let it be said that I'm one to shy away from large claims or assumptions...)
For basically as long as I can remember, I've had the sense that, at some point far in the past, I saw this film, or at least bits of it, and probably Farewell My Concubine too (for some reason I always think of the two together), and had retained - or thought I'd retained - a profound sense of slow, stultifying sadness.[*] Having watched it last night (Friday), I don't think that I'd seen it before - though I'm still not sure, and after all, often it's the memory of how something felt that lingers rather than the memory of the thing itself - but it does have a certain iconic quality (even) on its own terms, a kind of intrinsic statuesquerie. This is augmented by some of the choices made - the way that the master is always occluded, say, as if his identity is irrelevant (as opposed to his symbolic tole), or the striking opening vignette in which Songliang. And as events go forward, things take on a genuinely tragic air.
I have to say, it impressed me more than I liked it - but then I don't know if 'liking' is really a meaningful category or type of response for a film such as this in the first place. There's something in Raise The Red Lantern that I'm not sure I've seen before in a film - something powerful and strange and, I suspect, unshakeable.
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[*] Actually, it was the fact of this coming up in conversation with Steph a while ago which resulted in this viewing - a while later, she'd made a gift of the dvd to me (one of those occasion-less gifts which are always the more appreciated for their lack of a pretext).
