RAISE THE RED LANTERN

New 4k restoration courtesy of Film Movement!

Arguably the film that, more than any other, established China’s Fifth Generation on the international stage, Zhang’s adaptation of Su Tong’s novella of the same name, set in the Warlord Era of the 1920s, stars Gong Li as Songlian, a 19-year-old who, upon becoming the fourth wife of a powerful feudal lord, finds herself in a vicious struggle for power with her husband’s other three spouses. To merely call RAISE THE RED LANTERN a “period piece” doesn’t begin to do justice to its total, immersive evocation of a lost world: its hidebound, stifling moral codes, its decadent luxury, its brittle beauty, and the sadistic power games those living under its immaculate order are forced to play.

Newly restored, the film stands as one of the defining works of Fifth Generation Chinese cinema and international film of the 1990s.

"This film can no doubt be interpreted in a number of ways – as a cry against the subjection of women in China, as an attack on feudal attitudes, as a formal exercise in storytelling – and yet it works because it is so fascinating simply on the level of melodrama." - Roger Ebert