Tag: Cao Cuifen

Raise the Red Lantern (大红灯笼高高挂, Zhang Yimou, 1991)

Posted on by

“Isn’t that a woman’s fate?” 19-year-old Songlian (Gong Li) tearfully asks on defiantly agreeing to drop out of university and become the “fourth mistress” of a wealthy man (Ma Jingwu) in Zhang Yimou’s seminal 1920s-set drama Raise the Red Lantern (大红灯笼高高挂, Dà Hóng Dēnglong Gāogāo Guà). It’s as if she wants to make clear that she has chosen this fate for herself even if, in reality, she has little other choice. She had, in any case, been dependent on her father who has now died. Her step-mother either cannot afford or does not wish to continue paying for her university education, welding her own newfound power and cutting off Songlian’s only possibility of independence.

Even so, it’s clear that she made this decision in temper and has no real idea of what kind of life she has committed herself to. She continues in defiance, declining the palanquin and walking into the master’s house carrying her own suitcase. Encountering the sullen servant girl Yan’er (Kong Lin), she owns her new position as the Fourth Mistress and in someways bends herself to this system by insisting on her superiority, demanding that Yan’er be the one to carry her suitcase into her new home. But it’s after this that she loses all delusion of power. Songlian is encircled by female servants who swarm around her performing various tasks they assure her are “family traditions” which she must now learn to obey.

As the new mistress, and a very beautiful young woman, she enjoys an unusual level of privilege but currently lacks the experience to realise that this holiday period will be short-lived and in reality she has very little currency to bargain with. Introduced to the other mistresses, Songlian begins sizing them up as if she meant to hang on to this crown, but soon realises that they are much more experienced in plotting than she is, and that she has crucially misunderstood the ways in which this world, ruled by arbitrary “tradition”, may work. First Mistress (Jin Shuyuan), an older woman and the mother of the master’s grown up son Feipu (Chu Xiao), is polite but distant, resigned to the fact she can no longer attract the master’s attention but with little to occupy her time. Songlian had thought her major rival to be Third Mistress (He Saifei), a formerly a famous opera singer who tries to leverage her power by interrupting their wedding night claiming that she is ill and calling for the master, little realising that Second Mistress’ (Cao Cuifen) kindness is all strategy and masks a devious heart.

In this way, the master’s compound plays out as an allegory for the wider society. The master himself is never seen clearly and acts merely as a distant authority. With no power of their own, the only currency the women have lies in their proximity to men. These “traditions” pit them against each other to win the master’s favour. Only the chosen mistress has lanterns lit for her in this gloomy environment, receives a foot massage, and gets to decide the menu for the day. But even within this largely female world, there are other divisions in play. Songlian comes to learn that the reason Yan’er took against her, was that she has become sexually involved with the master and hoped that he would make her his official mistress instead. Her hope was an unrealistic as Songlian’s that she would be able to exert control over her life in this environment. The master will never marry a servant girl, and after all he has no need to when she is already sexually available to him, which is the only interest that he has in any of these women outside of their absolute obedience. Wandering around on the upper floors Songlian finds a locked shed ominously referred to as the “death room” where she is told women of past generations hanged themselves, only later coming to understand its grim significance as a symbol of the authoritarian power she now lives under.

In fact, Songlian’s naivety and childish defiance lead to unforeseen consequences including the death of other women trying to navigate this system just as she is. With his trademark use of colour, Zhang opens in the honeymoon period of the summer in which Songlian’s world is illuminated by the warm glow of the red lanterns, only to transition towards autumn and winter in which their light becomes increasingly hellish. White is a colour that has a strong association with death in Chinese culture, and the arrival of the snow enveloping the compound only serves to reinforce the idea of Songlian’s spiritual demise as she comes to realise that there is no escape from this world nor any freedom within it. The fate of the First Mistress presents the very best that she could hope for, leading the dull life of a discarded toy devoid of possibility or emotional fulfilment while otherwise enjoying a fairly basic level of material comfort in return for compliance with the many “traditions” of this world.

The Third Mistress had found a kind of freedom in music, but even Songlian’s flute is taken from her by the jealous master. Eventually she is replaced when the inevitable fifth mistress arrives. The only way in which she can continue to exist in this world is to go mad, wandering the prison-like environment in ghostly fashion wearing the clothes she arrived in and having reverted to a hairstyle only worn by children and very young, unmarried women. In this way the master’s estate becomes a metaphor for the patriarchal superstructure and authoritarianism of the contemporary Chinese society in which there is no such thing as solidarity, only those scrabbling over each other to survive and others so broken they have simply stopped trying.

The 4K restoration of Raise the Red Lantern opens 6th November in UK cinemas courtesy of Central City Media.

Rerelease trailer (English subtitles)

Traces of Justice (神探之痕迹, Chen Sicheng, 2026)

Posted on by

Best known for comedy including the incredibly popular Detective Chinatown series, actor/director Chen Sicheng has been in a more serious mood recently. Like 2024’s literary adaptation Decoded, Traces of Justice (神探之痕迹 shéntàn zhī hénjì) examines China’s 20th-century past but this time through the lens of forensics. Essentially a propaganda piece in praise of the scientific side of law enforcement, the film is in some ways surprising in its implications in hinting at the reasons why these crimes may have occurred along with difficulties of solving them which are often down to political realities.

In 2016, Cui Xun (Zhang Yi) prepares to accept a national honour for his contribution to police sciences while asked to consult on a serial killer case in which the police are struggling to find evidence to charge the suspect with the last remaining victim despite his confession. As evidence of law enforcement’s care for each and every citizen, the policeman in charge brushes off another’s insistence that they don’t need to charge him with the last case because the other 10 are watertight and enough to secure the death penalty. If they don’t officially link him to this case too, the little girl he killed and her family will not receive justice.

The serial killer case reminds Cui of one he investigated back in 1971 in which he pioneered dental indentations being used to identify suspects in the same way as fingerprints. 1971 is, of course, right in the middle of the Cultural Revolution and so Cui is hampered by persistent anti-intellectualism and distrust of science. The first thing he has to do is get his mentor out of a re-education camp, while a girl who narrowly escaped being caught by the killer was vulnerable in that she was currently living alone as both her parents had been “sent down”. The new local police squad leader, Wang (Chen Minghao), also gets in Cui’s way with his “old-fashioned” policing. His officers refuse to let forensics on site first and ruin the crime scene by stomping all over the evidence. One even triumphantly brings a nearby bicycle to dust for prints though his own hands have now been all over it, paying no heed to Cui’s rational response that they’ve no way of knowing if the bike even belonged to the killer.

By 1983, things are quite different. Wang no longer dresses in military uniform while Cui and his team have been given civilian outfits. Cui now has a sizeable team of assistants and students, while a school has been set up to teach modern forensics techniques. Wang secures the crime scene and grants access for the forensics team first. The issue this time around is the chaotic circumstances of the economic reforms. The prime suspect is a man with a rich and influential father who tries to frame a colleague as he had argued with the now murdered boss about black market profiteering. The suspect resents people mentioning the fact that he’s his father’s son, while simultaneously playing the rich kid card with the police by telling them they’re making a big mistake keeping him locked up. Cui is determined to use a broken fingernail found on one of the victims as an identification method, but again faces an uphill battle to have his ideas taken seriously.

One might think that these problems have then been resolved, but the 1998 sequence depicts much of the same anxiety as it begins to become clear that one of the men suspected of blowing up a bus was a disgruntled worker laid off amid the economic changes of the ’90s which saw many factories close. In an ironic touch, Cui’s investigation HQ is located in a disused factory. Like We’re Nothing At All which is inspired by the same incident, the film also suggests the two men involved were a romantic couple and that societal homophobia was a factor in their decision to end their lives.

Cui once again posits new methods of forensic investigation, but at the same time ends up alone with even his assistant leaving him to take up a position in Beijing. His dedication places a strain on his marriage as his wife, a doctor, is forced to pick up his slack given that he is often absent from the domestic space. Nevertheless, his contributions to science are well noted as is his legacy as “China’s Sherlock Holmes”. In some ways, the subtle implication is that the authorities will stop at nothing to catch wrongdoers, so the Chinese citizen is well protected, though this is, in other ways, a little oppressive in the “everything leaves a trace” messaging and may not reflect the reality of modern policing even if the film is surprisingly critical of law enforcement in places, depicting corruption and hinting at violence and forced confessions. Even so, it is at least keen to insist that the police force is a modern institution defined by science and rooted in forensics rather an irrational “gut feeling” or prejudice. Meanwhile, there is also something comforting in the idea that we all leave traces of ourselves in the world when we are gone that transcends a noirish sense of fatalism to become something richer and warmer in the positive impact our lives can have on those around us in whom we live on.

International Trailer (English subtitles)