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Pace Godard, the "neorealist musical" of burgeoning consciousness. Landscape voices, a lament for workers emanating from the craggy mountains, the Maoist soldier (Wang Xueqi) takes out pencil and notepad. The northern hinterland ca. 1939, just the realm for gleaning folk songs to be transmuted into Red Army anthems. "They're just bitter songs," shrugs the widowed farmer (Tan Tuo), "suffering is forever, sweetness is short" goes a typical refrain. His daughter (Xue Bai) takes a shine to the bureaucrat, who stokes her curiosity about a wider world of fighting women and sewing men. Perpetually carrying water from the Yellow River, she learns the force of melodic articulation: "When I start to sing the truth, my heart feels like bursting." The Old and the New, as Eisenstein would say, Chen Kaige finds the appropriate fusion of ethnography and expressionism. The arid topography is suddenly packed with members of a wedding procession, the vivid crimson from a bridal palanquin anchors the ceremony where wooden fish are served during a shortage of the real thing. "If a boy gets married, it's happiness / If a girl gets married, it's sadness." The heroine's father sees little purpose to music in the face of demanding soil, elsewhere her little brother (Liu Qiang) offers an ode to bed-wetting. (The Tavianis' Padre Padrone is a crucial mainstay.) Semi-silhouettes in a rural cabin, a dusty screen made to vibrate by rows of drum-smacking youths, supplicants bare-chested and garlanded under a looming cloudless sky—Zhang Yimou is the avid imagesmith on cinematography duty. Nature swallows up the peasant girl, change is a promise echoing in the desert. "Can't the rule be changed?" "We depend on rules for our cause." Zhang has his own betrothed maiden to follow in Red Sorghum.
--- Fernando F. Croce |