Tainted Love by the Dye Vat

By RICHARD CORLISS

Sometimes people don't notice a good movie until somebody bad steps on it. To Western eyes, Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou might seem to be just another pretty retelling of a familiar triangle: a young woman, her elderly husband and her lover. Ju Dou plays like Phaedra mixed with The Postman Always Rings Twice -- until the woman bears a son who grows ripe with vengeance, and the movie becomes a bitter Bad Seed.

But after Ju Dou was nominated for a foreign-film Oscar last month, the Chinese authorities insisted that it be withdrawn from consideration. (The Motion Picture Academy rejected the demand.) Nor have the Chinese allowed the film to be shown publicly on the mainland, though it has played to acclaim elsewhere in the Far East and in Europe. Suddenly, this spare melodrama acquired political significance. Zhang, 40, whose previous film, Red Sorghum, made him the brightest light of emerging Chinese cinema, became both an international cause celebre and a man without a local audience. "To get Ju Dou past the censors," Zhang says, "I have agreed to consider recutting some parts. But I never heard back from them."

If the movie seems enshrouded by fate, so are its characters. Jinshan (Li Wei) runs a dye factory in northwestern China in the 1920s. This vile old man has taken a young wife, Ju Dou (Gong Li), who is made a slave to his viciousness. In bed he gags and harnesses her and rides her like a donkey, and the night bleeds with her shrieks. But the degradations stir Ju Dou's willfulness and sensuality. Now she undresses before the avid eyes of Tianqing (Li Baotian), her husband's adopted son. By abandoning herself to him, she hopes to liberate the captive nation of her heart.

The story is primal, and so are Zhang's cinema strategies. Everything is told through gestures and colors. In the undressing scene, the beautiful Gong Li (who is the director's offscreen companion) wordlessly expresses the range of Ju Dou's feelings, from shame to rebellion to cool majesty. And with its sensuous color scheme -- reds, yellows, blues, in bold and subtle tonalities -- Ju Dou looks like a dream of carnage at sunrise. When the couple make love by the dye vat, a long bolt of red fabric unravels past Ju Dou's face: an ornament to her ecstasy and a hint of the blood to be spilled. The lovers cannot wash out the stain of their passion. This is a movie about taint.

Ju Dou is an austere thriller with one lingering mystery: Why was it shelved? Did the old husband -- brutal, impotent, self-deluding -- offer the Chinese rulers a disturbing mirror image of themselves? Did Ju Dou's child -- twisted, ruthless, utterly inhuman -- remind the authorities uncomfortably of the '60s Red Guard? Maybe the film was deemed too sexy for Chinese viewers. Though not much flesh is exposed, Ju Dou is a powerful essay on sexual longing, grounded in time-honored dramatic elements: fire, water, pain and lust.

China's film bureaucracy is notoriously stubborn. But Zhang, who as a young man sold his blood to buy his first camera, is determined to keep making films at home. "I don't think I could go on with my work abroad," he says. "Where could I find a place overseas that looks like the Chinese countryside?" That is the capping irony: China never looked more ravishing than it does through Zhang's camera eye. The censors never looked more myopic than when they suppressed and orphaned the most intelligently gorgeous film since The Last Emperor.

With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing