30th Anniversary of the Red Lantern Film
On September 10, 1991, at the Venice International Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival, the premiere of Zhang Yimou's film took place, the literal translation of the title of which (Da hong deng long gao gao gua 大红灯笼高高挎) sounds like "The big red lantern".
In the Russian-language box office, you can find two translations of the title of this film: "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Light the Red Lantern". Everyone is free to choose the name that he likes best. Meanwhile, the story of the famous Chinese writer Su Tong, on which this film is directed, is called "Wives and Concubines". And this title probably best reflects the content of the film, since it describes the life and relationships of four wives of one master in China in the 20s of the 20th century.
At the aforementioned Venice Film Festival, Zhang Yimou's film was nominated for the highest award, the Golden Lion. But the jury of the film festival, chaired by the Italian filmmaker Gian Luigi Rondi, found the picture of the Soviet filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov "Urga (Close to Eden)" more worthy of this award. Among the 22 nominees for the highest award of the festival was another film quite worthy of victory - "The Fisher King" by Terry Gilliam. But by the decision of the jury, Zhang Yimou, as well as Terry Gilliam, were awarded the Silver Lion Award for Best Director.
A little later, in November 1991, Zhang Yimou's film was nominated for the Bronze Horse - the highest award at the Stockholm International Film Festival. But even here the jury gave preference to another picture - the film by Lars von Trier "Europa".
At the beginning of the next year, 1992, Zhang Yimou was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. However, the American Film Academics awarded their prize to the Italian film "Mediterraneo" directed by Gabriele Salvatores. In the same year, Zhang Yimou's film received the David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Film from the Italian Film Academy. In the competition for this award, "Raise the Red Lantern" beat Ridley Scott's "Thelma & Louise" and Woody Allen's "Shadows and Fog".
In 1993, "Raise the Red Lantern" was awarded the BAFTA Best Foreign Language Film. Among the nominees for this award was, in particular, the French film "Les amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge)" by Leos Carax.
Zhang Yimou's film "Raise the Red Lantern" was met with almost 100% enthusiasm from film critics. One of the most respected American film critics, James Berardinelli, gave the film 4 out of 4 stars and wrote in his review: "Raise the Red Lantern is one of the more sublimely beautiful and openly disturbing films of the 1990s. It is also the best work to date turned in by the actress/director combination of Gong Li and Zhang Yimou. Raise the Red Lantern is one of those all-too-rare motion pictures capable of enthralling audience members while they're watching it, then haunting them for hours (or days) thereafter." American film critic guru Roger Ebert also praised the films as highly as possible and included him in his list of "Great Movies."
Russian film critics also rated Zhang Yimou's film quite highly. Sergey Kudryavtsev gave the film 8.5 stars out of 10 possible and noted in the review that "Zhang Yimou ... confirms the highest visual and cinematic culture, stunningly building the composition, fascinatingly alternating close-ups and general plans taken from above (by the way, the shooting took place on the island of Taiwan, in a Chinese manor that has preserved its centuries-old way of life). This director is almost the first in the modern cinema of the People's Republic of China who turned to the millennial traditions of the Chinese worldview and proved that, despite all the prohibitions and ideological dictates, China's culture has close ties with the ancient philosophy and system of attitude to human existence."
Another authoritative Russian film critic Yevgeny Nefedov, who, as I have repeatedly noted, is able to see the social background in the most seemingly intimate work, and in this film he saw almost a revolutionary manifesto. So, in his review, he writes: "Let's appreciate the irony of history. The red color in which the lanterns are painted, lit and hung out in the chambers of the wife with whom the gentleman intends to spend the night, has managed to be filled with a different meaning – it began to be associated with the revolution, and a few decades later it is the new content that will officially prevail. It's not just class contradictions that still penetrate the high walls – they are expressed, for example, in the actions of the maid Yan'er, who secretly dreams of becoming the next chosen one of the owner, consumed by jealousy, helping to weave intrigues against her mistress. The class principle, which has been carefully protected for centuries, as such, is being destroyed from within. A principle that strikingly does not correspond to fleeting trends, but to the fundamental (understood in a materialistic way) conditions for the functioning of society and the state."
The rating of the film by ordinary moviegoers is characterized by the following figures: 69% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this movie ratings from 8 to 10. Taking this into account and the above, the rating of Zhang Yimou's film "Raise the Red Lantern" according to FilmGourmand's version was 9,942 which allowed it to take 46th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
