Raise the Red Lantern

Until the so-called Fifth Generation of film-makers came along in the early Eighties, people thought of Chinese cinema in terms of strident propaganda films such as The Red Detachment of Women.

But the arrival of the new wave of young directors changed all that. The authorities viewed young Turks Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou with some suspicion, but Westerners took them to their hearts. And no film had a more startling effect internationally than Raise the Red Lantern.

It is set in the still feudal Twenties and it stars Gong Li (left), the director's lover at the time, as a young student who agrees to become the fourth wife of an ageing but still powerful clan leader.

Only 19, she finds herself confined in the leader's palatial palace, where the red lanterns of the title are hung outside the rooms of whichever wife the old man fancies that night.

She is clever as well as pretty, but the more she succeeds, the worse the jealousy of the other wives becomes. Zhang's shrewdest trick here is never to show us the old man - only his wives and servants.

This claustrophobic but richly beautiful film can be taken as a political allegory as well as a romantic tragedy or paranoid psychological thriller. But without Gong Li's incredible presence it would only be half as good.