Gong Li Returns to the Screen in a Restored 'Raise the Red Lantern'

Zhang Yimou's "Raise the Red Lantern," winner of the Silver Lion at the 1991 Venice Film Festival, returns to Film Forum on Friday in a newly restored print, running for two weeks.

The film is the fourth collaboration between Zhang and the actress Gong Li, following "Red Sorghum" (1989), "Ju Dou" (1990) and one intervening feature. Critics have long called it her quintessential vehicle. The restoration gives New York audiences a rare chance to test that claim on a big screen.

The plot follows a pattern Zhang had already established. Like "Red Sorghum" and "Ju Dou," "Raise the Red Lantern" is a period piece in which a beautiful young woman, played by Gong, is married off to a geriatric representative of pre-revolutionary China with dire results.

What happens in the film?

Set in the 1920s, the story turns on Songlian, a 19-year-old student. Financial hardship forces her to leave the university and become the fourth wife of a capricious plutocrat more than twice her age.

She arrives at his compound with only a suitcase. There she enters an enclosed world governed by stylized rituals built around the master's nightly choice of concubine.

The mechanics of that world are precise:

• Each woman has her own "house" within the compound.
• Red lanterns are ceremonially raised over the house of the woman chosen for the night.
• The chosen woman receives an elaborate foot massage.
• She also gains the privilege of determining the next day's menu.

The lanterns of the title, in other words, are not decoration. They are the visible instrument of a ranking system that pits the wives against one another for a man's favor.

Why did this film matter in 1991?

The Silver Lion at Venice raised the profile of China's young Fifth Generation filmmakers abroad. At home, the film raised hackles. Zhang's drama was, and remains, ferociously anti-patriarchal: a study of wealth, age and institutionalized female rivalry inside a sealed household.

The film's visual reputation rests on its impeccable formal construction — the symmetry of the compound, the ritualized repetition, the saturated red of the lanterns against grey walls. Zhang's fourth feature is also, by common critical account, the most perfectly fashioned of his early period.

What does the restoration change?

What the new restoration offers is clarity rather than revision. The film's power depends on color and architectural framing, and a fresh print restores both to theatrical scale. For viewers who know Gong Li only from later international work, the film documents the performance that made her name: restrained, watchful, and entirely central to the film's design.

The two-week run also serves as a reminder of how much of Zhang's early reputation rested on a single recurring structure — the young woman sold into an arranged marriage — repeated across three films in three years. Whether that repetition is a limitation or a deliberate trilogy of argument, Film Forum's engagement lets audiences decide for themselves.