Unforgettable … Gong Li in Raise the Red Lantern. Photograph: Era International/Kobal/Shutterstock View image in fullscreen Unforgettable … Gong Li in Raise the Red Lantern. Photograph: Era International/Kobal/Shutterstock Film Review Raise the Red Lantern review – Gong Li gives a decade-defining performance in an addictively ruthless masterpiece Gong simmers with rage, loneliness and humiliation as the ‘fourth mistress’ navigating the intimate political savagery of her husband’s compound in Zhang Yimou’s 1991 drama
Peter Bradshaw Thu 5 Nov 2026 14.00 CET Last modified on Thu 5 Nov 2026 18.12 CET Share Prefer the Guardian on Google R evisiting Zhang Yimou’s grippingly addictive psychological drama from 1991, adapted from a novella by Su Tong , is a reminder of what a great impact this movie made on western audiences. They responded to its arguably westernised tale of a young woman’s desperate loneliness in a sinister environment that resembles something by Charlotte Brontë or Daphne du Maurier. Like Jung Chang’s memoir Wild Swans from the same year, Raise the Red Lantern opened our eyes to 20th-century China’s secret theatre of cruelty and misogyny; elaborate domestic rituals of submission and servitude coexisted with infinitely subtle plotting, resentful manoeuvring and covert denunciation, habits of thought that could so easily be absorbed into Maoism.
Gong Li gives one of the great performances of the 1990s as Songlian, a beautiful, intelligent young woman in 1920s China who is forced to abandon her university studies after just six months because her father has died and there is no longer money for the fees. In the unforgettable opening scene, which unfolds with a single unbroken shot of Gong’s pale face, incandescent with shock and pain, Songlian announces to her callous stepmother (who remains off camera) that she is ready to accept marriage – and then her eyes brim with tears. Her suppressed rage, loneliness and humiliation are to simmer below the surface for the rest of the film.
Songlian arrives at the family compound of her autocratic new husband, Chen (Ma Jingwu), whose face is never clearly seen. This is virtually a walled city-state, subject to Chen’s implacably observed family traditions; Songlian is to be the “fourth mistress” occupying her own quarters, attended to by her own maidservant, the disobedient Yan’er (Kong Lin) who had hoped for “mistress” status herself. There are three other women, each in their own apartment: the stately, impassive “first mistress” Yuru (Jin Shuyuan) of Chen’s own age who has given him a grownup son; the homely, blandly smiling “second mistress” Zhuoyun (Cao Cuifen) who has only managed to give Chen a daughter; and the glamorous, haughty “third mistress” Meishan (He Saifei), a former opera singer who clearly resents Songlian, the new favourite.
Chen presides over it all like a Renaissance Tudor monarch, perhaps deriving unspoken erotic pleasure from capriciously transferring his attentions from one woman to the next. He has a bizarre tradition of putting red lanterns around the apartment of whichever of his mistress-wives he wishes to spend the night with, a decision that is bellowingly announced with elaborate formality by his major domo. (The “first mistress” never gets a red lantern, a mortification she accepts without comment.) And furthermore, the mistress currently enjoying Chen’s favour is allowed a privileged kind of foot-massage from a skilled ancient servant, a kind of quasi-c…