Princesses in A Pretty Prison

By RICHARD CORLISS

RAISE THE RED LANTERN Directed by Zhang Yimou

Screenplay by Ni Zhen

Beauty is suspect these days. Any movie that luxuriates in decor and landscape will be seen to dawdle (Aren't these the passages we all skipped over in the novels our English teachers demanded we read?). A pretty face in a pretty picture stirs all sorts of righteous suspicions about artists who wallow in nostalgia for the glamorous artifacts of a despotic past.

So the physical splendor of Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern can seem at best anachronistic, at worst reactionary. Even the film's nomination for this year's foreign-language Academy Award might attest to the bland gentility of its virtues, if only because Red Lantern reprises the dour theme and visual extravagance of 1988's big winner, The Last Emperor. But this obscures the point of a brave, passionate and highly entertaining work of art. In the best movies, style reflects substance. And in this story of a wealthy man in 1920s China and the four women he keeps in pampered imprisonment, the decor underlines the sad fable of Woman as ornament. As the heroine says, "I'm just one of the master's robes. He can wear it or take it off."

Her name is Songlian (Gong Li), and she has just come to be the fourth concubine of the master (Ma Jingwu). The first mistress is old and irrelevant; the second is ingratiating, lethal, with "a Buddha's face and a scorpion's heart"; the third a saucily imperious opera singer. Each day the chamberlain will raise the red lantern in front of one of their houses, and that woman will be blessed with the master's favors. His strategy, supported by millenniums of male domination, is divide and conquer. So the caged princesses must play power games, with their rivals as opponents and their servants as pawns. Subtly, sullenly, the women flaunt their femininity -- and in doing so destroy any chance for their sisterhood to flower. Songlian, the youngest, is the first to rebel against this system. A tragic comeuppance awaits her.

The emotional anchor for all Zhang's films is Gong Li -- her face a map of cool insurrection, her figure proud and voluptuously Western. But Red Lantern offers other, more exalted orders of ogling. As it plays out its melodrama, it | radiates a ravishing color scheme; it delights in the symmetrical framing of gorgeous objects, human and architectural. For the Westerner, it offers a tour of exotic lands and customs: China in its last imperial gasp. How very sumptuous, you will say of the visual style -- though Red Lantern was made for an impossibly thrifty $1 million.

And how very Chinese -- though this film, like Zhang's earlier Ju Dou, has yet to be shown on the mainland. The authorities see that both pictures, about rebellious young people crushed by mean old men, abound in dangerous political implications. And so, to their eternal discredit, the old men who run China have deprived their nation of the profound and pertinent pleasures that China's best filmmaker has provided for the rest of the world. Zhang is one in a billion. When will the billion get to see his work?