Thursday - Movies
The Age
Thursday February 21, 2008
Jasmine Women (2004)
World Movies, 8.30pmThis curious melodrama comes from Chinese director Hou Yong, previously the acclaimed cameraman of Zhang Yimou, and based on a novel by Su Tong, whose Raise the Red Lantern was filmed by Zhang Yimou. It stars Zhang Ziyi and Joan Chen, each playing three roles in this generational saga of Shanghai-born mothers and daughters. It begins in 1937, with Mo (Zhang) suddenly becoming a movie star, while her mother (Chen) sits alone in the family's unvisited photographic studio. When the Japanese invade, a pregnant Mo has her stardom vanish overnight. The film then leaps to 1958, and then 1981, with four generations of women trying to work out how to live in times of dramatic political change. What is puzzling is that this unabashed women's melodrama includes some of the most negative representations of women in recent memory, while labelling them heroic. They are intermittently bitter, neurotic, deceitful, callous and dangerous - or all together at once. There may be political and social criticism at work here (a mother falsely accusing her husband of raping their daughter may be highlighting the plague of false accusations in Mao's China), but, given the overall tone, probably not. -- SCOTT MURRAY
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