Watch Ju Dou For Free

Pretty Good

Crappy film

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

JU DOU is another early effort for Chinese director Zhang Yimou, and one that has much in common with his debut feature RED SORGHUM. Once again Gong Li stars, here playing an unhappily married woman whose mill owner husband abuses her horribly. She ends up having a kid with her husband's nephew, something that seals her fate. As with pretty much all of Yimou's work, this is beautifully shot throughout with some nicely artistic compositions, while the acting is understated and the plot elements subdued; Yimou goes for the naturalistic approach throughout. I found it slow-paced and lacking in engaging characters, only picking up for the effectively tragic climax.

This allegorical melodrama is most notable for its use of color: the film is mostly set in a small dye factory/household and the beautiful, brilliant colors of the dye are in stark contrast to the drabness of the building itself and the ugly lives that are lived there. Life is so ugly because household head Jin-shan is an impotent old man who has recently purchased an expensive young wife. Since he did purchase her, he feels it is his right to beat her every time he fails to perform sexually. Soon, his adopted son Tian-qing gets wind of his step-moms' nightly beatings and he begins to comfort her. It doesn't take much of this comforting to get her pregnant with a son that ends up being even more evil than Jin-shan himself, especially since young Tian-bai refuses to acknowledge Tian-qing in any way.Characterizations are very slim here, most likely to ensure that the viewer doesn't try to look at the characters as anything more than allegorical stand-ins for a government so repressive that they banned the film for portraying an extramarital affair and so stupid that they didn't realize that the film is highly critical of their regime. Jin-shen is the stand-in for the government that treats its people as slaves and he's ironically aided by the ignorant Tian-bai who completely fails to understand the situation and is guided by a misplaced loyalty. Of course the ill-fated central couple is representative of the middle class people who understand the situation they are in but lack the power to change it.The film works as an allegory but comes off as rather unengaging if taken literally since the characters aren't fleshed out. This is a particular problem with Tian-qing as he has numerous chances to better his situation but never acts rationally and Tian-bai who acts completely inhuman. Still, the direction and visuals are handled well enough to keep the film from being a mere exercise in didacticism.

I am a lover of history, and historical films, too, but Ju Dou has a lot of faults. Most of all this movie fails in story telling, by using weak characters and weak plot development. The only areas in which this film deserves the 10, given by many reviewers, in in cinematography, setting, and costume. One reviewer compared this movie to a Greek tragedy, but I don't know of any Greek tragedies that have endings as bad as this one. The only characters that seem to develop in a normal way are the uncle, Jin-shan, and his wife, Jo Dou. The attention that was paid to this awful relationship overshadowed the lack of detail paid to the characters in the rest of the movie.Jo Dou is the only character with a healthy motivation, and her fall is the "T" in the tragedy here. "Uncle" is only motivated by his drive to have an heir. His ancestor-worship calls attention to this, and thus the movie can be taken as religious criticism.Nephew Tian-qing's character was extremely weak, and only flourished in a single act of challenging his uncle. This, coupled with his physical unattractiveness caused the move to be difficult to watch, in spite of the color themes. I don't really understand much about Chinese color symbology, but this is a plus. In one scene, a customer comes to order cloth, 15 yellow (tradition) and 3 red (luck, fire, and energy). There is a lot more yellow than red. This is the main point I think the director is trying to make.Tian-qing's weak character is probably the main thing that made this move hard for me to watch. Second to that is the treatment of the autistic son, Tian-bai. One gets the idea from watching this that in society, and Chinese society especially, some people feel that their children are dropped from trees, and that the only way a child can develop a personality is from encountering other children and playing with them. "Uncle" finally gets a retrieve, when he develops a notion of parenting. This calls attention, perhaps, to the "dirty little secret" not being confronted in our society about autism - that it really has a lot to do with neglecting children. The details of Tian-bai's upbringing that lead to his murderous behavior are almost entirely eliminated from the story.At this point the movie goes upside down, the Uncle's develops moral superiority as well as ownership of the child, and for Tian-qing and Ju Dou, everything is downhill from there. I might revise my opinion of this if there was a list of "top-ten downer movies of all time".

Ju Dou is certainly an engaging enough film, because I like a filmmaker like Zhang Yimou who can be so fascinating with deep hues of colors in his costumes, sets, and cinematography. That's the way he tells his films' stories. And it's beautifully expressive, even in a grainy, lower- budgeted movie like Ju Dou.In its story of lustful vindication against a frightfully disgusting character, it can seem as if it's going in the wrong direction, sometimes disappointing the viewer's lustfully vengeful expectations for the movie's hero and heroine, but it should be realized that Ju Dou is a movie about passion vs. tradition, the emotional tempests people would go through under the businesslike customs and conventions of the time period.Ju Dou is worth seeing for its directors and writer's intuitive understanding of its drama and Gong Li's intense early performance. Hero and House of Flying Daggers are much more breathtaking than this early work of Yimou's, but for fans of emotional, romantic yet biting character dramas, and for fans of Asian cinema, I think you will be moved.