Gong Li | TIME
It’s not nearly her best movie, or her toughest role, but the 1994 Qin dynasty epic The Great Conqueror’s Concubine has a scene that beautifully sums up Gong Li’s screen power. She is bathing in a large wooden vat with the lovely Rosamund Kwan, who screams as a large rat swims toward her. In a flash, Gong Li grabs the rodent and tosses it unceremoniously out of the tub.
Many a movie rat, of the human male variety, has tried to strike fear onto Gong Li’s imperious face. Some have defeated her; none have cowed her. She represents, for many moviegoers, indomitable China: the stalwart image of 1.3 billion people, beamed around the world. In seven Zhang Yimou films — beginning with Red Sorghum, made in 1987 when she was just 21 — she overthrew the stereotype of the meek and compliant Chinese female for a new type: the insolent, independent woman. That glare, that stare — it says she will not be broken, and if you try, it’s you who will end up in pieces. Assertive and alluring, she has given Chinese cinema guts and, without half trying, sex appeal.
Moviegoers watched in awe as she stood up to her husbands in Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991). They did so again as she defied the Chinese bureaucracy in The Story of Qiu Ju (1992) — which unlike the previous two was set in contemporary times and echoed the travails of China’s rural poor in its depiction of a wife forced to travel to the city to seek justice for her husband. The film To Live (1994) made its point even more forcefully, directly satirizing China’s communist revolution. Unsurprisingly, mainland audiences missed some of the Gong-Zhang films; the censors either banned them or cut them. But China knew it had a strong symbol, and an irresistible export.
For ages, though, Gong Li refused to export herself. Unlike Shu Qi and Ziyi Zhang, she made no films in the West — until last year, when she got the plum role of the scheming Hatsumomo in Memoirs of a Geisha. She then played a sort of earth-mother drug dealer in Miami Vice, and a nurturer of the young Lecter in Hannibal Rising, to be released next year. But the best news is that, after a decade apart, she’s reunited with Zhang Yimou for his new action epic, Curse of the Golden Flower, opening next month. Two great spirits of Chinese cinema are one again: his vision, her stare.
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