An ocean of scarlet silk floods the screen, a river of color so saturated it seems like an open wound in the fabric of reality. The immense bolts of cotton, hung to dry like the banners of a defeated empire, billow in the courtyard of Yang Jin-shan's dye mill, a claustrophobic microcosm that Zhang Yimou transforms into a stage for a tragedy of Sophoclean proportions. In "Ju Dou", color is no mere aesthetic flourish; it is blood, rage, repressed passion, and finally, destruction. It is the objective correlative, almost Montalean, of a drama that throbs with the primordial violence of a trapped heart.

We are in 1920s rural China, but we could be in any time or place where the weight of tradition becomes a millstone upon the individual. The young and beautiful Ju Dou (a Gong Li whose expressiveness transcends the very need for dialogue) is sold as a wife to the old and sadistic owner of the dye mill. Jin-shan is impotent, and his frustration translates into nightly tortures, ritualistic abuses that echo between the wooden walls and the dyeing vats. Watching, helpless and consumed by shame, is the man’s adopted nephew, Tian-qing. A character whose weakness is almost more culpable than his uncle's cruelty; a rural Hamlet, paralyzed not by existential doubt but by an atavistic terror of the patriarchy.

The camera of Zhang Yimou and Lü Yue becomes an instrument of an almost ontological voyeurism. It spies through cracks in the wood, through holes in the floor, framing bodies and faces in constricted spaces, underscoring a total lack of privacy that is not just physical, but above all, social. The community, represented by the council of clan elders, is a panoptic eye that watches over the perpetuation of norms. It is in this context of surveillance and imprisonment that the inevitable happens. The attraction between Ju Dou and Tian-qing explodes into a clandestine passion, consummated among the bolts of cloth, in an embrace that is as much an act of love as a desperate rebellion.

Here, Zhang Yimou's genius merges with a sensibility that calls to mind the flamboyant melodramas of Douglas Sirk. As in All That Heaven Allows or Written on the Wind, the Technicolor is not realistic, but psychological. The carmine red of the dye into which Ju Dou accidentally falls, staining her body like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, is the visible seal of a sin that society cannot forgive. The saffron yellow, so vibrant and vital, becomes the color of forbidden hope, of the life that springs from an illicit act. Zhang uses the color palette like a Fauvist, distorting reality to express its emotional essence, building a prison of dazzling beauty from which his protagonists cannot escape. The long strips of dyed fabric are nothing but the colored bars of their cell.

From their union a son is born, Tian-bai. In a perverse twist of fate, the old Jin-shan, gloating and oblivious, claims him as his own, ensuring his lineage. The film, at this point, takes a narrative twist that steers it away from simple adulterous drama and into the territory of Greek tragedy and Zola-esque naturalism. Tian-bai is not the happy fruit of a forbidden love, but the very incarnation of the corrupt system that generated him. Raised to call the old torturer "Father" and his true biological father "Brother," the child becomes a little monster of Confucian morality, an unwitting and merciless guardian of the status quo. His gaze, once innocent, becomes judgmental, his silence a constant accusation. He is the product of a sick environment, a poisonous flower born from a seed of repression, whose loyalty lies with the patriarchal structure that gave him a name and an identity, however counterfeit.

The parable of "Ju Dou" is a fierce, if allegorical, critique of a feudal system whose vestiges, as the directors of the Chinese Fifth Generation well knew, had not been entirely eradicated even by the Cultural Revolution. Shot in the late 1980s, during a period of post-Tiananmen tensions, the film was initially banned in its homeland, precisely because its critique of an oppressive past resonated too strongly with the present. The story of Ju Dou and Tian-qing, unable to live out their love even after the tyrant's grotesque death (he drowns in a dyeing vat, no less), is a metaphor for an entire nation trapped between the desire for individual freedom and the chains of a collectivist and authoritarian ideology.

The film reaches its apex in a crescendo of tragic determinism. Tian-qing, the eternal pusillanimous, never manages to claim his role as father and husband. His inertia is Ju Dou's true condemnation. The tragedy is fulfilled when Tian-bai, now a young man, becomes the agent of fate. In a chilling sequence, he causes the death of his real father, "guilty" of having tried to save the corpse of his putative "father." It is the definitive triumph of the law of the clan over the law of blood and of the heart. The offspring, born of rebellion, becomes the executioner of reaction. It is a desolate Oedipal reversal, where the son does not kill the father to possess the mother, but to defend the symbolic order of the "grandfather," the patriarch.

Ju Dou's final response is an act of nihilistic grandeur. Faced with the collapse of all hope, her love destroyed and her son transformed into a stranger guarding the ashes, she performs the only act of freedom left to her: destruction. She sets fire to the dye mill, to that world of magnificent and cruel colors, in a purifying apocalypse. The flames that devour the scarlet cloths are the final, desperate, and sublime scream of a soul that chooses annihilation over submission. It is an ending that offers neither catharsis nor redemption, but only the desolate beauty of a funeral pyre.

"Ju Dou" is not simply a film about adultery or rural China. It is a chromatic fable about the nature of power, a merciless investigation into the cyclical nature of violence and the ability of oppressive systems to perpetuate themselves through their own victims. Gong Li gives a performance that is a symphony of glances, a treatise on female suffering and resilience written on her face. Zhang Yimou, in his third feature film, already demonstrated an astonishing directorial maturity, orchestrating a chamber melodrama with the ineluctability of a universal epic, and staining the history of cinema forever with the terrible beauty of his unforgettable red. A color that, like sin and sorrow, can never be washed away.