Ju Dou

As the story unfolds, cruelty mutates rather than disappears. Old Yang’s eventual paralysis from a robber attack does not end his tyranny; it merely transforms it. Societal practice has made Yang a burden to be cared for.   Ju Dou can no longer contain the secret and tells him the fact that the child is not his.  Yang becomes this grinning figure in a wooden bucket with wheels who moves around the factory with wooden poles.  At one point, he tried to push the young child into a dye vat, but failed.   Worse still, the child raised amid lies, repression, and fear matures into the film’s most chilling figure. Bald-headed, staring emotionless, judgmental, and aligned with authority over blood, he becomes a living embodiment of oppression.

“Passion is not softened; it is punished. Beauty is not redemptive; it is complicit.”

Ju Dou was heavily censored during its original release by Chinese film authorities. While Western critics often read the film as a critique of Maoism or the Cultural Revolution, with Old Yang as feudal tyranny and the child as ideological fanaticism, the offence may have been simpler and more damning. The film insists that repression touches everything in life, from sex, family, lineage, and truth itself. Its justice is absolute and merciless. No one escapes unscarred; freedom arrives only through annihilation or anarchy. Seen today, it stands as an argument for excess. In an era when prestige cinema often equates seriousness with restraint, Zhang’s film reminds us that melodrama, when wielded with intelligence and conviction, can cut deeper than realism.

Today, the more accessible work of Ang Lee or the glossy Wong Kar-Wai’s series Blossoms Shanghai shows color and glitz as a metaphor. Sex is a thought in the money world of saving face. Passion is not softened; it is punished. Beauty is not redemptive; it is complicit. Visually ravishing and morally devastating, Ju Dou transforms erotic melodrama into political tragedy, using colour, sex, and cruelty to expose how authoritarian systems reproduce themselves through fear and bloodlines.