When making a movie a director has
a hundred different little choices to make.
Should line x be said a certain way, should the light point on her face
like this or that. Everything idea or
item that helps create an image or series of images flashing across the movie
screen is a result of one or more of those choices. Mise-en-scene is the term
most often used for the construction of the scene. A director is able to use the set, the
lighting, the costuming and the thousand other aspects of the film to create
meaning outside the narrative. Raise the Red Lantern is a stunning example of
this. This particular film addresses the
inescapable position women and their obligations. The world of the wives in
Raise the Red Lantern is oppressive and as mentioned previously wholly
inescapable.
Songlian enters her marriage with an expression of nothingness. She has no passion for the idea of marriage yet she is in a way forced to accept it. She was an academic, yet she still makes the decision to marry a very rich man and become his fourth mistress. Upon entering the compound she enters her massive new home. It is gigantic, to the point of being a monolithic prison. The further into this ‘home’ she goes the further she gets from freedom. The sheer size of her new home is one signifier of how inescapable her new life is. We never see the master’s part of the house yet we get to see the wives rooms. Each has what in modern America would qualify as a huge individual house. Songlian herself walks much of the compound and reveals that there are many places to disappear within its walls. There are very few staff members so she remains alone for long periods of time, with no one else but one maid to push around. She finds the third wife on the roof of the houses singing. She wonders around and finds the son of the master’s first wife playing his flute. She even finds the room where women have an infamous tradition of dying, and later watches as the third wife gets dragged into that room and is hung.
She watches everything from distances. When she finds the third wife singing on the roof, she doesn’t approach her right away. She listens to her singing, trying to show herself to be not bothered by the disruptions to her solitude and her time with her new husband. Later she watches from a balcony as the same wife dances and sings in her courtyard. When the man reveals who gets the visit from the master they each stand away at their door ways, and she is the furthest from the entrance. She and the master’s son watch each other from a distance. Her prison keeps her distanced therefore from the world. She is solitary and alone, with no connection to the outside world, that could stand for freedom. When the master first looks at Songlian he looks at her from a distance. He sits across the room from her. He tells her to lift one of the famous Red Lanterns and shine light on her face.
Another testament to the instability she is obligated for survival to entertain the master. Success in this venture was marked by the lanterns. The red lanterns were only lit when that wife was chosen for a night with her husband. The entire compound without the lanterns is grey, even the weather is grey. The only other real color we get outside the rooms of the wives is the white snow. The color red is bright and very noticeable. The lanterns glow painted everything red. Inside Songlian’s room and even the servant’s room the lights bath everything red. Then conversely when it comes to light that Songlian had faked her pregnancy the lanterns are covered with black bags. Darkness falls over her part of the house. Then after she’s gone mad and lit the lanterns in the deceased third wife’s she returns to her dull black and white outfit she arrived in. She is trapped by her own black and white nature. She is either in favor or out. The color in her world or lack of it literally translates to how bright a future, or how happy a time she can have. By lighting the lanterns at the home of the third wife she is showing that the wife is free from her prison. She may have lost her love but she has been given a proverbial way out.
The size of the compound, the distances at which the characters interact, and the colors of the film all illustrate that Songlian is trapped in a prison. She is oppressed by the sheer size of her home and the solitude of a life she did not really want to have. She is continually faced with walls, dull colors and solitude to escape is impossible. The only option she has is to find the lights or find madness. For a time she finds the lights, but then when she loses the light she succumbs to madness.
