Ju Dou is the second film in the historical trilogy, also including Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern, that made Zhang Yimou China's most prominent international director. Made after the Tiananmen Square tragedy of 1989, it is a deeply pessimistic film. Set vaguely in the prerevolutionary past, the plot revolves around a dye workshop whose impotent and sadistic master marries a young wife, played by the luminously defiant Gong Li. She and his nephew fall in love, but ultimately they are too weak and too fearful to resist. The possibilities for allegorical reading are all too obvious, so it is not surprising that the release of the film in China itself was held up for some years. Zhang Yimou started out as a cinematographer, so it is also not surprising that the film makes full use of the visual possibilities of an environment literally draped in multihued fabric.-Chris Berry