Raise The Red Movie Analysis

The movie starts off with a girl weeping, telling her mother that she doesn’t want to

marry, that marriage is not what she wants in life, a very rebellious attitude of a girl

aged eighteen. But she is made to marry an old man with three wives, against her will.

The girl, named Songlian, becomes the fourth wife of the “Master”. The story revolves

around the girl’s life as a wife.

The “Master” is shown as this millionaire old man with a vast house. The house is like an

array of living spaces or rooms of the wives, each attached to a courtyard space. The

practice of polygamy is allowed in China to date only if the financial conditions of the

male are good enough to support the number of wives and if the marriages are not seen

as way to obtain male children.

The part the movie focuses on the most is how these wives are seen as nothing

but concubines of the master. There is a tension between all the wives in the house who

refer to each other as sisters. In the scenes showing these sisters together there is

always a sense of jealousy. Each wife wants to outdo the other in order to impress the

Master who chooses where he sleeps every day with a small sort of ‘I pick you’

ceremony which happens every evening before nightfall. The title of the movie, Raise

the red lantern is a reference to this “ceremony” that takes place every day. It is almost

like a formality where in a household worker carries a red lantern to the common

courtyard of the house where the four wives gather at the entrance from that courtyard

to their private courtyard. The job of the worker is to keep the red lantern in front of the

wife whose house the Master has chosen to sleep that night.

There one is only one objective in the mind of all wives, which is to impress the master

so that he chooses to spend the night at their house. In order to do that, there is an act

put up by each of the wives to annoy the other of show dislike and disrespect or