Yang T. returns from selling silk for his adoptive uncle, Yang J., who dyes fabrics to sell and is a cruel man who beats his wives to death because they fail to produce sons. His new wife, Ju Dou(Gong Li) is also abused by her husband and Yang T. sees her bruises and they soon begin an affair, Ju Dou has a child, Tianbai, and she pretends the kid is her husbands. Yang J. suffers a stroke and winds up in a wheelchair. He discovers his wife's deception and figures out that the boy is not his. He tries to kill the boy. The couple stop him and hang him in a barrel from the ceiling overnight. Tianbai grows up to be an angry boy and the rumors surrounding his mother's infidelity turn him vindictive. Karma has a way of paying people back and Ju Dou is no exception. Gong Li is beautiful in the title role and the ending will stay with you for a long time.

I am a lover of history, and historical films, too, but Ju Dou has a lot of faults. Most of all this movie fails in story telling, by using weak characters and weak plot development. The only areas in which this film deserves the 10, given by many reviewers, in in cinematography, setting, and costume. One reviewer compared this movie to a Greek tragedy, but I don't know of any Greek tragedies that have endings as bad as this one. The only characters that seem to develop in a normal way are the uncle, Jin-shan, and his wife, Jo Dou. The attention that was paid to this awful relationship overshadowed the lack of detail paid to the characters in the rest of the movie.Jo Dou is the only character with a healthy motivation, and her fall is the "T" in the tragedy here. "Uncle" is only motivated by his drive to have an heir. His ancestor-worship calls attention to this, and thus the movie can be taken as religious criticism.Nephew Tian-qing's character was extremely weak, and only flourished in a single act of challenging his uncle. This, coupled with his physical unattractiveness caused the move to be difficult to watch, in spite of the color themes. I don't really understand much about Chinese color symbology, but this is a plus. In one scene, a customer comes to order cloth, 15 yellow (tradition) and 3 red (luck, fire, and energy). There is a lot more yellow than red. This is the main point I think the director is trying to make.Tian-qing's weak character is probably the main thing that made this move hard for me to watch. Second to that is the treatment of the autistic son, Tian-bai. One gets the idea from watching this that in society, and Chinese society especially, some people feel that their children are dropped from trees, and that the only way a child can develop a personality is from encountering other children and playing with them. "Uncle" finally gets a retrieve, when he develops a notion of parenting. This calls attention, perhaps, to the "dirty little secret" not being confronted in our society about autism - that it really has a lot to do with neglecting children. The details of Tian-bai's upbringing that lead to his murderous behavior are almost entirely eliminated from the story.At this point the movie goes upside down, the Uncle's develops moral superiority as well as ownership of the child, and for Tian-qing and Ju Dou, everything is downhill from there. I might revise my opinion of this if there was a list of "top-ten downer movies of all time".

Controversial melodrama from China has a middle-aged man falling for the abused wife of his "adopted" uncle while working in a dye plant on the outskirts of town. Directors Fengliang Yang and Yimou Zhang have fashioned a no-holds-barred human tragedy here, painted in rich, vivid colors, but the downbeat tone of the whole thing is a bit wearing, especially since the film runs too long. Plenty of florid atmospherics--and smoldering Gong Li as the wife--still hold interest. Banned in its own country for showing the Chinese people in a negative light, the movie went on to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film. ** from ****

A good movie makes you feel and this one does that ...the Technicolor is amazing and the story makes you pause and reflect. The story is pretty old boy meet girl and girl is unavailable. No new twists, she is married and her husband is older and cruel (of course). Additionally he is hell bent on making a son and has "gone" through a couple of wives already. However, as this film develops the viewer feels compassion for the the would be lovers. There are places, one of the more pivotal point in the film is where the husband has an accident and how the protagonist reacts. Basically when I finished watching the film I felt quiet-not peaceful just a bit disturbed. The images from the movie continued to play in my head and it just made me wonder about the levels of cruelty people suffer through and place upon others. ten lines is a lot to write...help me end this now, I am starting to wonder if I should have just left it at voting...