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FROM THE ARCHIVES...
"REPUBLIC ENEMY NO. 1"
Gong Li is China's first great film star. With her longtime director and sometime lover, Zhang Yimou, she has dared to tell the unpalatable truth about the suffering of her people. Is she now too popular - and critically acclaimed in the West - to be silenced? To stand alone in the eerie darkness of Tianamen Square late at night is to begin to understand the nature of absolute political power. All around in the thick smog that seems permanently to enshroud the Chinese capital of Peking, the monstrous images of unfettered power leer down upon the silence. High on the walls of the Forbidden City, the fat 60-foot-high face of the greatest tyrant of them all gazes genially across three kilometers at the concrete monstrosity that forms his tomb. To the new generation of young Chinese, Mao is one more dead monster, the genocidal grandiosity of his life forgotten in the sniggering over recent revelations of his sex romps with young girls behind the walls of his private fortress. Just a few yards away, a new China is emerging with a speed that is one of the wonders of a world now fuelled by the power of deregulated money markets sensing the greatest economic Klondike in history. Since China opened its gates to all comers in 1981 after 30 years of total secrecy, new, rampant symbols have been placed over the Peking skyline. The huge yellow double hump of the McDonald's sign now dwarfs even Mao's portrait, and skyscraper hotels are thrusting upwards from the ruins of a still decrepit city. And, perhaps most important of all, on thousands of tiny magazine stalls throughout the city, another face has replaced that of Chairman Mao on the covers of newspapers and glossy magazines. It is the face of a beautiful young film actress - knowing, mischievous and somehow as mysterious as China itself. With this face comes the promise of thrilling things that have been hidden and repressed for decades, even centuries. Sexuality, for sure, is there. There is also romance, perhaps violence and adventure, to replace the stodgy diet of political polemic the Chinese millions have suffered all their lives on the cinema screen and the printed page. If they are lucky and the great collapse of the tottering regime continues, the face of this woman can play an important part in telling them the truth about the suffering, courage, patience and endurance of a country seemingly trapped throughout history inside an unending series of crazed social experiments inflicted on them by one despotic administration after another. It is difficult for Westerners to understand the significance of a 29-year-old actress called Gong Li and a small group of courageous Chinese film-makers who play a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an army of censors. In the Shanghai offices of the Film Bureau of the Ministry of Culture, hundreds of ill-educated and humorless apparatchiks examine very inch of film and scrutinize every line of dialogue, with the express purpose of seeking out treason in every form. But, despite their furious attempts to invoke public disgrace on this small group, even to the point of starving them of money, equipment and distribution, the movies have continued to be made and seen both inside China and - to huge acclaim - in the West. Hidden inside stories featuring peasants, landlords, soldiers, aristocrats, gangsters and Triads, the people of China - and a fascinated outside world - are seeing some of the misery and brutality inflicted on the planet's most populous nation by a ruling elite in the name of communism. This new breed of movie-makers, known as the Fifth Generation, coyly claim they are not political. They just want to make good movies which reflect their country, its people, its wondrous landscapes and, perhaps, just a little of its recent past. And in the process, almost as if the end of the great darkness demanded it, China's first great international film star has been born. Gong Li is tall by Chinese standards and as shapely as any Hollywood star. But it is her astonishing face that draws the immediate attention of all who meet her. Her wide-set eyes seem to change color, from rich brown to dark amber, depending on the light, and there is an absolute geometric stillness in the delicate features of her oval face, which curves almost to a point at her chin. Her hands are long and tapered and they flutter as she talks, and the slow, intricate traditional dance movements she learned as a child mean she moves with a fluidity not even a catwalk supermodel could match. In most of her films she has been covered up in heavy peasant clothing and her face devoid of make-up. But on the set of Shanghai Triad (released here in the autumn), a tale of gangsters and their molls set in the 1930s, Gong was obliged to turn on the full power of the equipment. She grumbled that she "didn't much enjoy" the process of encasing her body in a skintight, almost transparent black silk dress and plastering her face with thick pancake, crimson lipstick and eyelashes almost half an inch long. But a sluttish nightclub singer was what was called for and, good pro that she is, a sluttish nightclub singer was what they got. "It's a bit over the top," she says. "And dreadfully uncomfortable." It is the casual put-down of a wondrously sexual woman who is well aware of her powers and goes to extremes to keep them under wraps. She is a woman who likes her comfort, which normally means loose slacks, heavy woollen sweaters, and a quiet corner of the set where she can cook her own noodles and curl up like a big cat and sleep for half an hour. She likes to sleep. Anywhere and anytime. And she needs it. In the last decade she has made more movies than most of her Hollywood counterparts. But this means nothing to her. She could rightly claim that her movies have been viewed by perhaps 10 times as many people as watch theirs, but she has barely heard of the massively rich American superstars and has not seen their films. Gong Li doesn't speak a word of English and her schedule means she works practically every day. She averages three movies a year and, apart from working with China's most famous rebel director, Zhang Yimou, who discovered her as an unknown theatre player and was, until a few months ago, her lover, she has made movies in Hong Kong and Taiwan and a series of lucrative television commercials for sums that Chinese nationals once only dreamed of. She adamantly refuses to discuss her business dealings, but in one 30-second television commercial alone, made in Taiwan, she picked up £350,000, and those who know the secret ways of movie and television finance estimate that she may now have several million dollars salted away in secret bank accounts in Hong Kong - far from the knowledge and reach of the Chinese communist bureaucrats who watch her every move and monitor every contract. In theory she is still tied, as all Chinese workers are from childhood, to a specific work unit in Peking. She is still on their books as a drama teacher, and officially occupies a tiny one-bedroom flat with a coal-burning stove as the only means of heating and cooking. Furthermore, she is not entitled to leave the country or hold a passport without official permission for each journey. In fact, Gong is powerful enough to tell her local political cadre boss to go piss in a pot. It is said that this is exactly what she once told him, and that today she comes and goes as she pleases. Her effect on China itself, and the countless millions of Chinese scattered over the world, has been electrifying. Her face adorns the covers of Chinese film magazines with circulations of tens of millions, her publicity poses are pinned to the walls of countless young Chinese males, her every movement in and out of China, her every relationship, and the few brief and innocuous interviews she has given, are devoured by her public. But her appeal is much more than sexual. In some ways she is now re-creating the iconic impact that Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe had on the universal psyche of France and the United States in the 1950s. She has become the face, the spirit and the character of new-age China. And unlike both of these great stars, she has proved herself to be a gifted actress of astonishing range and power. "First and foremost," she says, "I am a professional actress. I am aware that I have become a person who is studied and watched and that many people seem to be very interested in me and my private life. It is something that I never expected to happen and I hope that other actresses will emerge and so reduce this interest in me." This could be the routine quote of any Hollywood starlet, but there is a cool toughness in this woman, and the words - delivered in the sighs and croons of Mandarin Chinese - make the point that she is not just a sexual object or a national heroine, but a committed film artist of the first rank. Nor does she take kindly to a new phenomenon that has sprung up around her, the tabloid tittle-tattle and the intrusive packs of photographers. Chinese newspapers hounded her when she split up with Zhang Yimou while filming Shanghai Triad. From Shanghai Triad, she was supposed to go straight to work on her new romantic movie, Temptress Moon, with China's other great director, Chen Kaige. For a week, an entire film crew waited on location in a remote part of China as Gong Li did what she always does when things become too much - went home and sought advice from her mother in the northern city of Shenyang, where she still values the company of her buddies at college and in the local drama group where she first played bit-part roles. "My home and my family are still the most important part of my life, as they are to all Chinese girls," she says. "No matter how famous I become, my mother just tells me to behave myself. She doesn't care about my films or how much people talk about me. I was a late child, an accident, born to two university lecturers, and they still treat me as something of a family joke. That's good. So whenever I need to, I just go home for a while." On the subject of her love life she just shakes her head firmly at all questions. It is a no-go area and she will neither confirm nor deny speculation that she has become engaged to a Mr. Huang and will soon be occupying a penthouse apartment on the top of a Hong Kong mountain making kung fu thrillers and sex comedies. On the question of whether the Western film industry will then step in with multi-million-dollar offers, give her a crash course in English, and gain guaranteed access to a mainland China audience that dwarfs anything even Hollywood can claim, she is thoughtful and cautious. "It is not really a strong possibility," she says. "I have no English and no real knowledge of the culture of the West. I know and love China and I understand the women there, what they have suffered and what they are capable of. I know nothing of Western women. I feel that I have a lot to do in my own country… Nevertheless, if there was a good script and a good director…" When the subject turns to Zhang Yimou a dreamy look comes into her eyes. He may no longer share her bed, but she knows how much she - and China - owe to his unique talents and the courage he has shown for over a decade in defying a potentially lethal political monolith to show China and its people as they have never been shown before, even to the Chinese themselves. "He is a true artist, a true leader and a wonderful man," she says. "They say he is political and dangerous and they try to stop his films being shown in China. But he is not political. He just wants to tell great stories. They throw barriers against him, but he never loses his temper. He just smiles and goes on making the films that he wants. He is afraid of nothing." To track down the object of this adoration you have to travel deep into the labyrinth suburbs of Peking, and when you finally arrive at the home of the Zhang Yimou film empire, it is the Chinese cinematic equivalent of finding the headquarters of Steven Spielberg in a Ruislip maisonette. By mid-morning the modest two-story cube is a hive of activity with a flurry of young men and women talking into mobile phones, examining plane timetables and studying a huge wall map of the city. This cheerful band of youngsters moves like a gypsy caravan, carrying the bulky cranes, cameras and lights that are the tools of their trade, across the length and breadth of China. It is a small, highly trained and totally self-contained film production company, comprising art directors, cinematographers, editors, stock actors, location managers, scriptwriters, lighting engineers, grips and gofers. They also live, eat, dink, row, hold parties and work 18-hour days at the behest of their master, who takes them on his whim from the freezing mountains of the north to the baking river flood plains of the Central Kingdom to the fetid alleyways of Shanghai. Over a decade of dedicated movie-making, they have come to regard themselves as Zhang's family and they all claim their say in the work process. There is a lot of laughter even though they know that government spies watch the house round the clock. Every penny earned by the company is reinvested in the next production and, until Zhang bought this house, they lived and worked in a succession of cheap taverns and workmen's hostels. The smell of beef and noodles in the kitchen fills the nostrils as Zhang comes into the room. He is bleary-eyed, having been up until 4am working on the final cut of Shanghai Triad. Later that night he will fly to that very city to show his latest work to the stone-faced party hacks who hate and fear him. He is now 45 and has the look of a Buddhist monk, lean to the point of gauntness, with a closely shaven head, delicate features and eyes that dance with good humor and enthusiasm. He wears a faded denim shirt and baggy slacks and, as he sits down, a glass of plain hot water is handed to him by one of the young women. He drinks gallons of it every day. The first question - how does he manage to get his films made in the face of such hostility - brings a smile that makes him look not unlike a mischievous fifth-former. "You are likely to bump into many obstacles when making movies in China," he says, shrugging at this massive piece of understatement. "Things here are never smooth." He then proceeds to list at least eight different stages of censorship, from the original script to the final official stamp of approval, that can oblige him to travel 3000 miles up and down the country over a period of months from one censors' department to another. "It is exhausting and frustrating, but I am used to it. This is the objective reality in our country. It is something that has been formed as a package over several decades and it is not strange to us. We are not hurt by it. Like everybody else I hope for a change and a time when Chinese movies will have more freedom of expression. That demands patience. Compared to 30 years ago, or the Cultural Revolution, things are already much better." Patience, allied to persistence, quiet defiance and a degree of real craftiness, are the attributes shared by Zhang and his fellow Fifth Generation directors, the first graduates from the Peking Film Academy following the opening up of China to the West in 1981-82. His reference to the Cultural Revolution, in the years between 1966 and 1976, was almost casual. Zhang knows he has to be careful in the rare interviews he grants Western journalists. He could have talked about the hundreds of filmmakers who were rooted out by the Red Guards, many of whom were murdered or driven to suicide, all at the whim of Jian Qing, wife of Mao and leader of the infamous Gang of Four, who was a failed B-movie actress with many scores to settle. There have been many false dawns of political freedom in China since Mao's emergence as a god in 1949. Each has been followed by a bloodbath as the regime felt its power weakening. Behind the high walls of the Zhongnanhai, the great, sealed compound near the Forbidden City where thousands of the party leaders live and work and plot against each other, there is still a furious power struggle going on as Deng Ziaoping, the last of Mao's comrades on the Long March, sinks to his death. With this band of megalomaniacs, nothing is every certain. If it all blew up, and ruinous inflation caused chaos and public disorder, the great doors of China were suddenly to clang shut once again, people like Zhang would be the first to disappear into the giant gulags that still exist in the remote north. He denies absolutely that he and the Fifth Generation school have a political agenda. "Our movies are not trying to reflect political backgrounds or problems. My aim is to express man's ideas, man's spirit and the world of emotions. When we put all this into historical perspective, perhaps 30 or 40 years from now, politics will seem unimportant. What I hope will finally be left in my movies will be the spirit of the people of China." But from the moment he burst onto the scene in 1987 with his debut, Red Sorghum, it would seem he could not help but prod the hide of a sleeping giant. This epic tale, set in the wine-growing region of the north, was carefully placed during the Japanese occupation, and got the approval of the censor. But its stark themes of sexuality, violence and desperate poverty among an entrapped peasant population ruled by vicious thugs struck a chord in millions of Chinese hearts. To them, one set of tyrants was pretty much like another. It ran in the cinemas for two years and reached cult status among the new generation - appealing especially to the thousands of young students who protested, hundreds of whom were later slaughtered, in Tianamen Square in 1989. The film also marked the debut of Gong Li. Zhang had seen her in an amateur theatre production and had her audition while he hid behind a screen. It was the start of a partnership and of a series of films that attracted huge audiences. It was also the start of a love affair that intrigued the whole nation. Zhang was married and separated, but party officials branded him an adulterer and Gong a slut. China's masses just sat back and enjoyed it all. To them it was Charles and Di, Andy and Fergie all rolled into one, and each day they scoured the newsstands for fresh revelations. Zhang, with a rueful smile, admits that the love affair is now over, but his affection, and gratitude, remain. And more movies with Gong will follow: "There are few actresses today as young as she is who are as good as she is. We were together for eight years and made 10 pictures together. She is a very passionate person, a very intense human being, and I feel very glad about all those years of our co-operation. Especially if she can go on to make films seen by a Western audience that will make the world understand us better." Both Gong and Zhang repeatedly state that they are completely without political motive, but the films themselves have, despite their often exotic, sometimes dreamy and always compelling fictional roots, hammered out clear signals of waste and repression to audiences both inside and outside China. They are also immensely watchable and skillfully played and Gong's roles as women who are hot-blooded, feisty, lusty, brave and resourceful often bring her female audience to their feet, roaring approval. In nearly six decades of turgid film fare, Chinese womanhood, usually padded and shapeless, has inevitably played wives, concubines, mothers, cooks and chattels - passive and servile alongside their comrade husbands, fathers and sons in the glorious struggle. In Ju Dou, which won awards at Cannes and Chicago, Gong produced a sensuality that had never been seen before in China when playing the wife of a sexually and physically abusive textile factory owner. She has a passionate affair with his nephew and the story, claustrophobically contained in a dyeing room that dripped sinisterly in crimson, climaxes in murder and mayhem. It is every bit as steamy as its American counterpart, The Postman Always Rings Twice, but Zhang added an extra touch of horror in the shape of a monstrous child who betrays his mother. To the millions who saw it, this scene was an undoubted reference to the thousands of children who denounced their parents during the Cultural Revolution. An even more subtle swipe at the communist ruling cadre was The Story of Qiu Ju, in which Gong, massively pregnant, mucky-faced and waddling across the landscape, travels hundreds of miles to find justice after her husband has been assaulted by the village chief. Cleverly, Zhang made sure she wins in the end, and censor was totally fooled. But the jeering mirth of the audience left no doubt that this was a scathing satire, of almost Chaplinesque quality, aimed directly against the creaking, often ludicrous and usually corrupt machinery of state. And in the haunting Raise The Red Lantern, an intricate and beautifully crafted study of 1920s erotica concerning four concubines serving an aristocrat, a young woman is snatched in the night and hanged. When Gong challenges the killers, one turns to her and says, directly into the camera: "You saw nothing. You heard nothing." These were the same words whispered inside every family and every community in China as millions disappeared, from every hamlet, town and village, during the Gang of Four's lethal decade. But it was To Live, perhaps their most ambitious film, that almost brought the roof crashing down. It was rumored to have been watched inside the ruling stockade by every one of the party's politburo, and there were enraged demands for Zhang's arrest. This time there was no mistaking his intentions. He was determined to make a movie that spanned his own lifetime and one of the greatest social upheavals of all time, and which would tell the story through the eyes of an ordinary family. Zhang produced a compelling, blood-soaked masterpiece tracing the suffering of his fictional family from the days of the Warlords, through the slaughterhouse wars between Mao and Chiang Kai-shek, on to the holocaust of the Great Leap Forward, and finally into the even deeper darkness of the Cultural Revolution. To compound his crime, Zhang, who must have known well the effect it would have, smuggled it out to Cannes and won two foreign language awards. He was summoned to the censors' office on his return and banned from any filmmaking for five years. Gong was barred from attending foreign film festivals and told to give no newspaper interviews. Both sentences were later modified. Gong goes her own way, as ever, and talks to whom she likes, and Zhang, cut off from ministry funding, cut some lucrative deals with French distributors, rounded up his "family" and went back to work. There are those who urge Zhang to leave China forever. His huge talent, they say, could make him an instant millionaire in Hong Kong, Taiwan or Singapore. Or even America. Filmmaking, he knows, is largely about one man's vision working with the imagination of a writer. Language need be no barrier to the man who paints his pictures on celluloid. He recently saw Spielberg's Schindler's List, and although he didn't understand a word of it, he was bowled over by its power, scale and compassion. He knows that if he had a fraction of the resources available to his American brother, there are stories in China's recent history that would match, in terms of tragedy and evil, those of Europe and the West. "I will not leave China, whatever happens," he says. "This is my home. I do not understand the West. And there is so much for me to do. If there were just enough money and freedom, there are so many movies to make. I would love to make some large-scale historical stuff, but there are difficulties." He smiles his big toothy smile. "For that kind of thing you need lots of horses and I simply cannot find enough horses." At that, steaming piles of food were carted in and the Zhang Yimou family sat down to eat, with much noisy sucking up of noodles and talk of conspiracy. A mobile phone was handed to the director. He listened and smiled. His new movie, it seemed, was ready for the censor that night in Shanghai… a movie about one kind of gangster to be studied for evidence of antisocial behavior by another, even more dangerous kind.
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