Chinese Theater Collaborative

Hongniang (a.k.a. Soubrette)
红娘 (1999)

Live Action Feature Film
Director: Huang Jianzhong 黄建中

LINKS TO THE FILM


INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

Hongniang, the 1999 film adaptation of Wang Shifu’s Western Wing, is a lavish production that capitalizes on the visual pleasure of historical romance. It was recognized as the 1999 “Best Picture” at the Hundred Flowers Awards, China’s most prestigious film awards. Liu Xin 刘欣 (1973- ), who plays the lead role of Hongniang, received that year’s “Best Actress” prize. The film also stars Taiwanese idol Alec Su (1973- ) 苏有朋 and the veteran actress and Peking opera performer Wang Fuli 王馥荔 (1949- ) as Madam Cui 崔夫人, lending it both cross-straits appeal and artistic bona fides.

A 2000 dispatch in the Beijing Evening News by reporter Chen Bin 陈滨 notes that the film was the first Chinese production to feature at the American Film Market, a film industry event based in Hollywood that is devoted to selling and producing movies for the US market. The dispatch notes that while the film’s plot holes were criticized by domestic audiences, Liu Xin’s performance won acclaim and she came to Los Angeles to promote the film on the heels of her success. American viewers, Chen suggests, are less likely to nitpick; they can enjoy the film’s characters and colorful costuming and understand the “ancient romance” 古代的爱情传奇. Though they are presumably ignorant of Western Wing’s history as a centerpiece of the Chinese operatic repertoire, Chen’s assessment suggests that foreign viewers will find the film’s romantic plot readily accessible.

Though China’s domestic box office struggled in the 1990s under pressure from television and non-PRC Sinophone and foreign language films, Chinese historical period pieces proved popular with Western audiences. This decade of Chinese film history was after all inaugurated by the festival success of films like Zhang Yimou’s 张艺谋 (1950- ) Raise the Red Lantern 大红灯笼高高挂 in 1991 and Chen Kaige’s 陈凯歌 (1952- ) lachrymose tribute to Peking Opera, Farewell, My Concubine 霸王别姬 in 1993.


Like these famous films, Hongniang asserts its "traditional" heritage through its visual aesthetic. The film's credits are written in a font that evokes the ancient clerical script and ornamented with images styled after stone rubbings, a genre of Chinese print used to transfer text and images on ancient stone onto paper. Both the red lettering and white outlines of the image denote cultural cachet and suggest the film we’re about to watch is a prestigious historical production. However, despite its ambitious production design, compelling acting, and efforts at international marketing, Hongniang has ultimately failed to register as a significant Chinese film both at home and abroad. Though a lush historical drama, it doesn’t quite attain the middle-brow prestige of Chen and Zhang’s 90s oeuvre. Instead, the film is pleasurably sumptuous and sensual. It’s both entertaining and a little kitschy, bringing together the narrative grammar of melodrama and the visual devices of Hong Kong erotic film and action movies to update Western Wing for a late 1990s popular film audience. This module will thus explore Hongniang’s adaptation of Western Wing through melodrama, a type cinematic emotional “excess” that appeals to audiences but bedevils the “classical” narrative that affords the status of “good movie.”

PLOT SUMMARY

At the beginning of the 1999 Hongniang, Student Zhang 张生 and the Cui 崔 family are traveling separately toward the Temple of Universal Salvation 普救寺, where the abbot has foreseen that a romance will take place. When Yingying’s 莺莺 carriage careens off the road, Student Zhang rides to her rescue, getting his first glimpse of the young woman when he successfully prevents disaster. The two parties reach the temple and settle in. The young lovers catching glimpses of each other at various moments during the beginning of their stay. Soon, their idyll is interrupted by the bandit Sun Feihu 孙飞虎, who rides to the doors of the temple with his army and demands that Yingying marry him. Her maid Hongniang 红娘 skillfully negotiates with the bandit and buys a few days reprieve. In the meantime, Student Zhang sends word to his friend General White Horse 白马将军. Together, the two defeat Sun in an exciting sword battle. After Yingying is saved, however, her mother reneges on the promise to wed her to her savior, hoping for a better match. Hongniang helps the two lovers communicate and consummate their union, actions that are discovered by Madam Cui 崔夫人, Yingying’s mother. She beats the maid, who in turn convinces the older woman to honor her word and allow the marriage between Hongniang and Student Zhang. Madam Cui agrees, but immediately frets about Hongniang’s role in Yingying’s future. To prevent the maid from securing Student Zhang’s affections (as a potential lover), she tries to send the girl to General White Horse as a concubine. Yingying asks that instead, she be freed from her servitude and allowed to return to her hometown so she can settle down and tend to her parents’ graves. Madam Cui agrees on the condition that she leave immediately, and Hongniang steals away before the wedding. The film ends with the young couple, concerned that Hongniang is missing, searching for the maid. They find her on a swing, enjoying her freedom in a gorgeous landscape.

THEME: Hongniang’s Melodramatic Homecoming

The classic definition of so-called “body genres” articulated by film scholar Linda Williams identifies melodrama, horror, and pornography as excessive “low genres.” These are films that indulge in bodily pleasures and ecstasy, be it the rapture of tears, fears, or arousal. Importantly, Williams argues that “what may especially mark these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen along with the fact that the body displayed is female” (4). Action cinema, though not explicitly defined by Williams, seems to fit the bill: as in horror, an excess of violence and kinetic motion moves viewers to jump from their seats in shock and leave the cinema invigorated by the spectacle of fighting bodies. As a film that indulges in the pleasures (and excesses) of the body, Hongniang can be analyzed in relation to melodrama, action cinema, and erotic cinema—all staple genres of the Hong Kong popular film market whose productions, rich with pathos, combat, and sensuality, have appealed to Chinese viewers since they began trickling into the mainland on VHS in the mid-1980s.

Hongniang leans heavily into melodramatic tropes; as the title suggests, the story is focused around the comparatively dull heroine’s maid. While the emphasis on Hongniang is hardly new, the film affords its main character a new (romantic) backstory that increases the viewer’s emotional investment in her story. The film’s opening sequence takes place in the temple, where the abbot has just had a premonition of a romance that is about to unfold within the temple’s walls. The film then cuts to a small caravan of carriages that travels through a lush, green mountain scenery showed off in series of pans that culminates in a shot of Yingying and Hongniang admiring the landscape.

Yingying is moved by the scenery and exclaims in joy. The two women begin to talk:

Click to expand/collapse Translation Notes
Chinese SubtitlesCTC Translation
莺莺：红娘，天下竟然有这么美的地方！Yingying: Hongniang, so there is such a beautiful place in the world after all!
红娘：你啊，从小囚在相府里，就不知道这外面呀是个什么样。Hongniang: Oh you! You’ve been locked up in the residence of the prime minister since you were little, so you don’t know what the outside world’s like.
这儿啊，叫十里花峪，峪口呢，还有个十里花村呢。This place, it’s called Ten Mile Flower Valley. And what’s more, at the mouth of the valley, there is a Ten Mile Flower Village.
莺莺：你怎么什么都知道？Yingying: How do you know all that?
红娘：这儿啊，离我的老家不远了。Hongniang: This place, it’s not far from my hometown.
莺莺：哦，想起来了！ 我听说过，你是小的时候到我们家。Yingying: Oh, I remember! I heard that you came to our house when you were little!
红娘：是啊。一晃眼，我离家都十三年了。十三年没回过家。Hongniang: Aye, as if in the blink of an eye, it’s been all of thirteen years. Haven’t been home in thirteen years..

The conversation lulls and the shot stays on a close up of Hongniang’s face as she reminisces about her (lost) childhood.


With a cut, the film transitions to Hongniang’s memories of her childhood. The idyllic scene is set to a swelling music. Images of children frolicking in green fields are set to a ballad. The children sometimes pick crops and sometimes goof off in the river. Naked boys show off, doing handstands in front of girls who giggle cover their faces in embarrassment at seeing the boys’ genitals. This preadolescent frolic culminates in playacting a “wedding ceremony”: a group of children carry a little girl, dressed in red to the nude boys by the river, one of whom is presumably the intended “groom.” The scene cuts back to the present day, where Yingying and Hongniang are once again chatting, this time about Yingying’s desire to travel freely.


Hongniang’s nostalgic memory sequence recurs throughout the film, making it increasingly clear that the “bride” in the memory is in fact the young Hongniang herself. In a sequence late in the film, she is in bed delirious with fever after suffering a truly excessive amount of bodily abuse. She fell from a wall while delivering a missive between the lovers, caught a fever while keeping guard in the rain while Yingying and Student Zhang consummated their relationship, and took a beating from Madam Cui for enabling their liaison. A true melodramatic heroine! As Yingying tends to her, concerned by the unjust physical injury that the righteous maid has suffered, Hongniang dreams of running across verdant hills with a young boy.


The two end up huddled in a hay bale, and the boy offers Hongniang a red doudou 兜兜, or shirt-like garment that is tied around the chest, as a gift. When the children had been playing out the wedding, the red fabric served as Hongniang’s bridal veil. As she takes the doudou/veil, Hongniang replies that she will miss her "brother" (a familiar but not necessarily familial appellation, implying this could be a potential childhood love).


The scene is both charmingly bucolic and melodramatic, as both viewers and the little Hongniang know that she will not be returning to this village and this boy for at least the next thirteen years. When the film cuts back to the present, Hongniang is waking from her fitful sleep in tears, crying out for her red doudou.


This sequence emphatically marks Hongniang as a melodramatic figure. She has been physically abused thrice over. When she returned to Yingying with a note from Student Zhang after falling from a wall, Yingying ignored her injury and pouted about her slow delivery of the missive. While the two lovers had sex inside Zhang’s study, she waited outside in the pouring rain to make sure they were not discovered. Finally, when Madam Cui did discover her complicity in arranging the illicit meeting (realizing her daughter didn’t have the wherewithal to plot it herself), she beat the maid with a stick. In each case, Hongniang fought for the lovers and suffered for it. When she finally confronts Madam Cui, she points out that her position in encouraging the romance is a just one since Madam Cui’s betrayal of Student Zhang is actually an egregious lapse in propriety that needs to be remedied. As such, she emerges as the story’s moral and romantic hero. Yet, once her beating is over and Yingying and Student Zhang are free to be married, the film focuses not on Hongniang’s triumph but her physical and emotional suffering. In the next scenes, she is crying over a red children’s garment that at once evokes her lost childhood and the apparently foregone possibility of her own happy marriage.

Even Madam Cui, who worries that Hongniang has designs on Student Zhang, and who hopes to marry her off as a concubine to the general who earlier saved them from bandits, is eventually moved by the young woman’s lonely plight. When she calls Hongniang in to discuss the potential match, Hongniang startles her by asking for another solution: her freedom so that she may return home. Although the narrative has so far suggested Hongniang has left behind the possibility of marriage in her hometown, the rationale changes here.


Click to expand/collapse Translation Notes


In the conversation, Hongniang begs to go home to take care of her parents’ grave, a duty she has not been able to fulfill because of her servitude. Madam Cui is surprised that Hongniang is not plotting to ingratiate herself with the new master of the house. She is also moved by the young woman’s sorry tale and homeless status and allows her to return to her hometown, never to return again. Ever cautious, however, Madam Cui demands that Hongniang not tell Yingying, who is by this point determined to elevate Hongniang as a sister, that she will be leaving them.


Hongniang does indeed depart secretly, returning to the landscape of her childhood memories. She quite literally inhabits the scenery that she had been remembering and dreaming about, laying on a grassy knoll and looking on children play in the near distance. Daydreams of her own childhood intermingle with scenes of local children playing in the landscape.
 


The ending here is quite strange. Instead of tending to her parents grave or setting up a household of her own, Hongniang seems to be stuck in a daydream. In other words, instead of an orientation towards the future, the film suggests that Hongniang may have already lost the life she longs for. In a last shot of her character, we see Hongniang on a swing above a picturesque but dangerous precipice. Yingying and Student Zhang, having set out to find the missing maid, look on from below. Instead of sharing in Hongniang’s joy, their faces betray confusion and ambivalence.


While the last shot of the film returns to the temple abbot meditating in the same spot he divined the romance about to take place in the film, it’s clear that Hongniang’s backstory is also a significant narrative frame in the film. The opening sequence implies that a romance is about to take place, but the film defers the meeting of the two lovers in favor of dwelling on Hongniang’s painful nostalgia. The wedding celebration that caps off the film love story is likewise interrupted when the couple realizes that their biggest benefactor is absent. The final cathartic moment of this adaptation of Western Wing is Hongniang’s ambivalent flight of fancy. Her righteous suffering and tears have brought her literally to the edge of a cliff.

WORKS CONSULTED: CLICK TO EXPAND/COLLAPSE

Chen, Bin 陈滨. "Shouci canjia dianying jiaoyi shichang Hongniang fumei zhao guanzhong" 首次参加电影交易市场《红娘》赴美找观众 (“First Time Participating in the American Film Market: Hongniang Goes to the US in Search of an Audience). 北京晚报 (Beijing Evening News). February 24, 2000. Archive reprint accessed June 13, 2023.
Williams, Linda. “Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2-13.
 

AUTHOR

Julia Keblinska

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