• 神女 (The Goddess)

11/9/24 (Sat)

This masterful Shanghai-based silent movie of 1934 was amazingly the prolific Wu Yonggang’s debut work, setting a pretty high standard for his career. It’s impressive that he was able to pull this off at all given the censorship under Nationalist Guomintang rule, though it does have an (overly) explicit moral message that might have helped. It’s still considered one of China’s greatest films.

The title, The Goddess, was also used euphemistically to refer to prostitutes. Both meanings would apply to the unnamed heroine, played by the irreplaceable Ruan Lingyu. A single women is forced to scrabble for a living on the streets while a neighbor watches over her infant son – a loving mother by day, streetwalker by night. An illiterate thug forces himself into her life by threatening her child, becoming a virtual pimp. She eventually figures out a way to hide her hard-earned money from him and, as her son reaches school age, uses it to enter him in school (lying that his father is dead). All goes well at first, and she lovingly sacrifices herself for her son’s future. A neighbor spotting her at the school, however, spreads the word about her profession, setting off a flood of complaints to the school that the kid will taint their children’s honor. The head of the school considers the child innocent and wants him to continue his studies, but the board flatly refuses, prompting him to resign. The heartbroken mother then discovers that her live-in brute has found her hiding place and stolen the money. When she confronts him, he slaps her violently in the face. She explodes and hits him over the head with a bottle, which kills him. She is found guilty and imprisoned for 12 years, but the former schoolmaster tells her that he will adopt the child and see that he gets a proper education. She is overjoyed at the offer, asking only that he tell the kid that she has died. She has a (somewhat sappy) vision of the happy child as the film ends.

The film is elevated by the overwhelming presence of Ruan, a screen legend in China. Her acting style is subtle and realistic, far and above the more silent-era mugging of others. Already a prominent actress at the time, she makes the film unforgettable. She was to die by her own hand just a year later at age 25 due to personal issues, so this film is also a reminder of what we lost. A great performance by any measure.

The physically imposing Zhang Zhizhi is well cast as the pimp, and the boy is surprisingly well played by Lai Hang (who also died by suicide years later due to political pressure under the Communists).

The movie ably avoids unnecessary intertitles for the most part, but relies at times on irritating long full-screen texts. The opening may be justified to an extent in setting the scene, but does it have to say regarding her double-life that in both cases “she shows great moral character”? We can figure that out over the course of the film. Also, the headmaster’s speech to the school over the treatment of the child and society’s duty to its citizens is eye-rollingly didactic, perhaps an attempt to justify to the government the sensitive topic of Shanghai prostitutes (said to number as many as 1/10th of the adult female population at the time). But the point could have been made more concisely. It’s one of the film’s few slip-ups.

The fallen woman was not a new theme even in its day in terms of world cinema, and the story is unavoidably melodramatic. Still, the young filmmaker handles the material with tremendous skill, including some striking angles and images. He includes images of the glowing streets of Shanghai as a contrast with the woman’s claustrophobic life. At the same time, he steers clear of overtly showing the woman’s transactions, at one point simply showing the feet of a client approaching her feet, then the four feet turning and going off together. There is a justifiably famous image of the woman crouching by her child viewed through the legs of the pimp, and she attacks the pimp by approaching the viewer head-on and waving the bottle as if striking the camera. The silence greatly benefits the material by leaving the more emotional sounds to our imagination, preventing the film (for the most part) from tipping over into undue sentimentality. That’s helped as well, of course, by Ruan’s restrained performance, which hardly needed words to communicate. The version I saw was accompanied by an excellent score.

A deserved classic from the silent era. Really enjoyed this film.