Gee, health care in 1935 China is similar to health care in 2021 America - pay up, or forget life-saving treatment, even for a place called "Philanthropy Hospital." Men are also the same everywhere, and in all times, trying to take advantage of any possible situation for sex.
This film is a tad melodramatic, with the dying child and teardrops falling in a teacup and whatnot, but it's got some powerful messages about the difficult position women find themselves in the world. It's easier for a man to just up and leave a woman with her child, abandoning them to their fate. It's not enough for a woman to write a good book, it has to be promoted with a pretty picture, and accompanied by harassment from the publisher. And of course when a woman needs money in an emergency, the thing everyone thinks of is that she can get it easily by selling her body, because as an old woman puts it, "what other path is open to us?"
We see Ruan Lingyu look at birds in a cage and dance performances in which one woman is whipped, and another is a prisoner in chains, and the symbolism couldn't be any clearer. To an offer of marriage she says "What can marriage give me? Companion for life?! Might as well call it slave for life!" It's interesting that when she considers prostituting herself, she thinks of it as being a "slave for one night," and in using the same word, slave, it made me think she was linking marriages that aren't out of love to a form of prostitution, pretty subversive stuff.
I don't think Ruan is given quite enough range in the character and thought her performance was good-not-great, until that final scene in the hospital, where she's brilliant. It's an especially poignant scene because she would herself be dead just one month after the film was released, and in a shroud of tabloid rumors as the character was. My other favorite scenes was when her friend (Yin Xu) defends her when a sleazeball just won't take 'no' for an answer. She breaks his cane like a twig, summons up some martial arts defense moves, and then after getting hit with a chair, head butts him not once but twice. God damn.
I loved a lot of what the film was doing, but its length and unevenness made it tough to fully enjoy. The sound technology was behind the curve, so it's got intertitles and then was also dubbed after the fact, sometimes with effects matching what we see on the screen. Director Cai Chusheng makes up for it a little bit with various video effects, including overlays and things like a flashback sequence viewed out a train window. It probably should have been pared down a bit, but it's still well worth seeking out.
