Edition note: Complete English edition based on the Chinese original; full-film spoilers. Dialogue is independently translated, not quoted from official subtitles.

The First Shot Is a Face

The film begins with nothing in the frame but Songlian's face, looking straight at the camera. Offscreen, her stepmother is speaking, coaxing and pressing her at once. This conversation has been going on for three days. We arrive for the last few sentences.

Mother, stop, she says. I've thought it through. If I must marry, I'll marry. Her stepmother asks what sort of man she wants. Is it up to me who I marry? she replies. You keep talking about money. Then let it be someone rich.

Her stepmother reminds her that marrying a rich man means becoming a concubine. Then I'll be a concubine, she says. Isn't that all there is to being a woman? Tears run down her face. She neither wipes them away nor lowers her head.

The shot never cuts away. Throughout the scene, hers is the only face we see; the person forcing her remains outside the frame. The words come from her own mouth, and it has taken three days of wearing her down to get them out. Both things are true within the same shot.

A film about a woman being devoured could begin in any number of ways. With a bridal sedan chair, a grand gateway, a bride weeping as she leaves home. This one begins with a face that speaks for itself.

She Walked Past the Bridal Chair

The Chen household sends a bridal chair to fetch her. Songlian does not get in. Her hair in two thick plaits, wearing a black-and-white student's outfit and carrying a wicker suitcase, she walks. The chair stands on the road. She passes it, glances at it, and does not stop.

This sequence is filmed with a long lens. The dirt road is flattened, its depth almost impossible to read. She walks for a long time, yet the distance within the image scarcely changes. Summer has just begun; the road is dazzlingly white. Walking this road takes more screen time than any of the struggles that follow.

In Su Tong's original story, Songlian is carried into the Chen household. Having her walk in is the film's decision, made in its very first scene. What a film changes in its opening minutes is often what it most wants to say.

Whether she walks or is carried, the road ends in the same courtyard. The difference lies in the stretch before the destination: in one case, goods are being transported; in the other, a person is moving. The film chooses the latter. Only then is there someone to whose account everything that follows can be entered.

Just inside the gate, she pauses before a stone inscribed in ancient seal script. She probably recognizes a few characters; she has had an education. The film supplies no subtitles, and no one explains what the inscription says. The stone simply stands there. It has been here many years longer than the person coming through the gate.

She lifts her suitcase and goes on. Courtyard follows courtyard, with no end in sight. This is the first appearance of that image of one doorway framed inside another. It will recur many times.

The Coercion Is Real

Before calling this step her choice, we need to be clear about what forces her to take it. Her father has died, and the family's tea shop has gone under. She has spent half a year at university and cannot continue. Only she and her stepmother remain at home. Her stepmother wants to shed a burden and collect a bride price into the bargain.

Her stepmother has talked at her for three days. Three days is a precise duration: this was not accomplished with a single sentence. She was worn down day after day. That is what the opening “I've thought it through” refers to. The film does not show those three days. It lets her speak on the last one.

Nineteen, without money or family to turn to, her studies broken off, with nowhere outside the house that will take her in. Under these conditions, “She could have refused to marry” is an easy thing to say. The conditions really do leave her no other road.

It is not wrong to read this film as a story of an inherited moral order devouring people. The machine is real, the gears are real, and so are the people being eaten. This has been the dominant reading for decades. It is accurate, forceful, and explains most of what happens in the film.

In one respect, however, it does not fit the film. Ultimately, that reading treats Songlian as the piece of flesh being devoured. The opening shot does not film her that way. It points the camera at her face and lets her finish the sentence herself.

Why the Step Has to Be Hers

If she were merely carried in, everything that happened afterward would be something done to her by other people. The film would become a list of charges. The audience would watch, curse, turn away, and forget it the next day.

But half of what follows is her doing. She invents the false pregnancy. She exposes Yan'er's secret cache of lanterns, after keeping quiet about it for a long time. And she is the one who, drunk, lets slip the third mistress's affair.

These actions make sense only if she is a person capable of making decisions. Only if the first step is her own can each subsequent step belong to her. The film establishes that premise at the outset, at the cost of making the audience uncomfortable from the start.

The discomfort is this: admitting that she chose seems to mean admitting that she is responsible. That conclusion comes too quickly. Choosing one of only two roads left to you is different from choosing one road out of many, even though both acts are called choosing.

The film is not trying to assign her blame. It refuses to take her actions out of her hands. Even when the choices available have dwindled to a single one, that one is still hers. Taking it away saves her one difficulty. It also removes her from the position of a human being.

At First, She Finds the Rules Ridiculous

The Chen household has a procedure to be performed every day. At dusk, each mistress stands at the entrance to her own courtyard and waits for the steward to announce where the master will spend the night. Lanterns are hung in the chosen courtyard, its mistress receives a foot massage, and the next day she chooses the dishes.

Standing there for the first time, Songlian finds it bewildering. If the master has instructions, she tells the steward, he need only send word. The steward answers with four Chinese characters: “Those are the rules.” The meaning is plain: whether it makes sense or not, you must stand there.

The foot massage is more tangible. First the feet are soaked in aged vinegar, then covered with a red bridal veil. An older maid taps the soles back and forth with two little bell-hammers. The sound is clear, stroke after stroke. The whole courtyard can hear it. So can the other courtyards.

The first time, she finds it strange and awkward. She has just left university and is accustomed to a different order of things: a person can ask why, and someone will answer. In this courtyard, “Why?” always brings the same reply: “Those are the rules.”

On the master's first night in her room, a message comes from the third mistress, feigning illness, and calls him away. Songlian lies alone, listening to what is happening elsewhere. This is her first lesson: winning and losing here are not hers to determine, and the result can be settled that very night.

The Information the Third Mistress Gives Her

Meishan, the third mistress, came here before her. She used to be a celebrated performer of female roles in an opera troupe. The two have several conversations, more candid than those Songlian has with anyone else. Meishan does not talk around things or put on a show. She is the only person in the courtyard who cannot be bothered with polite pretenses toward her.

Once Meishan tells her: Unless you give the Chens a son, the hard days are still ahead. Then she adds: It's the same for all of us. They are not competing over anything at the time, and no one else is there.

These words are neither a threat nor advice to accept her fate. They are information. Someone who has been here a long time is telling the newcomer the local terms of exchange: what you are worth depends on what you can supply, and there is only one thing to supply.

The information carries weight. A son is an important bargaining chip here, but no guarantee of safety. The first mistress has a son; her position is the most secure, and she need not compete. The second has only a daughter, which makes her especially calculating. The third also has a son, yet must still compete for the master's favor.

Songlian takes it in and acts accordingly. Her later pretended pregnancy uses exactly this rule, without deviating a step. She never questions whether the rule should exist. What she keeps questioning is why she cannot get ahead under it.

The Things She Brought With Her

In her suitcase is a flute left to her by her father. The master finds it while looking through her things and asks who gave it to her, his tone assuming it must have been a man. Later the flute is burned. She finds out afterward, when even the ashes have been swept away.

She brings other things, too: her student's clothes, the books she has read, half a year at university, a habit of asking why. Not one of these is useful in the Chen household. Not one is expressly forbidden, either.

The only thing put to use is the phrase “female student” itself. The master mentions her education with a note of novelty in his voice. Here, her education serves as a flavor.

Feipu, the eldest son, plays the flute on the roof. She goes up to listen. It is the only sound in the courtyard unconnected with the lighting of lanterns. The film does not let this thread grow into a way out. Later, Feipu avoids her.

One by one, the things she brought cease to work. Not because someone confiscates them, but because there is nowhere to put them. A place that awards points in only one way need not prohibit anything else. It need only award it no points.

In the passage about the burning of the flute, the film does not show the fire. It shows only her searching the suitcase afterward, and the way she stops there. No rule in the courtyard says that playing the flute is forbidden. None needs to.

Doorways

This house has many doorways. The film repeatedly uses the same setup: the camera high above, or facing straight down a long corridor, a person emerging from one doorway and entering the next, the two sides perfectly symmetrical.

Every courtyard is square. Look down on a person walking through it, and there are only a few possible routes. The setup recurs so often that eventually you realize you have never seen the outside of this house.

Apart from the opening dirt road, the film contains no shot outside the courtyard walls. Songlian never goes out through this gate again. Nor does she ever say she wants to leave. She complains about many things: the rules, the foot massages, the choice of dishes, the second mistress. Not one complaint is about the gate.

This says more than any line of dialogue. She took the step into the house herself; no one in this house has ever demonstrated the step out. Between them, the four mistresses have lived here for decades. None has shown her how to leave these rules behind.

That is why the opening dirt road matters so much. It is the only time in the film when someone walks under her own power, with a road beneath her feet and no walls on either side. She does not yet know where she is going. But the legs taking those steps are her own.

In the doorway sequence, she changes the suitcase from one hand to the other and looks up into the house. Courtyard follows courtyard, the light dimming one compartment at a time. The innermost courtyard can no longer be made out. She lifts her foot and crosses the threshold.

This essay refers to the 1991 version, approximately 125 minutes long.