Women From the Lake of Scented Souls

There seem to be two distinct types of films coming out of post-Cultural Revolution China these days: quasi-erotic tales of concubines and love gone awry (Raise the Red Lantern, Farewell My Concubine) and stories of hardship, travails, and more love gone awry, like Xie Fei's Women from the Lake of Scented Souls, which was the co-winner of the Golden Bear at the 1993 Berlin Film Festival. Xiang (Gaowa) is a middle-aged rural businesswomen who oversees her family's traditional sesame-oil company. With her family -- husband Que (Luosheng), mentally handicapped, 22-year-old son Dunzi, and younger daughter -- Xiang cultivates the finest sesame oil in the region, a fact that does not go unnoticed by a Japanese investor who stops by her home to sample her wares and ends up pumping much-needed cash into the venture. Xiang quickly decides that now's the time to marry off fractious Dunzi, and auditions a number of local girls, eventually deciding to go with innocent, giggly Huanhuan (Yujuan), a lower-caste peasant from a neighboring village. She literally buys the girl's love for $15,000, though the marriage is destined to fail, like her own. (Bought by her husband at age 7 and married at 13, Xiang now keeps a lover on the side to offset the pain of the drunken, loveless wreck that her marriage has become.) Unconsciously, she's laid the same trap for Huanhuan, and it takes several brutal acts of violence on Dunzi's part to enlighten her to the error of her ways. Director Xie has a brilliant eye for detail, filling the screen with gorgeous glimpses of modern rural China -- the lotus beds, the cranes, children at play, and ornate, regal marriages -- but his story here is so relentlessly downbeat (and you perceive just how downbeat within the film's first 15 minutes) that it's difficult to pay any heed to his brilliant cinematography. Xiang's plight -- and its eventual outcome -- are more or less obvious from the first: desperation clings to her heels like road dust and the resolution is never in question. Xie's tone is unrelieved by even occasional humor and, so, futility hangs over the film like a smoky, grey pall, making it one of the most depressing film's I've yet seen. Powerful, certainly, but then, so are funerals.