The movie starts off with a girl weeping, telling her mother that she doesn’t want to
marry, that marriage is not what she wants in life, a very rebellious attitude of a girl
aged eighteen. But she is made to marry an old man with three wives, against her will.
The girl, named Songlian, becomes the fourth wife of the “Master”. The story revolves
around the girl’s life as a wife.
The “Master” is shown as this millionaire old man with a vast house. The house is like an
array of living spaces or rooms of the wives, each attached to a courtyard space. The
practice of polygamy is allowed in China to date only if the financial conditions of the
male are good enough to support the number of wives and if the marriages are not seen
as way to obtain male children.
…show more content…
The part the movie focuses on the most is how these wives are seen as nothing
but concubines of the master. There is a tension between all the wives in the house who
refer to each other as sisters. In the scenes showing these sisters together there is
always a sense of jealousy. Each wife wants to outdo the other in order to impress the
Master who chooses where he sleeps every day with a small sort of ‘I pick you’
ceremony which happens every evening before nightfall. The title of the movie, Raise
the red lantern is a reference to this “ceremony” that takes place every day. It is almost
like a formality where in a household worker carries a red lantern to the common
courtyard of the house where the four wives gather at the entrance from that courtyard
to their private courtyard. The job of the worker is to keep the red lantern in front of the
wife whose house the Master has chosen to sleep that night.
There one is only one objective in the mind of all wives, which is to impress the master
so that he chooses to spend the night at their house. In order to do that, there is an act
put up by each of the wives to annoy the other of show dislike and disrespect or