With this episode, number 72, Michael Branson Smith and I are 4 films deep into our series on international independent films from the 90s. We started down under with Muriel’s Wedding (1994), then we headed up to Tehran for The White Balloon (1995) then on to working class England with Life is Sweet (1990) then we jumped over to 1920s China for Raise the Red Lantern (1991). Like many of the films from this series, I first experienced them as a young 20-something in independent movie houses in and around Los Angeles. Looking back now it’s ever more apparent the 90s was a golden era for independent film, and not inly in the US. New visions from new generations of international filmmakers were flowering around the world. I remember seeing Raise the Red Lantern in Long Beach’s arthouse cinema and being blown away. The whole vision of a rich merchant’s wives being controlled with lanterns and foot massages as a means to fuel the in-fighting was not only visually stunning, but narratively compelling. Re-watching it years later for this podcast I dug into the idea of the Chen household as self-contained, miniature social system. Rather than this being a family drama highlighting cruel masters and backbiting sister wives (the original reason I nominated it for this series), the film becomes a subtle allegory for family as metaphor for the state. The Chen compound is essentially a closed political order. The Master is less a character than an institution. We rarely even see his face clearly. Like the state, his authority is impersonal and unquestioned. The wives become competing political factions. Rather than cooperating, they compete for limited resources and privilege. The servants function as bureaucrats. They don’t make the rules—they enforce them. The rituals (lighting the lanterns, choosing meals, foot massages, punishments) create the illusion that the system is orderly and legitimate, even though it’s fundamentally arbitrary. One thing that really resonates with China’s reform era is how the system encourages competition instead of community. Songlian (Gong Li) enters the household believing education and intelligence will give her some agency. Instead she discovers that status depends entirely on proximity to power. The wives could unite against the patriarch, but the household’s rules ensure they never do. Every privilege for one woman is experienced as a loss by another. That dynamic mirrors one of the anxieties surrounding China’s market reforms: as economic opportunity expanded, so too did inequality and competition. Individual success increasingly depended on outperforming others rather than collective advancement. The family isn’t a refuge from power—it is power. The household is effectively a state in miniature. Every dinner, every lantern, every ritual reminds us that political systems endure not only because rulers command them, but because ordinary people learn to live within—and eventually reproduce—their logic. That is the dark vision of Raise the Red Lantern that in retrospect underlines just how the new wave of filmmakers coming out of China were responding to very specific cultural questions that would ultimately come to define an era that would mark an astonishingly rapid formation of a major economic and military world power at the start of the 21st century. In fact, Zhang Yimou‘s film career in many ways traces the emergence of the anxieties of the 5th wave in the 80s and the 90s to the confidence of China as a new world power with a film like Hero in the 2002. Anyway, those are many of my notes going into this podcast discussion, but as always MBS brings the magic and I remain his humble servant. Also, the images here are taken from Mike Best’s broader discussion of photography in this film which is a quite compelling post.