A Woman (2022)

A Woman's life was never easy

I watched the movie at the 16th Festival of Chinese movies in Paris on Tuesday May 25, 2025, pending another screening on Monday June 9 at the cinema Pathé Les Fauvettes.

The movie depicts the hard life and lack of choices of a woman assigned to work in a factory specializing in dyeing fabric while pushed into two unsuccessful marriages and painful births over a hard period (the Cultural Revolution in the early 1970s to the mid-1980s), it leaves an impression of a grey life, even if the end is more hopeful with the protagonist Kong Xiu publishing stories in a newspaper, against the odds. The movie was released on Women's Day, March 8, 2024, in mainland China.

Wang Chao, the director, specializes in the portraits of the underprivileged in hard circumstances since in "Orphan of Anyang" trilogy (which he wrote himself, but "A Woman" is adapted by him, also as screenwriter together with Dong Yunzhou, from the semi autobiographical novel of Zhang Xiuzhen : My Dream, as befits the theme of the festival which is "Adaptation of literary works into Chinese cinema").

This movie can be compared with the one about the tribulations of Xiangling Sao in 1956 "New Year Sacrifice" (adapted from a short story by Lu Xun) and of the classic 1934 "Goddess" (about a woman who sacrifices everything for her child).

Despite Mao's saying that "women hold up half the sky", doing so was not an easy task, even after the 1949 Liberation and the advent of the New China, when villagers still subscribed to early marriage to get a son who would keep alive the family line, while a daughter in law was regarded as only useful to cater for the elders and work in the fields. Especially during the Cultural Revolution when a factory worker, although also a needed category, was at risk of being politically scolded, slandered, or worse. Surviving the hardship, keeping up her spirit, and finding new hopes, Kong Xiu (played very precisely by Shen Shiyu) becomes a minor icon to be respected.

Yang Jinxia (played by Zhu Dongqing) was her first husband, obeying his mother who despised the daughter-in-law and forced him into divorce, keeping the son and leaving the daughter to Kong Xiu. Liu Hanzhang the second, crippled husband and father of her third child was played by Wang Xuedong. Yu Qingbin played as the timid factory electrical engineer Wu Beichen, who finally took courage to pursue Kong Xiu when she did not need a husband anymore.

The final images of Kong Xiu visiting her first husband tilling a field, and hearing that her elder son has been sent to boarding school, before she turns to the small bordering riverbed, become a stony wasteland, are bitter sweet.

The name 孔秀 also reminds of a hero from the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but the fate of the woman in the movie is kinder than that of the commander of Donglin Pass who was beheaded by Guan Yu.

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