Gong Li

▪ 1995

      When Gong Li's (Kung Li's) sensuous smile first appeared in close-up in Red Sorghum, a legend was born. A major event at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival, Red Sorghum was the first directorial effort of Zhang Yimou (Chang Yi-mou), whose work as a cinematographer on Chen Kaige's (Ch'en K'ai-ke's) The Yellow Earth (1984) had helped launch a new wave of filmmakers from China known as the "Fifth Generation." International audiences had tended to view contemporary Chinese cinema as boring and propagandistic. The "Fifth Generation" brought back sensuality, talent, and emotion to their national cinema, and Gong Li came to symbolize this new sensibility. It was this happy combination of glamour and historical significance that propelled the 22-year-old acting student to centre stage, where she was meant to stay.

      Gong Li was born on Dec. 31, 1965, in Shenyang, Liaoning province. She was the youngest of five children in a family of academics. In 1985 Gong Li was admitted to the prestigious Central Drama Academy in Beijing. It was during her second year that Zhang, who was interviewing young actresses for the part of the rebellious young bride in Red Sorghum, noticed her. Not only did Gong Li get the job, but she also got the man. The romance with director-Pygmalion Zhang (who was still married at the time) both scandalized and delighted fans throughout East Asia.

      Zhang Yimou's and Gong Li's careers grew together—with Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991). In these films, Gong Li played a spirited young woman who, forced to marry the wrong man, fights for her right to independence and sexual pleasure, but pays dearly. She was soon wooed by Hong Kong producers and landed her first comic role in Terra-Cotta Warrior (1990), in which she is pursued throughout the centuries by a faithful lover played by Zhang. She also appeared in parodic gangster movies, light-hearted dramas, and kung fu comedies.

      It was, however, with mainland directors that she did her best work. In Zhang's Qiu Ju Goes to Court (1992; also known as The Story of Qiu Ju) she played a decidedly unglamorous country wife, who, though heavily pregnant during most of the film, stubbornly wages a fight against the local bureaucracy. The film was a triumph at the Venice Film Festival, where it received the Golden Lion and Gong Li was given the best actress award. In Farewell, My Concubine, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1993, Chen Kaige cast her as a shrewd, single-minded, yet sensitive prostitute, who gets her man and forces him out of an ambiguous relationship with a fellow Peking Opera singer but is betrayed by him during the Cultural Revolution. In 1994 Zhang's To Live, which covered the life of a couple between the 1940s and the 1970s, allowed her to explore new dimensions of her art: not only does she age significantly, but she also evolves from the long-suffering wife of a patrician gambler to a plain, yet energetic, peasant woman who supports two children and a whimsical husband to a doting grandmother who has found peace in her old age. In addition to her glamour, talent, and magnetic screen presence, Gong Li's phenomenal popularity was due to her modernity. She was an incarnation of the new Chinese woman standing for herself through the tortuous meanders of melodramatic conventions, bureaucratic procedures, and the changing winds of history. (BÉRÉNICE REYNAUD)

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