Red Plague

By RICHARD CORLISS

How severe may the punishment be for the crime of being a rich wastrel in a poor land? If the land is China in the first three decades of Mao's reign, the sentence is severe. To Live, the new film from Zhang Yimou, China's top director, is a visually ravishing, emotionally relentless catalog of the indignations visited on a family that had the bad luck to have it good before the revolution.

It is 1947. A rich merchant's son named Fuqui (played by Ge You, who won the best-actor prize at the Cannes festival this year) waters the local casino tables with his father's fortune. Fuqui is a cool dude in line for comeuppance, and he soon learns humility the hard way; it arrives like a 30- ( year plague. He and his wife (Gong Li) are bankrupted, then branded as decadent curs. But the pestilence is not localized; every family suffers. In the '60s, doctors are locked up, leaving the hospitals in the control of those bullying incompetents, the Red Guards. All that keeps the country together is the stalwart heroism of millions of families like Fuqui's.

This trials-of-Job saga has been told more powerfully in other brave Chinese films (Farewell My Concubine and The Blue Kite), and To Live lacks the surprise and sumptuousness of Zhang's The Story of Qiu Ju and Raise the Red Lantern. But the Chinese censors can still be shocked -- and vindictive. Zhang was recently forced, under the threat of never making another film in his homeland, to write an apology for wanting to promote To Live at Cannes. So one has to ask, How severe is the punishment for the crime of being an honest artist in a corrupt land?