Zhang Yimou’s third film is the Chinese BLACK NARCISSUS: a fabulous tale of sexual passion set in a village dye-house in the 1920s. Gong Li plays the abused wife who’s had enough of ancestral law and enacts her revenge on her husband. The dye-house is an astonishing visual achievement – as grand as a silent movie, beautiful and hellish. The film grips because we want to rescue her, but its tone soon shifts into Stephen King black comedy, then grand guignol. The result is one of the most entertaining films of the Chinese new wave, a denunciation of pre-revolutionary gender relations and a biting, theatrical, compelling piece of pure cinema.