Goddess (1934)
Review of Goddess / 神女 (1934), directed by Yonggang Wu
Note: the video attached above is the full film, which is free to watch on YouTube.
I will admit, I decided to watch this movie after seeing Center Stage (Stanley Kwan, 1991) where Maggie Cheung is starring as the lead actress of Goddess Ruan Lingyu. A lot of Ruan’s earlier filmography was lost, as she only starred in silent films (she had a notoriously thick Cantonese accent and feared that she could not find work in Mandarin-language films if they ever transitioned to the talkies—a fun nugget of a history fact right there) and died by suicide at the age of twenty-four.
In Center Stage, they actually took clips from this movie and inserted them into the narrative alongside Cheung’s acting, which got me interested in watching the actual film. Thankfully, it was available for free on YouTube in its entirety with English subtitles for the placard scenes.
Goddess is Ruan’s best-known work, and it shows very well in the types of character roles she was cast in. Often she depicted women on the lower rungs of society, and this is true as well for this film.
This is also Ruan’s best-known work and is said to showcase the sheer amount of talent this little woman had in her, so, naturally, I knew I had to watch it in its entirety despite having an aversion to short films. It’s also considered one of the biggest silent films to have come out of China.
Wow, I’ve said quite a bit, so let’s get this review going.
Content
Goddess isn’t a tale for those who are quite emotional. Our main character is a strong leading lady; she is a single mother with a young son, and because she does not have a male figure in her life, she must provide for the both of them in the best way that she can. She turns to prostitution, showing us the dark underbelly of 1930s China almost immediately, as a local gangster coerces her into having sex with him while she’s fleeing from the police.
The deal is that he’ll hide her for the night. That doesn’t end up being reality, as this guy literally hunts her down after this episode and then claims she is now his property. She submits to this fate, knowing she can’t get out of it immediately, but begins to hide money away for her son.
On the opposite hand, her son is bullied at school because everyone know his mother is a prostitute. She has enrolled him in a private school, and when the staff members find out, the principal comes to investigate. If the rumors are true, the boy is to be expelled. We se this principal moved by the mother’s dedication to giving her son a better life, but in the end it is futile. The principal resigns and the boy is expelled.
The gangster comes back the mother kills him, leading her to go to jail and the principal adopts her son, promising to give him a better life that she had always dreamed of.
There’s a lot of historical context in this film; it is set in Shanghai during the 1930s, where roughy a 100,000 women were working as prostitutes. The term that is the Chinese title for this film, shen nü, is an old slang for prostitute, but the English title, Goddess, sheds light on her true nature: a dedicated mother who only wants the best in the world for her son.
It layers the complexity of what she had to do as a woman in Shanghai during the 1930s to make a feasible income for herself, but takes away the stereotype of being just another prostitute. Her story humanizes the profession, sheds light on the people in it and the struggles they face. We see how one man decides to make her life hell just because he’s decided she’s easy, but she doesn’t let that stop her in her mission.
This is also shown in the way that the mother is dressed. She looks like a normal woman on first glance, almost traditional. She is not following the standard styles of the era: in 1920s Shanghai, and extending into the 1930s, women often dressed like the Western flappers.
Here’s an overview of fashion in Shanghai. But because of the introduction to Western cinema in Asia, in both Japan and China we can trace the influence of the original flappers to the fashionable (often wealthy) women on the streets of both Shanghai and Tokyo. Instead of wearing a shorter qipao or makeup, which most women into fashion would be sporting, she is wearing a long qipao and dresses quite simply when it comes to her hair and appearance.
The camera and shots themselves lend to these ideas of the day versus night personas. We see the camera angle and framing set up in order to exacerbate the male gaze and these acts of male aggression. I particularly began to notice this when we first see the gangster come for her, as the camera gets up all in his face, having him take up the vast majority of the frame, and he acts enraged and particularly possessive.
There’s never a shot in between night and day—they’re always distinctly set up to be certain things happen at night (the prostitution related) and others at day (e.g. her being a goddess mother).
Overall Thoughts
Some fascinating nuggets of history in this one. Get some nationalist agendas, which I get considering they had to get past the censorship somehow (e.g. I doubt if Wu wanted to make a more gritty film about 1930s Shanghai, there was no way he would’ve gotten the funding.
He was a part of major left-wing groups that the Kuomintang were actually after). This is the only Chinese silent film I’ve seen, but I think I’ll go back and watch more of Ruan’s films as well as some others.
She was such a talented actress and had a tragic life story, I just wish she had gotten more justice when it came to her life and death. This was a very progressive film as well, so anyone interested in gender and film could have a great time with this movie.
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