Last Updated on October 2, 2020 by rob
A mother by day and a prostitute by night The Goddess (Ruan Ling-yu) struggles to bring up her child (Li Keng) in the face of hostility and prejudice. After narrowly escaping a police raid in the red light district The Goddess finds herself under the thumb of a thuggish gambler and pimp known as The Boss (Zhang Zhizhi), who steals the earnings meant to pay for her son’s education. As parents demand the blameless kid’s expulsion from school because of his mother’s occupation, The Goddess reaches breaking point.
This masterful silent film is dominated by an intense, heartfelt and above all – astonishingly modern in its feel – performance from Chinese film icon Ruan Ling-yu. So heartfelt are Ling-yu’s horrified reactions to these events (and yet so devoid of melodrama) you can feel this woman’s pain as each and every option for happiness is gradually closed off putting her in an increasingly desperate state. Wu Yonggang’s direction is excellent. Watch for the striking point-of-view shot as The Goddess scans her dingy room looking for somewhere to hide her money. Or the tracking shot during a school play in which the focus shifts from a proud and delighted Goddess admiring her son’s performance on the stage to a gaggle of bitchy, vindictive mothers gossiping about her further down the aisle. The acting style is naturalistic but the expressionistic images Yonggang conjures up combine into something approaching poetic realism.
Sound came to Chinese cinema almost a decade after its debut in Hollywood but the film technique on display here (which includes a couple of nifty superimpositions) in no way seems stiff or clunky. The film’s climax – in which The Goddess confronts The Boss in his gambling den and demands the return of her money – is an electrifying sequence (check out the look of pure hatred Ling-yu shoots Zhizhi’s brute after he’s smacked her and drawn blood) with the aftermath yet evoking the compassion and kindness that defines great humanist cinema. As for Ling-yu, only a small handful of her silent films survive with this one generally regarded as the greatest of them. Less than a year after making The Goddess Ruan Ling-yu took her own life for reasons that have never been entirely clear. She was just 24.
