Woman Sesame Oil Maker (1993) User Reviews

3rd Fanhua Chinese Film Festival

[emmamanetti · 8/10 · 9 October 2023]

It was a pleasure to see this movie in Florence yesterday! Thanks to the director Xie Fei for his kind message that was projected before the start of the film and for making this beautifully shot movie. The pacing is quite slow but it's not a bad thing, it just serves the purpose of laying the ground for the story to come and broadens our understanding of the characters' behaviour. The landscape is also quite beautiful but it becomes this open spaced prison for the women protagonists as they continue to live their lives, which are only oriented by their husbands' needs and wantings, even if in different forms.

If you have the occasion watch it!

Powerful but complex feminist statement

[Stracke · 9/10 · 12 April 1999]

This movie explores the moral dilemmas of a woman who has beaten the system on its own terms. Madame Xiang was sold at the age of 7 to the drunken lout who is now her husband of 20 years. She says she cried when she was a child, but long ago she became a stolid seeker of opportunities, with a secret lover and a successful business. Now her life comes full circle as, playing the solid patriarch that her husband could never be, she buys her retarded son a lovely young bride. Instead of preaching, Xie Fei builds powerful dramatic episodes that make the viewer feel equally strong sympathy for Madame Xiang and horror at what she is doing. The film's last moment, when she can no longer close her eyes to the horror, is very powerful. The cinematography is especially effective: the lake of the title is filmed with a lyrical beauty that serves primarily to provide an ironic contrast with the unfolding events but also underpins the characters' sense that beauty and dignity in life are somehow possible, somehow their right.

Money isn't everything, but what else is?

[zzmale · 10/10 · 19 November 2003]

Money cannot buy you love, but it does buy power. Once a victim of money, but when finally turns the table around, it is discovered in the end that the final result is the same, with or without money. The life of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is extremely similar and the director tries to leave a happy ending of breaking the vicious cycle, but has audience ever wondered that should Ms. Xiang died and the daughter-in-law, the only capable person who can handle the business, inherits the wealth of Ms. Xiang and expanded successfully just like Ms. Xiang did, would she also end up like her mother-in-law?