The Woman of Wrath angers more than the eponymous woman seems angry for much of it! (Film review)

The tickets I bought for the 2025 Hong Kong International Film Festival 

 

The Woman of Wrath (Taiwan, 1984)

- Tseng Chuang Hsiang, director

- Starring: Pat Ha, Pai Ying, Chen Shu Fang 

- Part of the HKIFF's Chinese-language Restored Classics program 

 

This 1984 film adaptation of Taiwanse feminist writer Li Ang's The Butcher's Wife is said to be a classic of Taiwanese New Cinema.  I must confess to not knowing about this movie though until I read that a restored version of it would be screened at this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival along with works that I am familiar with and rate highly, including Patrick Tam's My Heart is That Eternal Rose (Hong Kong, 1989) and Johnnie To's PTU (Hong Kong, 2003).

 

Starring two familiar names and faces in Pat Ha (who I've seen and loved in offerings like On the Run (Hong Kong, 1988)) and Pai Ying (who I had seen just one day earlier in The System (Hong Kong, 1979)!), I figured that I'd at least get guaranteed an acting masterclass.  And I think I did; what with these two thespians who I've seen in multiple roles play against type as they took on the roles of a much put upon female and a barbaric lout of a man in The Woman of Wrath!

 

Before they are seen in the film though, the audience is "treated" to scenes that set the tone for this harrowing drama in which rape and the general horrors of living in an unsophisticated patriarchal society prominently figures.  A young girl witnesses her mother, a widow who looked to be starving, allowing a man to have sex with her in return for food.  (Talk about a stark illustration about the "food for sex" theory I learnt about in biological anthropology classes at college!)  Then, when a male relative bursts into the room to confront -- and berate -- rather than rescue her, she decides out of shame -- or is it anger and desperation? -- to violently take her own life.

 

That young girl -- who I could easily imagine having become permanently traumatized by witnessing those scenes -- grows to young adulthood and is played by Pat Ha.  Just in time for Ah Shih, as she is called, to be married -- and sold? -- off by her uncle, whose family she had been living with, to a man living in another village a boat ride away.

 

Chiang Shui (portrayed by Pai Ying) is a butcher.  Literally.  And yes, the audience is shown graphic scenes of him and his fellow butchers at work.  (It's worth noting that The Woman of Wrath was previously shown with eight scenes cut that this restored version reinserts into the work.)  He also is shown visiting a prostitute -- a scene that turns out to be the film's tenderest; what with him treating the prostitute with the kind of humanity, not just affection, that he doesn't for anyone else, including the young woman he took as his wife.

 

Chiang Shui's disregard, dislike even, for Ah Shih looks to have begun on their first night together, when she doesn't respond well to his sexual overtures; not surprisingly given that she appears to not have known anything about sex and had not been ignored and not even given anything to eat in between her entering his home and his deciding to bed her after a big dinner and many drinks with his friends.  He does seem to like very much to make her scream and squeal while they are having sex (that is, when he is raping her), the way that a pig screams and squeals as it is being killed by him and his fellow butchers.  

 

Ironically, Ah Shih's loud screams are interpreted by other villagers as ones of enjoyment during sex and she is castigated as a sex maniac by village gossips.  (More than incidentally, many of the womenfolk in the village also come across as envious of her position as the wife of a butcher since their assumption is that she gets to eat lots of meat, unlike them.) 

 

The terrible treatment of Ah Shih goes on for what can seem like an eternity even though the film is less than 2 hours long.  Ditto the wait to see Ah Shih unleash her thoroughly justified wrath.  The fact of the matter though is that The Woman is Wrath is poorly named.  Honestly, I think The Terribly Abused Woman would have been a better title for this painful watch of a work that, if truth be told, I have zero plans of re-watching ever again!

 

My rating for this film: 5.5