‘Red Sorghum’ (NR)

Chinese director Zhang Yimou's cup runneth over in "Red Sorghum." His images intoxicate your eyes. His sounds are tonics from a vivid world. You get so drunk on his artistic bouquet, you worry about driving home.

It's almost comforting that "Sorghum" has structural shortcomings -- if Yimou's debut were any better, he'd have to be tested for artistic steroids. This omniscient sweep through the China of the 1920s and 1930s is fragmentary, shifting abruptly between vignettes. But Yimou uncorks a sensuality that transcends continuity, warms you under the skin; reaches you from a far-off continent and another era.

As outlined by an unseen, anonymous narrator, "Sorghum" tells of the life between "Grandmother" (an exquisite Gong Li) and "Grandfather" (stocky, imposing Jiang Wen). She's a bride-to-be when we meet her, enroute to an arranged wedding with an aging wine-maker. "Grandfather" is one of her litter bearers. After he saves her from a bandit, their attraction to each other leads (after the untimely death of the wine-maker) to marriage and a child. And, after reassembling the old wine-making crew, they endure continuous travails with banditry, pestilence, war with the Japanese and the ongoing process of making good sorghum wine.

Director Yimou floods his episodes with boundless spirit. When the litter-bearers carrying "Grandmother" break boisterously into a traditional song, shaking their fragile passenger to delicate tears, the emotional power of that scene is palpable. Later, when the same woman is pursued by a masked man through a sorghum-cane field -- the leaves and stalks swishing and cracking right inside your ears -- you feel her terror while you marvel at Yimou's visceral brilliance.

These are but two scenes in a prolonged and varied feast of pleasures (the unforgettably erotic scene that follows that cane-field chase) and horror (the flaying of a Chinese villager by Japanese soldiers). "Sorghum" serves up many of the common truths: the satisfaction of working the land, the joy of falling in love, the pain of hunger, the terror of invasion, the grim satisfaction of revenge, the desires of the body . . . There's a certain bawdy, corporeal wisdom to Yimou's work that suggests a Chinese "Canterbury Tales." Yet the 37-year-old director (aided by refined cinematographer Gu Changwei) watches the often crude proceedings with pristine, subtle eyes.

"Sorghum," which won this year's Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival and concluded the New York Film Festival, is not just a promising film. It's the first stroke of a formidable sensibility, aided by China's Beijing Film Academy, which opened the doors (after a 12-year-absence) to art again in 1978. May the State and the Individual work this well together again.

"Red Sorghum" is in Mandarin with subtitles.