dness, and freedom recounted and emulated.`Red Sorghum" is the sort of scenic, romantic, violent, symbolic melodrama that flowered in the early years of the cinema. The fact that it was made in 1988, and shot in China in CinemaScope and color, doesn't make it a modern film, but that is quite all right. There is a strength in the simplicity of this story, in the almost fairy-tale quality of its images and the shocking suddenness of its violence, that Hollywood in its sophistication has lost. The works of the "Fifth Generation" of People's Republic filmmakers have been seen widely in America at film festivals and on campuses, but "Red Sorghum," by Zhang Yimou, is the first modern Chinese film to be released commercially in this country. Playing at the Music Box through Saturday, it arrives decorated with the Golden Bear, the highest award of the 1988 Berlin Film Festival. It also carries on its shoulders the hopes of the Xi'an Film Studio, birthplace of a tentative "new wave" of Chinese filmmaking. The mainline Chinese movie market is enormous (18 studios supply 140 films a year, attracting 25 billion admissions), but a deliberate effort to produce world-class cinema is being made mostly at Xi'an (rhymes with "shan"). "Red Sorghum" begins as a memory, being told by an unseen narrator, of his grandmother. She was, we learn, a poor girl who in the late 1920s was sent by her parents into a pre-arranged marriage with a much older man. The good news was that he owned a vineyard. The bad news was that he had leprosy. The girl thoughtfully slips a pair of scissors into her blouse before being borne off by sedan chair to meet her husband. As her party makes its way through a field of sorghum, it is attacked by bandits. One of her escorts fights off the assailant, and then slips away into the fields - only to accost her the next day in a raid of his own. But she is grateful to him for having saved her life, and they make love. Time passes. The lep...
