The Chinese name of the film I Am Not Madame Bovary is literally I Am Not Pan Jinlian. Pan Jinlian is a fictional character in the 17th-century Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), and a minor character in Water Margin, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. She is an archetypal femme fatale and one of the most notorious villainesses of classical Chinese culture.
Pan Jinlian has also become the patron goddess of brothels and prostitutes.
Pan Jinlian is married to Wu Dalang, the elder brother of Wu Song. Wu Dalang is short and ugly, while Pan Jinlian is renowned for her beauty; as a result, many people feel that the couple are a mismatch.
Pan Jinlian, dissatisfied with her marriage, has an extramarital affair with Ximen Qing, a handsome womaniser in town. Wu Dalang eventually discovers the affair, but Pan Jinlian and Ximen Qing murder him by adding poison to his food. They bribe the coroner to conceal the true cause of his death. Wu Song grows suspicious of his brother's death. He carries out his own investigations and discovers the truth.
In Water Margin, Wu Song's slaying of the adulterous pair is described in graphic detail and is one of the most memorable scenes in the novel. In Jin Ping Mei, however, Pan Jinlian marries Ximen Qing as a concubine, and Wu Song kills Pan after Ximen dies from excessive sexual activity.
In the post-May Fourth era, the influential playwright Ouyang Yuqian wrote the early modern drama Pan Jinlian in 1928, in which Pan is depicted as a free-spirited woman victimized by a male-dominated traditional society. He played the role of Pan Jinlian himself.
Pan Jinlian is a popular subject of Chinese and Japanese films and television series. Since the 1950s, there have been at least 20 films and television series featuring her as a main character.
I Am Not Pan Jinlian
I Am Not Pan Jinlian (Chinese: 我不是潘金莲), known in English as I Am Not Madame Bovary, is a 2016 Chinese comedy film directed by Feng Xiaogang and written by Liu Zhenyun, based on Liu's 2012 novel I Did Not Kill My Husband. The film stars Fan Bingbing, Zhang Jiayi, Yu Hewei, Dong Chengpeng and Guo Tao.
The film experiments with a visual style that echoes Chinese artistic conventions on framing the image as well as being a sly social commentary concerning gender power relations, misogyny, politics and patriarchy.
The main protagonist, Li Xuelian, is a woman who divorces her husband in order to side-step Chinese law, which states that married couples can only own one property. In order to purchase another property, Li and her husband concoct a plan to divorce so that they can buy a second property. However, in the process of this, her now ex-husband marries another woman and denies ever agreeing to such a deal with Li. To further outrage and distance himself, he accuses Li of sleeping with other men (hence "prostitute" is exchangeable with being a "Madame Bovary"). Li, outraged by this, goes to the local authorities to nullify the divorce so that she may legitimately divorce her husband. Authorities are puzzled by this as Li is already divorced. Li explains her principled approach, first to the local police that she and her husband agreed to divorce under the guise of buying property, but now she wishes to undertake a legitimate divorce. Li crusades for her cause, escalating her issue through each bureaucratic step in the system, from the local police, to local judiciary, to local magistrate, then to the Provincial authorities.
During Li's journey, she tries to hire her friends as hitmen to kill her ex-husband, is accused by her ex-husband of fooling around with other men, is arrested and sent to re-education camps, falsely led into an intimate relationship with a man in an effort by local authorities of ceasing her crusade, goes all the way to Beijing to protest her principled stance on nullifying her divorce. During her persistent crusade, her ex-husband dies, leading Li to lament over her, now, inability to seek retribution for her ex-husband's illicit affair and branding her a prostitute.
The movie concludes with Li settling alone in Beijing, running a noodle restaurant where she encounters one of the local officials who impeded her during her early crusade. She recounts her tale with the official (who was fired as a result of her crusade) and reveals that she initially divorced not to buy property, but so they could have two children. Li was pregnant at the time of the divorce and a divorce would mean she and her ex could "re"-marry and have another child. However, during her divorce and crusade, she had a miscarriage and lost the baby. The movie concludes with Li accepting her fate and life for what it is and lets go of her angst and hate.
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