Abstract—The cinema industry has always presented
female figures from a patriarchal perspective, propagandizing
the men’s authority over women. The typical character
“female fatale” with fatal sexual attraction in the genre film
noir has already been the focus of many feminist scholars. The
essay focuses on the issue of the representation of women in
Chinese film noir through examining the female figures in The
Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful (2017) by close textual
analysis. Three heroines, the mom Madame Tang, the
daughters Tang Ning and Tang Zhen, as the embodiment of
“female fatale” drive the film’s plot and articulate their
agency of resisting the masculine power. However, the study
will prove that the Chinese female fatale conventionally
cannot escape from the fatal tragedy and pessimism in their
unsolvable dilemma.
Index Terms—Film noir, female fatale, patriarchy, male
gaze, myth.
Zixiang Xi is with University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK; Now
she is with London School of Economics and Political Science under the
Department of Anthropology, London, UK (e-mail:
Claudiaxi0428@outlook.com).
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Cite:Zixiang Xi, "A Feminist Film Analysis of the Representation of Woman in Chinese Film Noir: Based on the Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 111-115, 2021.