The Story of Autumn Chrysanthemum is the representative work of Zhang Yimou's early realism. From the technical and audio-visual aspects, the careful audience can find that in the process of arranging the Story of Autumn Chrysanthemum, most of the films are panoramic long shots, and the environmental noise in the set is not deliberately eliminated. Zhang Yimou deliberately kept the true ambient sound in the process of filming, which is a purely objective and cool style shooting, in order to present the audience with a story that tries to get rid of the emotional tendency and provide them with more space for independent thinking.

This is consistent with the style of Zhang Yimou's early "world blockbusters", such as Alive and Red Sorghum. In the later period of the new era, Zhang Yimou launched a movie craze of "commercial blockbusters", and introduced a large number of quick-cut and surreal aerial martial arts scenes, such as Hero and Golden Flower in the City, including Shadow, which is on fire recently.

As for the story, it is also realistic. Compared with Living, which is too sensitive, The Story of Qiu Ju is much more subtle. The camera is aimed at the corner of Qiu Ju, a rural woman who has no culture but is quite stubborn in her bones. Although she is in a mountain village with blocked news and logistics, it will take a long time to get into the county seat, but her stubbornness in her bones forced her to "make a statement" with the village head and force her to apologize. In fact, such a character setting almost did not exist at that time, and "solving difficulties and disputes" was mostly the solution of the actual version of the story. The method of film storytelling was absolutely understood by the law popularization when the thinking of Chinese people was still relatively simple and closed at that time.

This understanding of "popularizing the law" runs through the film, including how to visit, how to appeal, how to file a case, and even the ending. In the end, Qiu Ju had tacitly forgiven the village head, but the village head was taken away by the police car. This law is greater than the plot setting, and it still has certain universal value in a certain sense.

In the choice of artists, Gong Li, who plays Qiu Ju, should be the biggest highlight. Different from the girls in Hanging the Red Lantern, Gong Li "landed" at home this time. Her words and deeds, breathing and even frown completely disappeared as an "artist". This simple texture and natural temperament is quite difficult to achieve. At first, when the screenwriter was writing the script, he thought that Gong Li was the protagonist, but he couldn't write it after writing it several times, thinking that the other party was too noble and gorgeous. However, with Zhang Yimou's persistent efforts, Gong Li got the role after all, and we can also see that Gong Li gave Zhang Yimou, herself and China Film a very satisfactory answer sheet.