Curse of the Golden Flower

Year:2006
Director:Zhang Yimou
Cast:Chow Yun-Fat, Gong Li, Jay Chou, Liu Ye, Ni Dahong, Chen Jin, Li Man, Qin Junjie
Description:
It's
pretty and it's also pretty good. The Curse of Costume
Epics Made for Western Consumption�gets stymied
by Zhang Yimou's fittingly opulent Curse of the
Golden Flower. The famed Chinese director, who
last went westward with 2004's overwrought and somewhat
silly House of Flying Daggers, assembles a
name-heavy cast for this adaptation of famed dramatist
Cao Yu's play Thunderstorm. Zhang Yimou and
writers Wu Nan and Bian Zhihong transplant Cao Yu's
1930's era play to Tang Dynasty-era China, replacing
the messed-up family of Cao's original with a royal
messed-up version, who find their relationships
getting torn to shreds right on the eve of the Chongyang
Festival . Throw in your requisite martial
arts, some CGI armies, and more faux gold production
design than is probably necessary and you have this
year's most entertaining and overdone melodrama.
Chow Yun-Fat is the patriarch
of the film's messed-up family unit, only he isn't
just an upper class snob with gobs of dough like in
Cao Yu's original play. Chow is Emperor Ping, a powerful
man who's built a successful empire, and he apparently
aims to enjoy it. Aside from lording over thousands
of subjects, the Emperor's palace is gold-encrusted
and ultra-opulent, a deliberate and even disgusting
monument to one man's obsession with status and appearance.
When the man first appears, he summons his second
son, Prince Jie , to his quarters for an
impromptu duel, whereupon he tells the kid that he's
given him everything that he has, and that he must
never, ever try to take more without permission. The
message is obvious: don't turn on me, kid, or suffer
the consequences. Jie promises that he won't, but
by the end of the film, circumstances have arisen
that cause Jie to go back on his word. But the Emperor
isn't lying to Jie: the kid is in for a tough lesson.
So is the audience.
Things kick off with
the revelation that the Emperor's second wife, Empress
Phoenix ,
is being slowly killed. The Imperial Physician has instructed his daughter, Chen , to spike the
Empress' hourly anemia medicine with a poison that
will slowly turn her into a half-wit. The chief mastermind
to this plot is of course the Emperor, who's trying
to off his buxom wife presumably because of her long-standing
affair with with the Emperor's number one son Xiang
, who is thankfully not the Empress' biological
son. In turn, the Empress would like Xiang's help
to overthrow the Emperor, but he's a sniveling, useless
sort, meaning he lacks the guts to go through with
a coup.
However, that's not the only
rotten thing happening in the state of Denmark; Xiang
is also carrying on an affair with Chen, much to the
Empress' disapproval, and it's unknown if the Emperor
even knows about it. The Emperor has his own secrets
involving his first wife, and youngest son Cheng mopes around looking annoyed because everyone
is too busy scheming and plotting to pay him any mind.
The lone stalwart person in all of this is Jie, who
seemingly desires family harmony. However, the deal
breaker for Jie may be that his father is deliberately
attempting to turn his mother into a vegetable. The
Empress is all-too-aware of this leverage, but the
clock is ticking on her remaining sanity. With the
Chongyang festival drawing close, will she be able
to entice Jie to pull off the planned coup against
her crappy husband? And will the Emperor catch on
before its too late?
Curse of the Golden
Flower is chockfull of deadly grudges and overwrought
personal politics. This is incredibly melodramatic
stuff; incest, murder, patricide, and other Korean
drama-worthy plotlines are offered up in the film's
juicy screenplay, which sometimes seems to be as trashy
as it is classy. The overdone histrionics from the
cast only add to the fun, with three of the four leads
overacting admirably . Gong Li strides
around the palace in an incredibly haughty manner,
sweating wildly and fixing everyone who crosses her
path with withering gazes. Chow Yun-Fat is powerfully
smug as the Emperor, and uses his tremendous screen
charisma to ooze smarm instead of the patented Chow
Yun-Fat charm. Liu Ye perfectly embodies Xiang with
a suitably over-the-top display of pathetic weakness.
The production design and Shigeru Umebayashi's bombastic
score are the icing on the cake of this exercise in
excess. Curse of the Golden Flower could be
the year's most overdone and potentially alienating
motion picture. Everything is too beautiful and too
perfectly arranged, which is usually where we knock
a film for being too manufactured.
Not this time. It's
true that the look and feel of Curse of the Golden
Flower is manufactured to egregious effect, but
there are actually reasons behind all the insane artifice.
The Ancient Chinese glitz and glamour traps some characters;
the Empress may know that she's being poisoned, but
her excessive amount of attendants, the exact timekeeping
,
and the Emperor's steel grip on the household serve
to suffocate her, making deception and a planned coup
her only way out. The artificial beauty is also a
part of the Emperor's perfectly arranged show of power.
His family and empire are his to command, and they're
all supposed to be as lovely and docile as the inanimate
finery that makes up his overly ornate surroundings.
But it's all plainly artificial, both to the audience
and to the characters in the film. Beneath the beauty
lies plenty of ugliness, and the Emperor behaves in
a cunning, villainous way because he's trying to preserve
the artificially created beauty of his lofty position.
The Emperor's values
are also hypocritical. When gathering his family for
the Chongyang Festival, he stresses such values as
filial piety, honor, and righteousness, though it's
plainly obvious from minute one that these fine values
are not practiced by most of the film's principal
characters. That these characters are the ones in
power gives Curse of the Golden Flower a suspicious,
anti-Hero feel, i.e. this may not be a pro-China
movie. Unlike the ultra-sympathetic King portrayed
in Zhang Yimou's acclaimed 2002 film, Emperor Ping
is conniving and ruthless, and seems to be behaving
so terribly becauses he's corrupt and generally selfish
lout who only talks a good game. In truth, he abuses
his power by poisoning his wife, and then shames her
into accepting the poison by pretending to show public
concern. During these scenes it's easy to feel some
sympathy for the put-upon Empress because she's in
such a terrible position, drinking poison hourly despite
the knowledge that it's really killing her.
Still, the Empress has, by
definition, violated the family's values by engaging
in adultery and nominal incest, meaning her suffering
may not be entirely unjust. There's more afoot in
Curse of the Golden Flower than a simple tale
of "bad man forces family to succumb to his will
until the family rightfully seeks revenge." In
this film, everyone's a sinner and everyone suffers - even the Emperor, whose cooly calculating evil
eventually backfires in a way that even he doesn't
expect. Chow Yun-Fat gives his character a powerful
confidence, but when things spin beyond his expectation,
his veneer is momentarily shattered. In those moments,
the Emperor becomes a tragic, and even sympathetic
figure. He'll still do what he has to do, i.e. kill
those who have betrayed him, but his character reveals
levels not fully verbalized in the script. Despite
the overt trashiness of the film's "Dallas
in the Palace" storyline, there's a complexity
of theme and character going on that proves fascinating.
However, the above
is simply one way of looking at the Curse of the
Golden Flower, which proffers extreme melodrama,
sumptuous art direction, multi-layered themes, and
your requisite martial arts all packaged in smashing
gold lamé wrapping paper. Ching Siu-Tung manages
some fine action set pieces, including an exciting
ambush by the Emperor's assassins, plus the slightly
unconvincing finale, which finds Jay Chou mixing it
up against scores of foes while carrying a spear that
may be heavier than he is. But the action is only
one part of the piñata that is Curse of
the Golden Flower. There's lots of stuff going
on here, allowing the film to be enjoyed on numerous
levels. As a trashy melodrama, the film delivers its
share of campy soap opera goodness, and as an opulent
epic, there's much to gawk at. But there's also well-played
drama and complex themes mixed into the epic action
and artifice. Cao Yu's Thunderstorm is renowned
as a classic of Chinese melodrama, and Zhang Yimou
and company have given the play a worthy twist with
Curse of the Golden Flower.
That said, the extreme gaudiness
of the whole affair may turn off more than a few audiences,
and after The Banquet, a backlash against these
sorts of costume epics may be in full effect. Those
who subscribe to the backlash do have a legitimate
beef, as Curse of the Golden Flower does exhibit
much of the same artificial excess that made The
Banquet seem cold and unapproachable. But there's
really a lot more going on here, and Zhang Yimou should
be given credit for returning to this genre again
and again. This is already Zhang's third time around
with big-budget martial arts extravagance, and he
looks to be changing things up each time he returns,
finding new and even worthy stories to tell using
the genre's now overly-familiar iconography. The results
may not always be Hero or Curse of the Golden
Flower, but they won't always be House of Flying
Daggers either. At this point, he's two out of
three, so giving Zhang Yimou license to be excessive
again may be more prudent than, say, throwing money
at Chen Kaige for a Promise 2. Besides, sometimes
excess can be good. This is one of those times.