Curse of the Golden Filmmaker
Went to watch Zhang Yimou’s much anticipated Tang-dynasty extravaganza Curse of the Golden Flower the other day with darkobsidian, discoecstasy and RY following dinner at the Eastern Restaurant (Centrepoint).
Zhang’s last few films - Hero, The House of Flying Daggers - are at the forefront of a move to bring wuxia films to a wider, western audience with increasingly large budgets, lavish sets and employing the cream of Asian acting talent. In pressing forwards towards this grand vision, Yimou has also reached backwards and re-united (both in a professional and a personal sense) with the incomparable Gong Li.
Discoecstasy informs me that Golden Flower was based upon a play set in 1930s China about a wealthy family whose superficial veneer of upper-class respectability belies a dysfunctional interior landscape. Yimou has transplanted the story to Tang dynasty China with the parts recast as members of the imperial family, the main reason for which seems to be that mere upper-classness doesn’t offer Zhang Yimou the opportunity for lavish spectacle which he favours nowadays.
The sets and costumes are jaw-droppingly opulent. During the opening minutes, we are treated to an extravagant cacophony of textures, colours and sounds that threaten to overwhelm the senses. The palace interiors are a particular marvel - iridescent glass columns encrusted with amber, intricately carved gold screens, plush silk carpets in glowing rainbow hues. Life in the palace is described as a series of immaculately choreographed actions, from the palace girls dressing with awesome military precision, to flocks of eunuchs noisily announcing each passing hour with auspicious proverbs and clattering bells.
At the centre of this artificial universe are the imperial family whose similarly gilded, constrained exteriors (note Gong Li’s heaving bosom squashed into her bodice) are slowly giving way to deeper, darker undercurrents. The coolly demented emperor, played by Chow Yun Fat with customary suavity, has uncovered an incestuous affair (one of two in the film) between the rather effete crown prince (Liu Ye) and his stepmother, the empress (Gong Li).
Decorum and loss-of-face preclude public punishment, and since he clearly can’t punish the son of his deceased first wife and love (for some rather unsurprising reasons which will later emerge), the emperor does the next best thing - prescribe the empress with a medication to be taken hourly that will eventually drive her mad. The empress is aware that her morning juice is being spiked - and it’s worth the ticket price just to see Gong Li dispatch this distasteful duty over and over again - but so as not to arouse suspicion she continues to take the toxic brew as directed while plotting a suitable end for her imperial spouse.
To this end she compels her son, Prince Jai (Jay Chou) who has returned victorious from battle into staging a coup at the annual chrysanthemum festival (the golden flower), which she obsessively embroiders with shaky hands that chart her deterioration. The overlooked and mild-mannered youngest son Prince Yu watches the events unfold. Adding to this rather tangled web, a subplot is introduced around the emperor’s first wife, the court physician, and his daughter who is having a roll in the hay with the crown prince.
Perhaps it’s because of the film’s genesis as a theatre piece, but the script’s broad gestures which may have worked well on stage translate rather clunkily to the screen, driving the actors into histrionic excesses to make the point. Considering the high calibre of some of the artists, this is a real shame. Sure, we get the point about the oppressive heaped layers of opulence like gold leaf millefeuille, but there has to be much more than that. Beyond the big gestures, the lord-of-the-rings-style CGI battle sequences and the gilt, little about the characters is interesting or illuminating.
Even Chow Yun Fat fills his role uncomfortably - perhaps he is just too likeable to fit the idea of a demented ruler. This leaves Gong Li to command the pivotal performance - and commands it she does - but the empress’s inner turmoil is just drawn in too single-minded and prosaic strokes to save the film. Liu Ye’s crown prince is the one character whose gradual deterioration of mind and body is best communicated. Jay Chou, except for one or two moments of uncertainty, does a passable job but is clearly out of his league.
For a wuxia film, the action sequences are disappointing. The big battle sequences, for all their mass and intricate rendering, lack atmosphere and tend to plod. More impressive is the sequence in which the battlefield is set upon by a second army of cleaners which efficiently sweep away blood and gore and replace them with a sea of chrysanthemums.
Personally, what I found most disconcerting is that in upping the scale of his films, Zhang Yimou seems to have sacrificed storytelling for bombast. Grand spectacle and metaphors alone are not enough to make a film good; Golden Flower is beautifully shot but the narrative is grotesquely out of proportion and poorly paced. As one of the world’s most high-profile filmmakers, he should be getting more adept at telling engaging stories, not less.
As he himself has acknowledged, Hero and Flying Daggers were experiments in the medium of wuxia films by pushing their expressive boundaries. These films have to toe a fine line between artistic drama and physical camp, and well-scripted stories are an integral part. In the case of Golden Flower, this is one experiment that clearly went wrong.