Monday night I went to watch the new film by Zhang Yimou titled “Curse of the Golden Flower.” It was so irisdescent and awashed with color, that it bordered on being an eyesore, but only in certain scenes. I was unprepared for the heaviness of this film, of an order that matched the darkest Shakespearean tragedy. Bold colors of gold, aqua blue, magenta pink, rich embers of hues decorate the cinematography. Watching this, I get the sense that Zhang Yimou was not so much a film director, but a painter artist at heart.
The opening scenes showing the multitudes of palace slaves getting ready for their day reminded me of how it was in Spirited Away, when you get a grand bird’s eye view of the spa house and what it took for all its oiled parts to kick into gear at the same time. Except in this movie, it took precision and clockwork team effort to a whole new level. Everyone did everything in synchronous motion, from brushing hair, putting on dresses and going through morning toiletries. It emphasized more than ever the dehumanization of any one person, the robotization of mankind.
Gong-li was resplendent and convincing as the miserable but still regal empress. She carries the noble burden very admirably and is able to, despite a certain distance that separates us lowly human beings from her, convey the universal themes of human emotion: jealousy, anxiety, bitterness, resignation, anger, and borderline insanity. One of my beefs with this film would be that no comic relief was ever present in the movie. It started out grand but heavy, it ended grand and even heavier. It was just heavy heavy heavy. I left the theater, half dazed from all the dazzling colors, but my heart felt heavy from the burden of such enormous bloodshed and tragedy. It was definitely not the type of movie to kick off the new year in a happy go lucky way.
My feelings about this film are mixed. On the one hand, the mega production of this film, the grandiose battle scenes were awe-inspiring. The film makes me feel like a very small insignificant thing, in the face of the millions of troops that surged onscreen. It was LOTR without the CGI effects. On the other hand, the sheer grandeur of the battle scenes also serve to make the main characters smaller than life too, less important, more distant and consequently, less to be concerned with in my mind. These petulant and conniving royalties, with their incestuous affairs and tyrannical natures, caused the deaths of thousands who have no better way to explain their deaths except that they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Tragic, really, so terribly tragic.
The film was not without redeeming characters. The second son of the empress, Prince Jai, came through as the sole purist with a noble heart. Amidst the muck and dirty swamp that characterizes his royal family, he is the sole lotus flower that rises above it. I think Jay Chou brought to the character an admirable performance. He’s not an obvious choice to be cast in that role, I guess, because he lacks the noble appearance of his parents, but it doesn’t matter, because he came through in the end. I have nothing to say about the older brother, appearance wise, he’s a major turn off, character-wise, he’s even worse. I don’t know why he was cast and what purpose he served other than to be wretched and pathetic and just gross.
Zhang Yimou was one of my first favorite Chinese directors, back when I first began to watch films critically and appreciate them above and beyond the typical Steve Chow or Jackie Chan mad-dash and entertainment. His earlier films were powerful and moving or more than a little disturbing. This film, his latest, definitely is very disturbing but also very powerful, in a different way. It wasn't so much powerful in terms of its emotional impact, but more from an aesthetic standpoint, it delivers triumphantly. The use of music and sound were also very effective. At the end, I felt like I had been to an opera and I was left drained, because the visual feast served not to nourish me, but rather, it absorbed energy from me, That was the price of enjoying this film, Curse of the Golden Flower.
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