IT’S SUMPTUOUS: It’s also a little suffocating. |
Many of Zhang Yimou’s films come down to a battle between character and décor. Especially the period pictures: Raise the Red Lantern (1991), Shanghai Triad (1995), Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004), and now Curse of the Golden Flower. The décor invariably wins, embodying as it does the intransigent social order the character is rebelling against. It is also always sumptuously beautiful, comprising awe-inspiring sets and exquisite costumes all shot with transcendent serenity and epic composition. Nonetheless, we always root for the downtrodden protagonists, who are played with resolve and pathos by some of the world’s best actors.
In this one, though, it’s a close call as to who gets our sympathy. Based on Cao Yu’s Thunder Storm, a 1930s Chinese melodrama, Flower takes place in the later Tang Dynasty of the 10th century, a period that, as depicted here, makes Marie Antoinette’s Versailles look like a Shaker meeting house. When Gong Li decked out in about 50 pounds of gold, silk, gems, and satin walks down a hallway, no one ordinarily pays attention to the hallway. But this is the Forbidden Palace of a thousand years ago as concocted by a chromatically drunk Zhang Yimou, and the colored glass of the walls shimmers in hues almost unimaginable. It’s like a corridor of rainbow Christmas candy in Willy Wonka’s factory.
Pretty, but also suffocating. In such a setting, it’s hard to get a story started. Not for lack of trying: there’s enough plot here for at least three Shakespearean tragedies, Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear among them. Gong plays the unfortunate Empress, a victim, like her characters in Raise the Red Lantern and Shanghai Triad, of a decadent, despotic patriarchy. The Emperor (a terrific Chow Yun Fat) has begun to put a poisonous fungus in her medicine — it would seem he has learned of her affair with her stepson, his eldest son and heir, Crown Prince Wan (Liu Ye). Wan for his part has been sneaking around with the Imperial Doctor’s daughter. Meanwhile, second son Prince Jai (Jay You) is wondering why his beloved mother is obsessively embroidering thousands of chrysanthemums for the upcoming Chrysanthemum Festival. And who is the mysterious older woman snooping around Wan’s quarters?
It’s a nightmare of incest, treachery, and despair hatched in a Fabergé egg. Something’s got to give, and you feel some relief when the king’s ninja-like avengers descend like inky spiders to unleash balletic mayhem. Or when a golden-armored army appears for a convulsive final battle. The martial arts and massed combat thrill, but inevitably the gorgeous courts, squares, thrones and battlements swallow them up. The performers, too, are splendid; when Gong tosses down another poisoned brew and wipes her lips with a hanky, it’s the visual equivalent of Bette Davis’s “What a dump!” But the most vivid image for me is when an army of servants clean up after a vast Tiananmen Square–like massacre and replace the thousands of golden flowers the violence destroyed. Such beauty is a curse indeed.
