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dir: Zhang Yimou
Happy Golden Family
If you were so inclined, you could think this is the third in some kind of opulent wuxia (martial arts) trilogy Zhang Yimou started with Hero, seconded with House of Flying Daggers, and then capped off with Curse of the Golden Flower. But it wouldn’t be true.

Sorry to let you down. None of the films are connected in any way apart from the incredibly lush visuals and the painstaking attention to set and art design. Themes, subtexts are all different. So there’s no need to link them further.

Curse is the least action-based, with the more complex initial set up, and for most of its length it is what I would call a courtly drama. The story focuses on the fortunes of the Emperor (Chow Yun Fat), the Empress (Gong Li), the three heirs to the throne Wan (Ye Liu), Jai (Jay Chou) and Yu (Junjie Qin), and their happy days in a golden palace.

It is set during the later Tang Dynasty, in the 9th century, considered one of the peaks of Chinese civilisation. At one point, the nation’s capital Chang’an (now Xi’an) was the biggest (as in population) city in the world. The film tries to give a sense of how magnificent an age it was with incredible visuals that should literally stun the viewers. This is, at $45 million, the most expensive film in Chinese history, and most of that must have been spent on buying up all the gold they could in order to cover everything.

Visually, the scenery, costumes and every single little thing that appears on the screen is beyond opulent, beyond sumptuous, beyond orgasmic for the eyeballs. I thought the retina-scorching opulence of the echo game scene at the Peony Pavilion at the beginning of House of Flying Daggers was extravagant. The entirety of Curse makes Flying Daggers look blandly monochrome and colour-blind by comparison. Yimou definitely achieves his ambition of making it look like a golden era come to life.

But don’t think this is history that you’re watching. The screenplay is based on a novel called The Thunderstorm by Cao Yu, and bears no relation to anything that happened in history. The director himself, though, has said the driving force for what he wanted to achieve was to bring to life a Chinese proverb that translates to ‘gold and jade on the outside, rot and corruption inside’.

As wonderful as this royal family and their empire seems, so much so is the corruption within. Emperor Ping is an absolute monarch whose every glance, thought and desire are made law as put into action by hundreds of thousands of attendants. He is, of this we have no doubt, the kind of cruel despot that comes from enjoying absolute power.

His Empress seems to be a bit unwell. She takes medicine every two hours which doesn’t seem to be helping her get any better. In fact, strangely, it seems to be making things worse. We find out pretty early on that the Emperor is having her poisoned, but we don’t immediately know why.

Since this was the Tang Dynasty, it’s not like the Emperor was afraid of losing half the empire in a divorce settlement. And the child support wouldn’t have been too harsh for him. He can have people killed just for breathing funny. And for looking funny, too.

No, he has other reasons for doing what he is doing. And since he’s the Godking on earth for these people, no-one can stop him from doing what he does, which makes it doubly difficult since the Empress, superbly played by Gong Li, knows she’s being poisoned.

What to do, what to do, when you know the Emperor is poisoning you, but you know there’s nothing you can do about it. The whole system precludes being able to defy the Emperor in any obvious way. But maybe there’s something else she can think up in her spare time.

One of the Emperor’s sons, Jai, has returned from the empire’s frontier, and seems to sense that something is rotten in the state of Denmark/Chang’an. Youngest son Yu is too girly, childish and effeminate to really have an impact, but, since everyone ignores him, it means he spies on people and keeps his ears open to the secrets others would rather he not know.

The next in line to the throne, Wan, is also kind of girly, but he, along with the Empress, harbours a pretty kinky secret. On top of this is his relationship with the Imperial Physician’s daughter, which has a kinky secret all of its own.

We are unsure if a plan the Empress sets in motion is to save herself, her sons, or for revenge. The poison is particularly nasty, in that its consumption daily for two weeks will render the victim mad before killing them. It’s a bit scary to not be sure exactly at what stage of the process she is currently at. The sons are dragged into the machinations started by their Imperial parents, part by choice and partly by their own ambitions and desires.

The plot centres around the upcoming Autumn festival, here titled the Chrysanthemum Festival, where, ironically, good health and prosperity are celebrated. Everything seems to be hinging on whatever is meant to happen that night. We are given an inkling as to what could happen, but the Emperor didn’t get where he is by being caught napping, and the Empress doesn’t seem to be the forgiving type.

Chow gives a chilling performance as the Emperor. One of the laws of Hong Kong films used to be ‘don’t let Chow play a villain’. Audiences never liked it, critics hated it, and generally, even in films where you thought he’d be the villain, they usually found a work-around for it. Here he is an unabashedly mean despot, with the right level of cruelty and smoothness to his portrayal. In some ways, feeling like I knew him so well from so many other performances, he felt so evil that it was like he was giving off radioactivity. You feel uncomfortable whenever he’s on screen.

Gong Li has the harder role, and doesn’t struggle to be sympathetic, something which she’s often lacked in many of her other performances. When I look at her recent substandard work in films like Memoirs of a Geisha and Miami Vice, it makes me glad that she still gets to work with her ex-flame Yimou.

Of the sons, Wan has the hardest role, and probably doesn’t nail it, but it doesn’t really matter in the end. He tries to balance the weakness of the character with the psychological complexity he’s supposed to exhibit, but I’m not really sure it’s all there. The ‘good’ son Jai just has to be noble, and he does get the excellent sparring scene with Chow at the film’s beginning, which shouldn’t give the impression that fighting abounds.

In fact, for a film marketed as a wuxia (fight) flick, the vast majority of the flick is devoid of any fighting, and there’s no floating or flying at all, for those of you still bitching about its renaissance since Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Oh, and it’s nothing like CTHD either.

The last twenty minutes of the flick does have a large battle scene, and though it looks like there’s been an attack of the Helm’s Deeps in the consciousness of the filmmakers, there is something more important going on. The manner in which the evidence of the battle is expunged is even more chilling than anything occurring during the battle itself. It points to the inhuman horror that is life for anyone living under such a regime, regardless of whether it’s an Emperor, President, Chancellor or Party Leader who makes people’s lives so superfluous.

As much as I enjoyed this flick, its story and the incredibly over-amped visuals, the ending does kind of undo much of the good work done earlier on. The survival of one person during that final battle, and some strange ninja-like characters destroy the atmosphere created by the preceding hour of well-handled drama and meticulous filmmaking. The ending shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s watched more than three period piece Chinese films in their lives, but even I was expecting something different.

Still, it’s an interesting enough flick, and your eyes deserve a treat like this every now and then.

7 times the title Curse of the Golden Flower means nothing and doesn’t actually connect to anything in the film out of 10

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“What I do not give you, you cannot take by force.” – Curse of the Golden Flower.