Starring: Chow Yun Fat, Li Gong, Jay Chou
Director: Zhang Yimou
Certificate: 15
Since Ang Lee’s influential and pleasantly ridiculous Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000, a trend seems to have been set for gravity defying martial arts spectacles, combining astronomical production values with almost constant wire work, all soaked in historical reverence. Zhang Yimou, as far as the West is concerned, has been at the forefront of this trend, enjoying substantial financial and critical success with Hero, and more recently House of Flying Daggers. The main strength of these films, and especially Hero, was that Yimou not only gave the audience their money’s worth in action, but also created a flamboyant aesthetic which gave each shot an almost poetic value, as characters would wander and battle amongst swathes of colour. The result was seductive enough that the utter absurdity of the fight scene – where combatants would happily float over thirty foot walls or fly over lakes - didn’t seem to matter.
Of course, the inevitable problem with trends, especially in cinema, is that sooner or later their appeal begins to expire, and you end up with the same recycled fodder as any Hollywood time waster. It would be easy to accuse Curse of the Golden Flower of this, and look at Yimou as a director cashing in on the latest fad. But what needs to be remembered is that Western cinema only gets half the picture when it comes to imports. Yimou’s 2005 film Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, which tells the story of a Japanese father who travels to the Yannan province of China to film a famous Chinese folk singer, was barely seen outside China and Japan. It’s safe to say that imports are a tricky business, as is Curse of the Golden Flower.
The strikingly vivid visual style of Hero and House of Flying Daggers has been replaced with elaborate and hyperreal set pieces. Yimou clearly has fun in designing his version of the Tang dynasty, and the whole film is imbued with a kind of knowingly sardonic grandiosity, including Chow Yun Fat’s unusually embittered performance as the power hungry Emperor Ping. What is most significant about this film is what it lacks. The first hour of the film contains virtually nothing which isn’t explained in the last fifty minutes. The main narrative drive is motivated by Emperor Ping’s plans to kill his wife, whom he has taken from a neighbouring province in order to gain control of her land and her subjects. As it turns out, this thinly played plot point only really functions as a catalyst for a series of skilfully choreographed, yet rather brief battle sequences between Ping’s men and the fighters of Empress Phoenix’s insurrection against her plotting husband.
There are some irrelevant subplots involving incestuous affairs and domestic disputes, but the overall lack of action creates a curious atmosphere similar to Takashi Miike’s 1999 film Audition, where the deliberate boredom felt in the first half of the movie only heightens the shock of its horrific conclusion. The tone of Yimou’s film is a little more subdued, despite its colourful set designs. The film certainly doesn’t succeed in as many areas as his previous martial arts films, and it will be interesting to see how he progresses as an international filmmaker. All that can be hoped is that at least a few of his more dramatic films get some exposure in the West, and Yimou doesn’t get trapped in another genre pigeonhole.
Rating 2/5