Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Going
for Baroque
(Curse of the Golden Flower, 1/22/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
It
only seems fitting that the great Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou has
recently turned to directing opera. With his First Emperor premiering
at the Metropolitan Opera in New York last month, and a new martial-arts
opus, Curse of the Golden Flower, now out in theaters, it appears
that his sensibility has gone truly operatic.
When Zhang first burst on the international
scene in the late 1980's with such films as Red Sorghum (1987),
Ju Dou (1990) and the classic Raise the Red Lantern (1991),
his storytelling boasted an intriguing combination of lush visuals and
a cool, almost formal classicism. His recent excursion into martial
arts filmmaking (in Hero and House of Flying Daggers)
has brought him more box office heft, but at the cost of sticking to
the conventions of a genre crowded with competition. Where his eye never
failed him in Lantern, the camera work in Curse sometimes
seems loose, almost fidgety. It's as if a first-class stylist like John
Ford had decided to try his hand at being a second-class Quentin Tarantino.
Don't get me wrong—as far as
it goes, Curse is a fair melodrama, livened up with some genuinely
eye-popping visual design and action sequences. Set in the year 928
AD, the story concerns a truly dysfunctional royal family led by Emperor
Ping (Chow Yun-Fat) and his restless queen, Phoenix (Gong Li). Phoenix
has been having a long-term affair with her stepson, Crown Prince Jie
(Ye Liu); the Emperor exacts quiet revenge by slow poisoning his wife
with the help of the imperial physician (Dahong Ni). Matters comes to
a crisis when Phoenix's own son, Prince Jai (Jay Chou) learns of the
plot and conspires with the Queen to force the Emperor from his throne.
Though Chow Yun-Fat and Gong Li
are among China's most charismatic stars, production designer Tingxiao
Huo and cinematographer Xiaoding Zhao make a serious bid to upstage
them. The royal palace is a kaleidoscope of translucent colors, packed
with an maniacal degree of detail, like an ice sculpture carved with
a dental pick. When armies fight here, they don't just clash—they
run together as if two cans of paint have been overturned. Depending
on your mood, all this can seem either arrestingly baroque, or chintz
befitting the newest dim sum palace in Las Vegas.
Against this kind of competition
the cast does well just to command attention. Just when Chow Yun-Fat
seems content merely to inhabit his elaborate costumes, he screws himself
into a frenzy that whips the drapery. Gong Li, who has been the director's
favorite leading lady for years, is given the best opportunities to
shine. Much of the time she strides around like a diva; as the poison
starts to tell on her health, she gets to play the dying swan as well.
Knowing nothing of the Chinese theatrical
tradition or the novel on which the script is based (The Thunder
Storm, by Cao Yu), I have no idea if this should be considered a
fair adaptation or a terrible vulgarization. What does seem clear, though,
is that although Zhang Yimou works wonders at the margins, in close-up
and in those battlefield vistas, the extremes never seem to have anything
to do with each other. When ten thousand troops get slaughtered—or
ten thousand bosoms swell over tight bodices—the effect is less
rousing than picturesque. This was never a problem in, say, the best
works of Akira Kurosawa, who was a more natural—and more empathetic—combat
director.
And so we come back to the key question
of what is lost when such a gifted director of chamber dramas feels
he must compete with all those crouching tigers and hidden dragons.
There's a recurring detail in Curse, where the palace timekeeper
emerges periodically to make a poetic invocation of the coming hour.
In the course of the story the announcement becomes a familiar ritual,
assuring us that the palace is, after all, also a home. One wonders
how much Zhang Yimou would have accomplished if he had kept all the
plotting and killing on that more intimate, human scale.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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