Curse of the Golden Flower

Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) is directed by Yimou Zhang, who also directed Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004). It is similar to Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Those preceding films used cinematography, music, and Chinese legend in the same way a poet uses language. They were compelling and beautiful works. You could sense the traditions they were working in even if you could not define or understand them. Visually, Curse of the Golden Flower is an impressive film. The interior sets of the imperial palace change from scene to scene, and it's possible just to watch the colors and the visual imagery in this film without thinking about the characters or the plot. There are rich and intricate color combinations never seen in American or European films. The sets, the beautiful tapestries and costumes, the music—these are all part of the spectacle, and spectacle in this film becomes a substitute for the subtlety and the nuances of Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Those films were romantic histories with interesting characters. Curse of the Golden Flower is like an overblown King Lear—cold, severe, sometimes wooden. King Lear earns its place as a great play through stunning language and compelling characters. Does Golden Flowers offer the same?

The basic plot involves the emperor, his consort, and their three sons, one of whom was borne by another woman long ago banished. Out of jealousy, she has returned for revenge. Her son, out of ambition, plots to overthrow his father. Another son loves the daughter of the court doctor, whose wife lives in a far away village. A third son is the youngest—overlooked and secretly jealous. The Emperor forces his wife to take a special medicine every two hours. She is periodically afflicted by mysterious seizures of some sort—they seem to be getting worse. By the end of the film, only the emperor and his consort remain, and she is insane or headed in that direction. These characters are bound up and inter-related in ways barely hinted at here. The revelation of these relationships is bound up with the many turns of plot.

Excess is the hallmark of this film—an excess of color, of costume, of intrigue, of violence, of grief, and ambition. Impossible situations abound, though usually there is some way out of them. In several scenes, we see soldiers who have massed to invade the palace and overthrow the emperor. It is not enough that there must be several hundred or a thousand of them—no, there are thousands on thousands. They fill the screen, shouting and stamping their feet on the ground, moving fiercely towards their chosen victim. Zhang claimed he hired a thousand extras to film these scenes, and if that is the case, he must have relied on digital effects to increase their numbers. This is the kind of overwhelming excess that is meant to divert your attention from more important elements missing from the film. It is the kind of excess too often seen in Western films, and from which Zhang's earlier films—as spectacular as they could be--were such a relief.

Chow Yun-Fat and Gong Li are excellent in their roles as the Emperor and his consort, though Yun-Fat's role allows him little opportunity for acting outside of a narrow range of bombast and authoritarian gestures. Gong-Li vacillates between being the suffering victim of her tyrannical husband and a scheming betrayer. Basic and fundamental inconsistencies in how characters behave and think are fundamental weaknesses in the film as a whole, which tends to meander rather than move in any particular narrative direction. When it does arrive at a conclusion, you don't care. You're exhausted, and the film does not repay your efforts.

Curse of the Golden Flower attempts to compensate for a turgid revenge plot with an excess of spectacle. Assaulted by it, you forget, or overlook, the absence of the finely drawn characters and romance and legend that made Hero and House of Flying Daggers remarkably better films.