Thursday, March 15, 2012
"I'm just one of the Master's robes. He can put me on or he can take me off."
By Edward Copeland
That face. That gorgeous image of Gong Li not only exposed to me to her for the first time but to my first viewing of a Zhang Yimou film as well. Wait! I confess — factually speaking, clips of Raise the Red Lantern and its star crossed my eyesight before I saw the movie, but I prefer to remember it the other way and I hadn't seen Red Sorghum or Ju Dou yet. Besides, the scenes shown on Siskel & Ebert couldn't really do justice to that remarkable face or film, particularly that opening scene that consisted only of a young Chinese girl named Songlian (Gong) speaking to her offscreen mother (voice of Ding Weimin).
SONGLIAN: Mother, stop. You’ve been talking for three days. I’ve thought it over. Alright, I’ll get married
MOTHER'S VOICE: Good. What sort of man is he?
SONGLIAN: What sort of man? Is it up to me? You always speak of money. Why not marry a rich man?
MOTHER'S VOICE: Rich man? If you marry a rich man, you will only be his concubine.
SONGLIAN: Let me be a concubine. Isn't that the fate of a woman?
Songlian talks to her mother in a voice that's strong and defiant and that makes the silent streams of tears that fall down her cheeks even more powerful, just as the film that follows that scene will be.
When Gong Li and Zhang Yimou collaborated (onscreen and off), it turned out to be one of the most fruitful actress/director relationships in cinema history, even though it lasted a mere six features, the last of which, 1995's Shanghai Triad, ended the teaming on a mixed note (Gong and Zhang reunited for 2006's Curse of the Golden Flower, but it didn't come close to matching their work in the '90s). Raise the Red Lantern marks my second favorite of the Gong/Zhang films (topped only by 1994's To Live). Lantern immediately followed Ju Dou and, like that film, received an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film. However, one major difference separated the two films in terms of Oscar submission. China submitted Ju Duo as its official entry when it received its nomination in 1990, the first Chinese film ever nominated. Ju Dou did face some controversy and the communist government banned it for a few years, though eventually they lifted the ban. Lantern proved even more provocative to the Chinese officials, who viewed the film as a veiled allegory for the contemporary Chinese government and similarly banned it (and later lifted it) so it was submitted to the Academy Awards by Hong Kong, which hadn't been handed over to the China yet.
Like Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern takes place in 1920s China during what was known as the country's warlord era, not that anything on the screen specifically tells you the date of the film, aside for a phonograph player that narrows the time period down. Songlian does marry a rich man as she told her mother she would. Soon after she arrives at the ancient fortress that the Chen family has held for generations, she'll learn how right her mother was when telling her that she'd be a concubine since she would become the fourth wife (or Fourth Mistress, as she's formally referred) to Master Chen (Ma Jingwu). Screenwriter Zhen Ni adapted Lantern from the 1990 novel Wives and Concubines by Tong Su. After the brief prologue where Songlian speaks directly to the camera, Zhang divides the film by seasons, beginning with SUMMER when Songlian shows up at the massive, Chen castle grounds dressed like a schoolgirl, wearing long pigtails and carrying a single suitcase. Her unexpected appearance panics the old, longtime servant Chen Baishun (Zhou Qi) who asks her why she didn't take the bridal sedan they sent for her. Songlian tells him that she insisted on walking and when he reaches to take her
suitcase, she refuses. She's determined to be self-sufficient. Baishun doesn't argue and begins to lead Songlian toward her new residence. After her long walk, Songlian feels slightly grimy so before she enters the interior of her home, she spots a servant woman (Lin Kong), who must be around her age, sitting on the ground of the stone courtyard, washing clothes by hand. Songlian asks if she might borrow a bit of the clean water from her basin to rinse her arms and hands and the servant, whose name is Yan'er, reluctantly acquiesces but doesn't hide her bitterness toward this new arrival — through glares, tone and words. Realizing quickly what the pecking order in the Chen household will be, Songlian drops any pretense of politeness and orders Yan'er to bring her suitcase into the house. When I rewatched Raise the Red Lantern, for the first time in several years, while many of its most potent and devastating details had remained seared in my memory, I'd forgotten how many surprises the film springs on you via its talented cast, Zhang's directing choices and Zhen's script. I don't mean twists in the conventional sense that we think of when it comes to movies such as Angel Heart, which I discussed just last week, or Fight Club but in characters and situations where things don't turn out to be quite the way they appear at first glance.
Songlian entered this multiple marriage with a decidedly cynical attitude, but the attention a new wife gets shown on her first day overwhelms the 19-year-old. Baishun shows her into her home, which isn't particularly spacious but comes adorned with nice looking furnishings. What takes Songlian's breath away is when the battalion of servants begins appearing to equip residence, both inside and outside. Men hurry into place pushing rolling racks of bulbous red lanterns that they light and hang on hooks leading to her door. One man comes into the house, lowers a ring holding several of the lanterns above her bed, methodically lights each one and then raises them back toward the ceiling again. This section of the film brings the moment, as in Ju Dou when those dye machines began working overtime, that absolutely gorgeous cinematography consumes the screen. Unlike Ju Dou, which splashed wide array of vivid color across its canvas using the long abandoned Technicolor process, Red Lantern's cinematographer Zhao Fei utilizes the color in the film's title as his hue of choice (and won awards from both the Los Angeles and National Society of Film Critics groups for his work. The Inaccurate Movie Database credits Zhao correctly on the movie's awards page, but claims he and Yang Lun, one of the two d.p.'s on Ju Dou, teamed up on Lantern's cinematography on the film's main page. Zhao removes other virtual crayons besides red from his box to create vibrant and striking images for such as a startling icy blue shade at one point. He even manages to make winter's grays and whites sparkle somehow amidst the dullness of the grayer ancient surroundings. While the pampering flatters Songlian, who likes to consider herself smarter and worldlier than many around her, the audience shouldn't forget her age either.
We eventually learn that Songlian attended a university but her father's death forced her to drop out since her family no longer could afford the tuition. That's what led her mother to pressure her into marriage but it's also why she warned her daughter against the type of marriage she enters. That first day though seems pretty good to Songlian — the new wife gets to decide the dinner menu and receives a foot massage, which brings another group of servants (all female) to her residence to prepare her for that ritual. What Songlian doesn't realize is that every day isn't like this and the Master picks which of his wives receives the "honor" of having
him sleep with her that night along with the other perks (foot massage, dinner menu, etc.) This pits the wives against one another on a daily basis, competing and scheming daily to be the chosen one. If this were played for laughs, they'd call it "Desperate Concubines." Raise the Red Lantern tells its story on so many levels simultaneously (if one happens to be veiled criticism of the Chinese government, so be it; the movie did come out just a little more than
two years after Tiananmen Square), but at its core, the lanterns being lit shine upon the tragic history not only of women in China, but women everywhere — a battle being waged frighteningly on state and national levels in the U.S. today over issues thought settled long ago. (And Songlian tried to pursue a higher education — what a snob!) The wives learn to covet the foot massages that, while not as awful as the practice of foot binding, don't look particularly relaxing. One of the oldest servants, Aunt Cao (Cao Zhengyin), explains to Songlian that "a woman's feet are very important" so she can serve her master well. That's why the wives get the "privilege" of this ritual where servants as the servants stretch out the wife's legs, resting the feet on a stool and wrapping a piece of linen around them. Then Aunt Cao takes two hard looking implements that make sounds like rattles and beat them repeatedly against the souls of the wife's feet. In an issue of Senses of Cinema by David Neo on the film called "The 'Confusion Ethics' of Raise the Red Lantern," Neo writes extensively about the history of fetishism of women's feet by men in China, saying, "It was a Chinese myth that the smaller a woman’s feet, the smaller her vagina — therefore, the better for the man."Songlian gets an idea of the games wives play that first night, what should be her "honeymoon." The young woman expresses nerves as it is, hiding her nakedness beneath the covers and asking her husband if they can turn out the lights, but he likes the
lanterns lit, so he can see her. It doesn't matter much because before they can consummate their union, a servant knocks on the door to interrupt. He apologizes but tells the Master the Third Mistress (He Caifei) has fallen ill and is asking for him. At first, the Master orders him to call for a doctor and to tell her he'll see her in the morning, but the servant says she's insistent. The annoyed Master says he's sorry to Songlian, but if he doesn't go, she'll keep this up all night. so he leaves Songlian alone. (This isn't fun for the servants either who have to extinguish the lanterns and Songlian's home and light them at the home of Meishan, the Third Mistress. Someone, presumably Zhang, made a very interesting decision concerning Master Chen in the film: The moviegoer never gets a clear view of his face. The first time I saw Raise the Red Lantern, I thought perhaps Zhang was withholding the moment the audience sees what he looks like for a dramatic purpose much as Spielberg didn't let you see the shark right away in Jaws. That doesn't turn out to be the case though. While Master Chen certainly can be viewed as a villain, it's more like evil spreads out from him and his family's "rules" while in most cases you don't see him committing the acts himself. The Master really serves as a pawn in this game where the women are the victims as well as the villains. Then as the saying goes, you can’t judge a book by its cover.
When I knew at the end of last year that the anniversary of the U.S. release of Raise the Red Lantern occurred this year, the prospect of
writing about this great film excited me. I wanted to detail the surprises and turns the film takes and how what could have been a staid period tale of oppression turns into a moving, riveting and entertaining motion picture all at the same time, but when I watched it again, a protective feeling awoke in me. Sure, I could utilize the silly SPOILER ALERT, but it isn't that important to tell you in specifics who does what to whom. If you haven't seen the film, you must experience these events for yourself to truly appreciate Zhang's masterful direction, Zhen's great screenplay and, most especially, the wondrous ensemble of actresses. I love Gong but, unlike most of her films, she's not the only actress with chops. All the characters that matter are women and two of the other actresses give performances as downright superb as Gong's. He as Third Mistress Meishan and Cao Cuifen as Zhuoyun, the second mistress also do brilliant work. Giving a fine turn in a smaller role is Lin as Yan'er, the spiteful servant who becomes Songlian’s personal maid and spits in her laundry. We eventually learn her attitude comes from her feeling that she should have been the Fourth Mistress. Playing the First Wife, Yuru, is Jin Shuyuan, an older woman who keeps quiet most of the time since Master Chen shows little interest in her anymore. (Given her age, that's one reason I though they kept his face hidden — to shock us with how old he looks.)
He Caifei and Cao Cuifen stand out in what really end up being the film's most difficult roles since the movie places the audience in the same position as Songlian in that we don't know how to read them. He's Third Mistress Meishan definitely comes on the scene as the troublemaker, interrupting Songlian's first night and when the same tactic fails the second night, she
uses her skills as a former opera singer to sing all night on the roof of the castle and keep everyone awake. Cao's Second Mistress Zhuoyun
doesn't seem duplicitous at all at first, going out of her way to be friendly to Songlian and give her gifts. She even acts as if she's happy for her when she gets picked as the mistress for the night. It's only when Songlian uncovers secrets that Yan'er hides in her quarters that she realizes that the maid works as a spy for Zhuoyun. The situation that persists in the Chen household infects everyone in the end and soon Songlian plays the same sort of games and schemes in the same ways to try to monopolize the master's attention. Eventually this chain of events leads to horrifying results for most of the people who live there. After someone dies, Songlian actually says that she is lucky to be dead because that is a better fate than being alive in the Chen household. A lot of lines prove to be very telling, but I'm going to give them to you as blind quotes to preserve the film's surprises. During a dinner of the wives, one complains about another and vows how different things will be when she's in charge prompting another to say, "When you're in charge, the Chen household will perish." One mistress on another: "She has the face of Buddha and the heart of a scorpion. She's the truly wicked one. I'm no match for her." Even though Master Chen has a grown son Feipu (Xiao Chu) by his first wife and has another by Meishan, Zhuoyun regrets only giving him a daughter and Songlian gets warned, "If you don't give him a son, you're in for hard times." Both actresses give simply superb performances, but I haven't heard much of either since. Not that you can trust the Inaccurate Movie Database, but it lists very few titles for He Caifei (I'm going with the spelling of her name I find everywhere else, that's how little I trust IMDb these days) except for some Chinese TV series, though it says her last feature was Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. Cao Cuifen's IMDb filmography ends up even sparser, showing a single TV series and four feature films in her entire career. Then again, who know what can happen to artists in China?
As for Gong Li, Raise the Red Lantern might have been one of her earliest performances, but it showed what a gifted actress she was even then in her mid-20s. She has continued to work steadily in China as well as some American productions such as Memoirs of a Geisha and Michael Mann's film version of Miami Vice. In Red Lantern, what she has to accomplish and does truly amazes. Every emotion you can think of, Songlian expresses — and she gets a drunk scene and gets to go mad as well. It's too bad the performance wasn't eligible for an Oscar nomination. When you think of the Academy's tendency to bestow best actress on twentysomething actresses constantly, few of whom approach what Gong did.
Zhang Yimou provides a lot of great camera moves in the movie both in terms of composition and motion. He has one sequence that pulls back from a scene (I don't want to say of what) to give you the bigger picture that's quite remarkable. As I said earlier, the wondrous
cinematography combined with the production design just produces a stunningly beautiful film, even if it's a heartbreaking one in the end when you see a Fifth Mistress arrive who looks like the youngest yet. Zhang often ran into trouble in China, but he has stuck it out there. Part of me always has wished that he made the leap as other directors did when fleeing totalitarian states such as Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder. Then again, who's to say that Hollywood wouldn't have ruined him as they did Jean Renoir who had to return to Europe to make good films again? China has done their own damage. I miss the Zhang Yimou who made the personal, intriguing films before he got caught up in the Hero-House of Flying Daggers-Curse of the Golden Flower-type of filmmaking. Riding Alone for a Thousand Miles certainly went in the right direction and there are a frustrating number of his works that just never make it here at all. The Flowers of War makes me curious, but after the disaster of A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, I don't know what to expect from him. Whatever he does, we'll always have that great period of work that lasted through about The Road Home in 2000. More importantly, we'll always have Raise the Red Lantern.
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Labels: 90s, Books, Ebert, Fiction, Foreign, Gong Li, Lang, Michael Mann, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Ray Top 100, Renoir, Spielberg, Wilder, Zhang Yimou
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Sunday, March 06, 2011
A small village somewhere in China in the 1920s
By Edward Copeland
If it weren't for Siskel & Ebert, who knows when I would have heard about Ju Dou, which premiered 20 years ago today in Los Angeles. More importantly, when would I have become enraptured with the work of Chinese director Zhang Yimou or began my cinematic crush on Gong Li. I'm not certain how long after I heard about Ju Dou that I finally was able to see it, but it was a great day once I did. (I actually saw Raise the Red Lantern first.) Rewatching it, I'd forgotten that Zhang actually co-directed the film with Yang Fengliang, who sort of faded away with no IMDb credits since 1997, but Zhang continued to grow as a filmmaker and most consider Ju Dou mostly his vision. Regardless, Zhang went on solo, making better and better films. Even though he'd made two movies prior to Ju Dou (including the very good Red Sorghum which I didn't see until many years later), that was my starting point and it was a great place to begin.
When I think of Ju Dou (which takes its title from the name of Gong's character), the first thing that comes to mind — more than the story, more than the performances or characters — is color, lots of shades of active, vibrant colors that practically become characters in its own right. There's a good reason for that as one of
the early subtitles, which appears as Tianqing (Li Baotian) returns to a building with a loaded-down horse, identifies the rugged-looking structure as the Yang family dye mill. An even better reason: Ju Dou used Technicolor, the long-since-abandoned tri-color process pioneered by Hollywood studios that gave many American classics their stunning looks. Tianqing greets his uncle (Li Wei), who owns the mill, and he berates his nephew's tardiness which Tianqing explains was due to many bandits on the road. The uncle tells the man who had done Tianqing's work during his absence that he won't be needed any longer. Tianqing learns from the man that while he was gone selling goods that the miserly old man only paid him $2 for all of the work that Tianqing usually did — and bought himself a new wife as well. Tianqing's previous two aunts, the replacement worker tells him, had been tortured to death by the old man because they didn't bear him any children. Already, the replacement reports, he'd heard the new bride's screams from the uncle's brutal attempts at lovemaking during the nights Tianqing was gone.
Aside from hearing his aunt's screams on his first night home, Tianqing had yet to see Ju Dou. The wondrous colors of the film don't just flow from the mill's function as a place that dyes fabric, but in the beautiful palate painted by cinematographers Gu Changwei and Yang Lun, which often bathe the actors in specific color schemes throughout the film. For example, whenever Tianqing hears Ju Dou being abused by his uncle at night, the images become saturated in a cool blue hue. Ju Dou herself often seems to mimic the light of the sun in yellows in picture or dress (costumes
designed by Zhang Zhi-an). His first morning back at work at the mill, Tianqing gets sent by his uncle to fetch Ju Dou for him and he (as well as the audience) lays eyes on her for the first time. Her beauty stuns Tianqing as it did me as well. Gong simply is one of the most gorgeous faces ever to grace celluloid and her character Ju Dou recognizes the reaction in Tianqing, who isn't a boy after all, but a man in his 40s, by giving a sly smile after he leaves. It's a grin that captured my heart and I'm sure many other moviegoers as well. What's great is that Gong Li doesn't get by on looks alone: There is a fine actress inside the beautiful visage and while she's very good in Ju Dou, she'd prove even greater in later films by Zhang and in Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine. Alas, when she's tried to strike out in English-language performances, the results have not been as good. She's at her best in her native tongue.
For awhile, Tianqing and Ju Dou just watch each other tenuously while she still suffers at the hands of his uncle. Tianqing will peek through cracks and watch Ju Dou bathe (though she knows he's doing it), but the old tyrant inhibits them from acting on any attraction. In one horrible scene,
we see that the uncle has Ju Dou bound and gagged and sits on top of her, telling her, "When I buy an animal, I treat it as I wish. And you're no better than an animal." Her cries almost prompt Tianqing to act, but he holds himself back, even when he spies her again and sees all the bruises. Ju Dou finally breaks down one day and tells Tianqing that his uncle will kill her sooner or later and she wants him to just let her die. She also tells him that the cheap old tyrant is sick and can't even perform sexually anymore. "He's not human. He's not a man," Ju Dou cries. Tianqing feels helpless, especially when he's sent off on another trip to sell goods. When he returns, the horse is very sick and for the first time, the uncle seems genuinely concerned about something other than money and leaves with the animal in hopes of getting it life-saving treatment.
With the old man's absence, Ju Dou uses the time to take advantage of Tianqing, turning into a world-class seductress who seems as if she's just popped out of a Hollywood film noir. While Tianqing initially resists, Ju Dou keeps her sultry pressure on, asking him, "Am I a wolf? Do you think I'd eat you?"
When Tianqing finally gives in, the consummation may be the movie's greatest sequence. He kick-starts the fabric wheel as he passionately lays her down and yards of fabric spin wildly out of control, running through the dye, turning bright red as the nephew makes love to his aunt with reckless abandon.
As you probably guessed, the affair between Ju Dou and Tianqing leads to Ju Dou finally getting pregnant. You would think, given the fact that Uncle Jinshan takes to torturing all his wives because of his impotence, he'd realize that he couldn't be the father, but he's joyous at the news, hoping for a big fat baby boy, which Tianqing also hopes for, though he and Ju Dou must share the news through a window pane in order not to arouse suspicions. Sure enough, Ju Dou does have a boy and the town elders help
select a name for the newborn, noting that one bad first name could mean the end of the line for the Yang family. The elders note that most of the good names have been taken before settling on Tianbai. However, they may not have picked well because soon after Jinshan, while on an outdoor excursion, suffers an accident that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down and the temporary happiness the bitter old man displayed with the birth of "his son" evaporates and with it comes suspicions that perhaps Tianbai might be Tianqing's son, not his.
With his uncle — her husband — paralyzed, the lovers get more careless, even going so far as to make out on the marital bed with the child lying next to them. Just because Jinshan has lost the use of his legs, doesn't mean his hate isn't strong enough to power the rest of his body and he crawls on the floor toward the child once, but Ju Dou catches him and then he tries to attack her. She easily gets away and then tells him the whole truth while he's prone on the floor, enjoying her new sense of power over the invalid. Later, the old man even manages to crawl all the way down the stairs and starts a fire, trying to burn the mill and its inhabitants, but he's stopped again and finally Tianqing comes up with a barrel to place him in and suspends him in the air at night, though Ju Dou recommends killing him outright, but Tianqing can't do it saying that as awful as the man is, he's still his uncle. His height brings him even with some of the figurines of their altar and Jinshan pleads with the gods to take care of "these beasts." It is one of my few problems with the film that it took them so long to try to come up with a better solution for the uncle. Speaking for myself, one murder attempt would have been enough for me to do something with the paralyzed guy. The parents though are starting to wonder about their child, who seems unusually quiet.
The three live together uncomfortably, to say the least, even dining together, where uncle is prone to spit food out at his nephew and his wife, who seem never to learn their lesson about the man, equipping his barrel with wheels and giving him what I guess you would call oars to wheel himself around. Their worries about Tianbai have grown more serious, especially for Tianqing, who suspects that the 3-year-old (Zhang Yi) could be a mute since he's still never said a word, but Ju Dou thinks he's just anxious to hear him call him daddy. As the two lovers get carried away with themselves outside, they don't notice that Tianbai has wandered back into the mill, looking to dye branches with leaves. Jinshan spots him though and slowly wheels toward the boy, seeing his opportunity to drown the bastard child. Just as he's within reach, Tianbai suddenly turns around and starts calling Jinshan daddy, stunning the old man who hugs the child tight, convinced that this must mean he is indeed his child. Ju Dou and Tianqing, having noticed the boy's absence, run into the mill just in time to witness this scene.
Needless to say, more twists will be coming, but I will spare anyone who hasn't had the pleasure of seeing Ju Dou, which packs a lot of plot into its tight running time of barely more than 90 minutes. Seeing it again after so many years, it plays less as the forbidden romance that I remember and more in a noirish vein with a strong sense of karmic justice. When Zhang Yimou recently bungled a remake of the Coen brothers' Blood Simple with his film A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, it struck me that though the plot certainly differs, in its own way Ju Dou resembles a closer reinvention of the Coens' film than Zhang's more recent effort did. Also, in light of the just-finished For the Love of Film (Noir): The Film Preservation Blogathon in which I wrote about Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, Ju Dou reminded me of the reporter's line toward the end of that film that "No one escapes punishment."
Twenty years since Ju Dou began playing U.S. theaters after it received an Oscar nomination as foreign language film (which it, as well as Michael Verhoeven's great The Nasty Girl and Jean-Paul Rappeneau's solid Cyrano de
Bergerac starring Gérard Depardieu, lost to the bore that is Journey of Hope), Zhang Yimou's film remains a keeper and a great welcoming beacon of his greater work to come such as Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju and To Live. It's also worth noting that when Ju Dou received that Oscar nomination for foreign language film, it was the first ever for a film from China, though Zhang couldn't attend the Academy Awards ceremony. At the time and for many years after it was made, Ju Dou was banned in its country of origin by the repressive Chinese regime uncomfortable with the film's sexuality (tame by American standards) and what the communists saw as an allegorical critique of modern China by its attack on the customs and patriarchal society of China in the 1920s. Sadly, Zhang would face this problem on many of his best films and I fear that's what has stifled him on his more recent efforts, making him shy away from the type of films that made his reputation and toward more noncontroversial, commercial fare. It's tragic, but at least we still have those early films even if he's never able to make another movie that comes close to equaling them.
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Labels: 90s, Coens, Ebert, Foreign, Gong Li, Lang, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Remakes, Zhang Yimou
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Monday, October 01, 2007
Kurosawa meets Busby Berkeley
By Edward Copeland
Zhang Yimou assembles a world in Curse of the Golden Flower of stunning beauty, beauty nearly equal to his leading actress Gong Li, reunited with director for the first time in years. Still, as great as the movie works as an opulent spectacle, there remains something dramatically and emotionally inert about it that pales in comparison to the director's early exquisite films.
Set during the Tang dynasty of 10th-century China, Curse of the Golden Flower may be the most successful of Zhang's late-career switch from powerful small-scale dramas to martial-arts extravaganzas.
Hero left me cold, though I liked House of Flying Daggers for the most part, but Curse worked better for me because the fighting grows out of the story instead of seeming as if it was the only reason for the film to be made in the first place. Gong, who came to the world's attention in Zhang's early films, reunites with the director for the first time since 1995's Shanghai Triad.
She plays the wife of a powerful emperor (Chow Yun Fat), who for some reason is slowly poisoning his wife to drive her mad and eventually kill her. One of the problems with Curse is that even once the film is over, I still had no clear sense of why the emperor felt it necessary to off his wife in the first place, but no matter, what I did like about the film was the amazing imagery that Zhang creates on the screen.
The entire opening sequence seems more like an elaborate musical number as it sweeps and scans the emperor's palace and its assorted denizens with vivid colors, amazing costumes and even a good beat. Once the fighting ensues, it doesn't seem as if Zhang has just seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon too many times. The feudal-era fighting seems more earth-bound and the parts that do, particularly dark-clad warriors who literally slide into the scene on wires, are different enough to provoke admiration as opposed to a feeling of "I've seen this sort of thing enough."
Gong is great as usual, though this part doesn't give her the chance to flex her acting muscles the way her previous work with Zhang did, specifically Raise the Red Lantern and To Live.
In a way, Chow Yun Fat fares better because it's fun to see the man usually cast as the hero play a bit of a villain for a change and to let others do most of the fighting for him.
Still, when I think about the movie, I keep coming back to the remarkable production values. Yee Chung Man's wondrous costumes got a well-deserved Oscar nomination, but the production design by Huo Tingxiao deserved a nod as well.
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Zhang Yimou assembles a world in Curse of the Golden Flower of stunning beauty, beauty nearly equal to his leading actress Gong Li, reunited with director for the first time in years. Still, as great as the movie works as an opulent spectacle, there remains something dramatically and emotionally inert about it that pales in comparison to the director's early exquisite films.
Set during the Tang dynasty of 10th-century China, Curse of the Golden Flower may be the most successful of Zhang's late-career switch from powerful small-scale dramas to martial-arts extravaganzas.
Hero left me cold, though I liked House of Flying Daggers for the most part, but Curse worked better for me because the fighting grows out of the story instead of seeming as if it was the only reason for the film to be made in the first place. Gong, who came to the world's attention in Zhang's early films, reunites with the director for the first time since 1995's Shanghai Triad.
She plays the wife of a powerful emperor (Chow Yun Fat), who for some reason is slowly poisoning his wife to drive her mad and eventually kill her. One of the problems with Curse is that even once the film is over, I still had no clear sense of why the emperor felt it necessary to off his wife in the first place, but no matter, what I did like about the film was the amazing imagery that Zhang creates on the screen.
The entire opening sequence seems more like an elaborate musical number as it sweeps and scans the emperor's palace and its assorted denizens with vivid colors, amazing costumes and even a good beat. Once the fighting ensues, it doesn't seem as if Zhang has just seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon too many times. The feudal-era fighting seems more earth-bound and the parts that do, particularly dark-clad warriors who literally slide into the scene on wires, are different enough to provoke admiration as opposed to a feeling of "I've seen this sort of thing enough."
Gong is great as usual, though this part doesn't give her the chance to flex her acting muscles the way her previous work with Zhang did, specifically Raise the Red Lantern and To Live.
In a way, Chow Yun Fat fares better because it's fun to see the man usually cast as the hero play a bit of a villain for a change and to let others do most of the fighting for him.
Still, when I think about the movie, I keep coming back to the remarkable production values. Yee Chung Man's wondrous costumes got a well-deserved Oscar nomination, but the production design by Huo Tingxiao deserved a nod as well.
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Labels: 00s, Foreign, Gong Li, Zhang Yimou
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Saturday, February 03, 2007
Masking your true feelings
By Edward Copeland
When I first heard about Zhang Yimou's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, it was hard to suppress my excitement. The Chinese filmmaker has long been one of my favorite directors and I'd been disappointed by his recent turn toward martial arts epics and away from the personal, human stories that made me fall for his work in the first place.
I didn't care for Hero though I liked House of Flying Daggers (Curse of the Golden Flower slipped in and out of town too fast for me to see it), but they were all letdowns from the man who made such masterful and moving films as Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, Ju Dou and The Story of Qiu Ju. The descriptions of Riding Alone held the promise that Yimou was going back to the types of films he does best.
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles stars Japanese actor Ken Takakura, the best thing about some late '80s/early '90s American stinkers such as Tom Selleck's Mr. Baseball and Michael Douglas' Black Rain, as Gou-ichi Takata, a man estranged for some unexplained reason from his grown son Ken-ichi.
Takata wants to re-establish the bond with his son when he learns from his daughter Rie (Shinobu Terajima) that Ken-ichi has terminal cancer. The ailing Ken-ichi still isn't interested in seeing his father, so Gou-ichi decides to fulfill one of Ken-ichi's dreams — filming the Chinese mask opera that gives the film its title. Despite his daughter's insistence that the trip is unnecessary and Ken-ichi's health is too fragile for his father to be potentially out of touch, Gou-ichi travels to China to find the man whom his son thought to be the greatest interpreter of the mask opera.
Dependent on interpreters, Gou-ichi soon finds that the man he seeks is in prison and won't be released for several years. He tries to arrange for a performance that takes place in the prison only to discover the man has his own paternal problems — he longs to meet the son he's never met (Yang Zhenbo), transforming Gou-ichi's original mission for his own father-son reunion into another as he tracks down the young boy in hopes of taking him to meet his father for the first time.
While the film certainly is touching at times and Takakura gives a great, stoic performance as Gou-ichi, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles doesn't seem to build toward anything. Once the scenes between Gou-ichi and the young Yang Yang occur, they bear an uncomfortable similarity to too many other films about a sudden relationship between an adult and a needy child.
On the other hand, it's great to see Zhang Yimou back on more familiar terrain. I still want to see Curse of the Golden Flower, if only to see the director reunite with his former muse, the great Gong Li, but I for one would be happy if he went back to stories like this that keep their feet on the ground in all senses of the words.
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When I first heard about Zhang Yimou's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, it was hard to suppress my excitement. The Chinese filmmaker has long been one of my favorite directors and I'd been disappointed by his recent turn toward martial arts epics and away from the personal, human stories that made me fall for his work in the first place.
I didn't care for Hero though I liked House of Flying Daggers (Curse of the Golden Flower slipped in and out of town too fast for me to see it), but they were all letdowns from the man who made such masterful and moving films as Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, Ju Dou and The Story of Qiu Ju. The descriptions of Riding Alone held the promise that Yimou was going back to the types of films he does best.
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles stars Japanese actor Ken Takakura, the best thing about some late '80s/early '90s American stinkers such as Tom Selleck's Mr. Baseball and Michael Douglas' Black Rain, as Gou-ichi Takata, a man estranged for some unexplained reason from his grown son Ken-ichi.
Takata wants to re-establish the bond with his son when he learns from his daughter Rie (Shinobu Terajima) that Ken-ichi has terminal cancer. The ailing Ken-ichi still isn't interested in seeing his father, so Gou-ichi decides to fulfill one of Ken-ichi's dreams — filming the Chinese mask opera that gives the film its title. Despite his daughter's insistence that the trip is unnecessary and Ken-ichi's health is too fragile for his father to be potentially out of touch, Gou-ichi travels to China to find the man whom his son thought to be the greatest interpreter of the mask opera.
Dependent on interpreters, Gou-ichi soon finds that the man he seeks is in prison and won't be released for several years. He tries to arrange for a performance that takes place in the prison only to discover the man has his own paternal problems — he longs to meet the son he's never met (Yang Zhenbo), transforming Gou-ichi's original mission for his own father-son reunion into another as he tracks down the young boy in hopes of taking him to meet his father for the first time.
While the film certainly is touching at times and Takakura gives a great, stoic performance as Gou-ichi, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles doesn't seem to build toward anything. Once the scenes between Gou-ichi and the young Yang Yang occur, they bear an uncomfortable similarity to too many other films about a sudden relationship between an adult and a needy child.
On the other hand, it's great to see Zhang Yimou back on more familiar terrain. I still want to see Curse of the Golden Flower, if only to see the director reunite with his former muse, the great Gong Li, but I for one would be happy if he went back to stories like this that keep their feet on the ground in all senses of the words.
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Labels: 00s, Foreign, Gong Li, M. Douglas, Zhang Yimou
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