Beyond the Multiplex

"Curse of the Golden Flower": Jade and gold outside, corruption and rot within
It may be that Zhang Yimou's newest film, a quasi-Shakespearean exploration of incest, corruption and murder behind the scenes of T'ang Dynasty imperial China (around 1000 A.D.), is so big that it becomes weighed down by its own bigness. It may also be that it's just the darkest picture in Zhang's big-budget trilogy of action-adventure films drawn from Chinese history and legend, which began with "Hero" and continued with "House of Flying Daggers."

Whatever the reason, this eye-popping spectacle, with its high-flying fight choreography, color-coordinated battle scenes, phantasmagorical interiors and rows upon rows of deliciously costumed extras, is not going to strike anybody as a rip-roaring good time. As the despotic emperor, Chow Yun-Fat presides over his bitterly divided family with an air of sardonic contempt peeking through his Mephistophelean beard. As his embattled wife, who has apparently been sleeping with her stepson the crown prince (Liu Ye), Gong Li seems to spend most of the film sweating, coughing and collapsing. The emperor is giving her "medicine" for her "anemia"; it's poison and she knows it, but she keeps on drinking it anyway.

Still and all, good Lord, is this an impressive motion picture. Filmed largely in and around Beijing's Forbidden City, with other locations, some studio work and computer effects mixed in, "Curse of the Golden Flower" is the most opulent evocation of Chinese imperial culture at its decadent height ever brought to the screen. If there's a certain static quality to all this richness, and an undeniable bleakness, those strike me as fully intentional. This film avoids easy optimism about the possibility of revolution or reform, a lesson that may be just as pertinent in today's China, and many other places as well. (Zhang of course has denied any present-tense significance.)

On the eve of the Chrysanthemum Festival, with tens of thousands of yellow flowers filling the central courtyard of the imperial palace, Gong Li's empress plots her move. She enlists her warrior son Prince Jai (Jay Chou) to help her, counting on the ineffectual crown prince, her former lover, to stay out of the way with his new girlfriend (Li Man). But the emperor is one of those deathless villains who hears and sees all, and you can count on his black-clad assassins to descend from the sky, with an array of fearsome weapons, at the most inconvenient moments.

Then there's the mysterious woman in black with the branded face (Chen Jin), not a bad martial-arts fighter in her own right, who has sworn vengeance against the emperor and bears an important secret. It's probably fair to say that none of these characters exactly leaps off the screen -- the backdrop that Zhang and cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding have created is too overpowering for that. But with its grand pageantry and its sense of pervasive foreboding, "Curse of the Golden Flower" simultaneously suggests Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and Kurosawa's "Macbeth" adaptation, "Throne of Blood."

Those are inflated and dangerous comparisons, of course. Will this picture measure up to those in the long haul? I'm not saying that. I am saying that the morbid grandiosity of "Curse of the Golden Flower" is its own distinctive accomplishment, another remarkable chapter in the career of Asia's most important living filmmaker. After "Pan's Labyrinth," this is the movie to see this season.

"Curse of the Golden Flower" opens Dec. 21 in New York and Dec. 22 in Los Angeles "and select major cities," which means you'd better check local listings. A wide national release will begin Jan. 12.

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