There's an argument that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon gave American audiences a taste of a martial arts that took the Bruce Lee school of fighting and gave it swords while taking away gravity, and that it did more harm than good to the Chinese film industry. From Hero to The House of Flying Daggers to, now, The Curse of the Golden Flower, Chinese film has become mainly synonymous for outlandish characters and lavish fight scenes.
Much of this can be credited to one man, Yimou Zhang, who directed all three of those films hand-in-hand with some of Hollywood's best cinematographers and China's finest fight choreographers. Though he returned in 2006 to his more understated roots by directing Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles, it seemed Yimou needed a shot of adrenaline once more and set out to make Golden Flower, which ended up becoming the most expensive Chinese film ever made to date. Glance at any scene and you can see why.
Chinese grand dame actress Gong Li, as the Empress Phoenix, is swathed in a luxurious silken wardrobe that revels in hand embroidered patterns and heavy earrings and pendants, wisping between rooms surrounded by a miasma of colored tapestries. Her sons Prince Jie (Jay Chou), Prince Xiang (Ye Liu) and Prince Cheng (Junjie Qin) skitter about the palace in equally extravagant outfits, and all four are attended to by a cast of hundreds of servants, doctors, guards and concubines, each division of whom wears a distinct uniform and carries out particular responsibilities.
With the entrance of the Emperor, a nearly unrecognizable Chow Yun-Fat hidden behind a wispy beard and mustache, the entire process reaches a fever pitch. The first half-hour of the film is akin to eating a rainbow swirl lollipop slowly. Needless to say, after the bombardment of lyrical Chinese, well-timed gongs, sliding and unrolling tapestries, the lollipop begins to give you a serious sugar headache. Yet the saccharine nature of the elaborate costumes, labyrinthine sets and lustrous score seems to have a point -- it disguises the soap opera plot that goes on behind the scenes.
As two of China's most famed and recognized actors, Gong Li and Chow Yun-Fat seem oddly disjointed mouthing the clumsy lines and performing the grand sweeping motions called upon them by a script seeking to ring of Chinese classical poetry but instead sounding tritely like Chinese daytime television. The plot, though unnecessarily convoluted, revolves around the Empress being poisoned by the Emperor, whose former wife is seeking to get even while the kids scheme for the throne. With every gulp of poison, Gong Li becomes more and more a caricature of Lady Macbeth and Chow Yun-Fat the stereotypical Chinese emperor -- blustery, spouting witticisms and gifted with a funny beard.
While Yimou provides no shortage of acrobatics, he reserves his show-stopping battle scenes for the film's last hour, when the various princes divide into factions and gather their individual armies for a climactic showdown against their father, who strokes his mustache and makes ominous-sounding proclamations. Critics compared the battle scenes in Golden Flower to those of the Lord of the Rings series, but Rings director Peter Jackson had CGI on his side. Yimou, instead, seemingly outfits thousands of extras in period armor and weapons, then sets them loose against thousands more -- a kid playing with action figures brought to life.
