Chinese director Zhang Yimou has always been drunk on color, as fans of his early films (“Raise the Red Lantern”) or recent epics (“Hero,” “House of Flying Daggers”) can attest.
But with his new project, “Curse of the Golden Flower,” he’s on a three-day bender. This delirious movie will peel back your eyelids.
The scale is small, and big: intimate palace intrigue and huge battle scenes. The Imperial Palace, circa 10th century, is ruled by the Emperor (the great action star Chow Yun Fat) with three adult sons. The Emperor has a jaundiced view of his wife (Gong Li).
For years she’s been having an affair with the Emperor’s weak-willed eldest son – her stepson – and the Emperor is having her slowly poisoned. Her daily “medicine” contains a funky mushroom that slowly drives her mad.
The return of the middle son (singer Jay Chou), a strong warrior loyal to the Empress, signals a change. As the festival of the golden chrysanthemum draws near, the back-room back-stabbing gets fierce.
Heads are going to roll. As Jack Nicholson mangles the phrase in “The Departed,” “Uneasy lies the crown, and all that.”
The palace Zhang creates for this skullduggery is a riot of near-DayGlo colors; the hallways shimmer in greens and aqua, and the grounds outside become an ocean of yellow when the festival begins. It looks so crazy, you might suspect you’ve ingested some of the Empress’s bad mushrooms.
The first half of the picture is mostly talk amongst plotters, but the action picks up with a thrilling nighttime attack in a valley, where assassins on ropes come swooping down on unsuspecting riders. The climax is a teeming battle that wants to outdo the “Lord of the Rings” for sheer manpower.
I’m not sure what it all amounts to, but it’s fun to watch. Zhang puts everything over the top (costumes, decor, stunts), except for the sinister maneuvers within the royal family.
The actors are somewhat swamped by all this, but Chow Yun Fat (much nastier here than in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) is excellent, and Gong Li rules.
Gong Li was in Zhang Yimou’s early movies, before she became an international player in the likes of “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “Miami Vice.” Here, she creates a schemer you can sympathize with even when she’s bad, and her beauty is to die for. Which, before the movie’s over, lots of people do.
Jay Chou (left), Gong Li and Chow Yun Fat star in “Curse of the Golden Flower.”
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