Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Sun Dec 24, 2006 7:04 pm 
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Bloody pretty, but pretty empty

Tarantino could probably provide more contemporary celluloid examples, but the closest I can come to the plot of this elaborate epic of vicious royal conflict outside the world of Greek tragedy is the Jacobean revenge plays. And it’s got the poisoning that was all the rage in those days, as well as incest. Nothing too complicated, really. An emperor (Chow Yun-fat) of the later Tang Dynasty (tenth century A.D.) is slowly killing his current consort (Gong Li), through a royal doctor whose wife Jiang Shi (Chen Jin), unbeknownst to him, is an old mistress of his and the mother of one of three possible heirs to the throne, Crown Prince Wan (Liu Ye), who is unwittingly having an affair with his step-sister, the doctor’s daughter Chan (Li Man), and has knowingly been the lover of his stepmother, the empress. You could say things are rather inbred in the Forbidden City. The empress, who suspects the hourly herbal teas to treat an “illness” are slowly killing her (and turning her into a “cretin”), is preparing a surprise to coincide with the oncoming Chong Yang Festival celebrating golden chrysanthemums. As the overwrought action draws to a climax one of the sons lays siege to the palace with a large army garbed in gold and embroidered chrysanthemum images, and a third son reveals another surprise: he doesn’t like anybody and wants to become emperor, now. Fields of flowers are drenched in blood before it’s all over, and digital armies have clashed by night, with hordes of red- or black-garbed ninjas flying down from on high to capture individual royal rebels.

This grandiose affair is not without notable performances and wonderful looking people, chief among them Gong Li, whose outsize emotions are worthy of a Greek tragedy – except that Medea didn’t have six-inch-long elaborately painted fingernails. Gong’s face is mesmerizing to look at. Prince Jai (Jay Chou) looks fabulous and sexy in a war helmet. John Woo favorite gangster/cop hero of the Eighties Chow Yun-fat manages to be both appealing and scary as the emperor and Li Man as the taboo girlfriend is just the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen. Why doesn’t it work better? I think back to the pleasure provided by House of Flying Daggers and I believe the difference lies in the claustrophobic nature of this story, most of which takes place inside a garish recreation of the palace that looks like a very, very expensive jukebox. There’s just too much material here crammed into too confined a space with ornamental violence that seems too unrelated to the central core of royal machinations. I suppose these older-generation Chinese epics are the equivalent of popular folk art – except they don’t come from the people but from an increasingly international-focused film industry whose creations are neither culturally authentic nor emotionally convincing.

This is also a very nasty story. It’s demoralizing to find a royal family whose members are all out to get each other. But if we got to look in on that in emotionally valid terms – if some time was taken to develop the feelings and conflicts instead of constantly interrupting them with kung-fu action or vast scenes of concubines all with identical cleavages, or ninjas spinning around with curved weapons in the air – the nastiness might develop some conviction. As it is, this is a spectacle that seems both ugly and hollow at the core. Anyone who is seriously pleased by this may not be paying much attention to what they’re seeing. Sure, as a spectacle it’s frequently eye-popping. But its pretense at content is superficial.

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