Rating of
2/4
"Curse Of The Golden Flower" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 03/23/12
The Curse Of The Golden Flower is a historical epic starring Chow Yun-Fat as a Chinese emperor who rules both his lands and family with an iron fist. A plot to assassinate his empress results in an attempted coup to wrest power from his grasp. This story has a lot of potential for political machinations, scheming and the kind of epic, heroic battles you'd expect from Zhang Yimou. The costumes and sets are of a scale and splendour it is impossible to ignore and his eye for aesthetic beauty is as evident as ever. But it seemed to me that the actors had been demoted to nothing more than elaborate mannequins on which to hang these incredible creations, arranged to make the most attractively composed images, rather than to facilitate the narrative or create empathy or even interest for the viewer. The characters and their relationships are barely fleshed out, and I never felt I'd got to know any of them or their personal motivations at all. Gong Li is the only one to wrest any screen time away from her sumptuous surroundings and she was always fighting a losing battle for attention with her quite hypnotic cleavage. I think Zhang was trying to create a Shakespearean tragedy, but his eye was so unwaveringly concerned with the style of the film rather than the substance, the result is little more than a collection of pretty pictures.
