“Red Sorghum” - Zhang Yimou (1987)

Red Sorghum (Hong Gaoliang, 1987) was Zhang Yimou’s first directorial outing (he started out earlier as a cinematographer), and it was also the first modern Chinese film to be commercially released in the U. S. [1].  Although earlier films by fellow Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers, such as Tian Zhuangzhuang and Chen Kaige, had received significant critical admiration on the Western art-house circuit, they apparently didn’t have the eye-popping blockbuster production values of Red Sorghum (such as its spectacular, brightly-hued wide-screen cinematography) to attract mainstream commercial distributors.  They also didn’t have the magnetic allure of Zhang’s dramatic star and artistic partner, Gong Li.  Anyway and for whatever reasons, Red Sorghum did go on to win the Golden Bear Award (Best Film) at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival in 1988.

Certainly Red Sorghum does have narrative and production features likely to appeal to a broad audience spectrum, but just what is its overall intended meaning has been the subject of a variety of interpretations.  The general topic could be said to be that of aspirations of heroic masculinity, but is the underlying tone worshipful, reproachful, or ironic? 

The story of the film is loosely based on 2012 Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan’s first novel Red Sorghum Clan (1986), but the film adopts its own distinctive perspective.  In the story here, we follow the changing circumstances and experiences of a young woman who inherits and operates a liquor distillery during the 1930s.  The focalization is persistently on her, but the action of the film consists of a series of events imposed on the woman arising from traditional Chinese (and Japanese) notions of masculinity. 

Because masculinity is such an important underlying theme in this film, it might first be best to mention the wider cultural lens through which masculinity is sometimes viewed in China.  This is associated with the traditional Daoist yin-yang dualism.  According to this conceptualization, the world is permeated with two complementary conceptual forces:

• yang – associated with: light, warmth, summer, daylight, masculinity, ascent, and action
   
• yin – associated with: darkness, coldness, winter, night, femininity, descent, and inaction

So yang can be considered to be an abstract conceptualization of masculinity, and yin is an abstract conceptualization of femininity.  According to most traditional accounts, both yang and yin are necessary and just need to be maintained in a proper balance.  However, Confucian sage Dong Zhongshu (179-104 B.C.) is said to have held that yang is essentially good and yin is detrimental, to wit [2]:

"The yang is benign while the yin is malign: the yang means birth while the yin means death.  Therefore yang is mostly present and prominent: yin is constantly absent and marginal."

In any case, one could certainly argue that Red Sorghum’s treatment of masculinity needs to be considered from the larger Daoist perspective.  Moreover, as Yeujin Wang has remarked [3]:

“One distinction that marks the contemporary Chinese New Wave cinema is its sense of cultural urgency couched in the collective consciousness, and the impossibility of there being private isolation in this critical moment of historical transformation that will eventually implicate every individual. In this context, issues of masculinity and femininity acquire more social and symbolic resonances than they may in the West.“

Apart from any specific Daoist considerations, though, there have been three main stances that critics have adopted with respect to the general depiction of masculinity in Red Sorghum:

• Celebration of heroic masculinity
  
  Critic Roger Ebert, for example, saw the film as a throwback to the old Hollywood-style “shoot ‘em up” action movies, like the old Hollywood Westerns, that featured heroic good guys going up against bad guys [1].  For him, the movie was a celebration of heroic masculinity among the common people.
     
• Condemnation of crude, narcissistic masculinity
  Others have seen the film as a portrayal of reprehensible male narcissism, with the female protagonist in the story shown being continually subjected to the ego gratification activities of males with whom she is forced to interact [4].
       
• Masculinity seen through a feminine perspective
  But one can also see the film from the feminine perspective.  After all, the focalization of the film is entirely on the female protagonist, and she is not entirely passive.  Within the social constraints imposed on her, she expresses her own feminine assertiveness and personal responses to the masculine-dominant world surrounding her.  In fact in this regard [3]

  “Female sexuality is represented not through the frank sexual scenes which are kept off-screen, thus defying the male spectators' voyeuristic impulse, but rather by focusing on the female presence as the locus of discourse. Gong Li, who plays Jiuer, has a temperamental look of rapture and ecstasy that is always there.”

The story of Red Sorghum plays out through five sections, or “acts”; and to help trace this masculine-feminine theme that I have been discussing, I will identify moments in the narrative that show expressions of masculinity (with “(M)”) and feminine assertiveness (with “(F)”).

1.   1929 – An Arranged Marriage
The film begins with an unseen narrator saying that this tale is about his grandmother, Jiu’er (played by Gong Li).  As a very young woman, she is sent off on a marriage palanquin to the remote home/business of her new bridegroom, Li Datou, who, we are told (he is never seen in the film), is a 50-year-old man who owns a liquor distillery and suffers from leprosy.

The palanquin carriers are workers from the groom’s distillery, except for the leader, Yu (Jiang Wen), who is a professional sedan carrier.  Yu is a brawny, super-confidant fellow who leads the other carriers in singing ribald songs to taunt and embarrass the unhappy bride inside the closed palanquin (M).  Jiu’er is anguished by these antics, but we see that she is secretly carrying a pair of scissors with her, which she apparently intends to use in case things get out of hand (F).

Along the way, the palanquin is carried through a wild sorghum field (the sorghum plants have tall stalks and thereby provide concealment for anyone who wants to hide among them), and they are ambushed by a masked bandit, who wants all their money and to carry off Jiu’er into the sorghum field (M).  However, Yu manages to fight off the bandit and kill him (M).  Finally Jiu’er is delivered to Li Datou’s remote home.

2.  Jiu’er Visits Her Parental Home
Following custom, Jiu’er must visit her own parents three days after her wedding, so her father comes to fetch her and escort her back to her parents’ home on the back of a donkey.  With her father trying to walk beside her on foot, Jiu’er rushes ahead on the donkey and out of her father’s sight (F).  When she gets to the sorghum fields, she is again attacked by a masked bandit.  But this one turns out to be Yu, a person Jiu’er had earlier been eyeing.  When Jiu’er sees who her attacker is, she willingly succumbs to his  demands for sexual intercourse in the sorghum field (M), (F).

Later Jiu’er makes it to her parents’ home, but there she renounces her father for having arranged her unwanted marriage to a leper just so he could secure a valued dowry (F).  She tells him that she never wants to see him again.

3.  Jiu’er Returns to the Distillery
When Jiu’er returns to the distillery, she learns that Li Datou has been murdered.  The voiceover narrator says he presumes that the murderer was Yu, whom he refers to as his grandpa (M). 

Since Li Datou had no heirs, Jiu’er inherits the distillery.  Although she has no experience running a distillery, she convinces all the workers, who have been packing their bags preparing to leave, to stay and help run the distillery in communal fashion (F).

Then an inebriated Yu comes to the distillery and drunkenly boasts to everyone that he had had sex with Jiu’er (M).  He tries to barge into Jiu’er’s quarters, but she has him thrown out (F).  Then the workers dump the passed-out Yu into a large empty clay jug.

4.  Sanpao, the Bandit
Suddenly the notorious gun-wielding bandit Sanpao (Ji Chunhua) and his gang now attack the distillery.  Sanpao abducts Jiu’er and holds her for ransom (M).  Yu, now sober, can only cower in helplessness.  Later, though, after the ransom is paid Yu daringly tracks down Sanpao and after a scuffle, gets the bandit to confirm that he did not have sex with Jiu’er (M).

Now feeling more macho than ever, Yu comes to the distillery during a new-liquor ceremony and contemptuously urinates into all the new-liquor vats (M).  Then after wrecking some distillery equipment, he proudly carries Jiu’er off into her bedroom to have sex with her (M).  The workers only watch helplessly.

Later, however, the distillery foreman happens to taste the pissed-in liquor and discovers that it has an exquisite taste.  He reports this news to Jiu’er, and they start producing liquor according to this new formula.

5.  1938
The scene shifts forward nine years, and the distillery is shown to be booming, thanks to its secret formula.  Jiu’er is the happy mother of a nine-year-old son, Dou-Guan, the narrator’s father. 

However, the Second Sino-Japanese War has begun, and invading Japanese troops come to the distillery locale and force all the villagers in the area to trample the sorghum fields so they can build a road there (M).  The Japanese soldiers are shown here to be cruel and inhuman, and revelling in torture, which reflects general Chinese feelings concerning the holocaust that the Japanese inflicted on them at this time [5].

The Japanese then order a local butcher to skin alive the captured bandit Sanpao.  When he resists them by killing Sanpao quickly, the soldiers shoot the butcher.  Then they order the butcher’s assistant to skin alive the captured former distillery foreman, who had left earlier and apparently joined the Communist forces (M).  All the locals, including Jiu’er and Yu, are forced to watch this horror in silence.

That evening, Jiu’er gets Yu and the distillery workers to swear to avenge this cruel murder (F).  They go out at night to set up an alcohol-based bombing ambush on the Japanese truck for the next morning.  However, in the morning the Japanese truck still hasn’t come, and Dou-Guan reports back to his mother at the distillery that the ambushers are getting hungry.  So Jiu’er prepares some food for her team and brings it out to them (F). 

Just when she arrives, though, the Japanese truck shows up, and she is machine-gunned.  The attack is triggered too early and botched, and in the ensuing mayhem almost everyone is killed.  The only ones to survive are Yu and Dou-Guan, who are shown at the end staring forlornly at the devastation.


The film ends in despair, with Jiu’er finally succumbing to one of the many acts of masculinity-fed brutalization that had plagued her throughout her life.  But there are images and sequences that resonate in the mind long afterwards.  So before returning to the key issue of Red Sorghum’s portrayal of masculinity, we might comment on the excellent wide-screen cinematography of photographer Changwei Gu (Farewell My Concubine (1993) and Ju Dou (1990)) and director Zhang Yimou, himself a former cinematographer.  The color red is a symbolic image in the film and is featured in various places.  At one point, after Yu has had sex with Jiu’er in the sorghum field, he sneaks along, hidden in the sorghum stalks, and sings to her a ribald song extolling the virtues  of red.  In it he says that red is the color for (a) the blaze of love, (b) the bride’s chamber, (c) a virgin’s blood, and (d) red sorghum liquor.  More generally, Yeujin Wang comments [3]:

“Redness bespeaks desire, passion, blood (itself signifying birth and death), beauty and cruelty, destruction and construction (in that the homogeneous color scheme destroys the previous world of color and re-orders a new world).”

Thus red might be considered to be representative of the Daoist notion of the yang force, but at the same time it is associated with images of femininity that invite lustful masculine thoughts.  This powerful but ambivalent nature of red with respect to the masculine-feminine dualism is what seems to lie at the heart of Red Sorghum.

So returning to the three main critical stances in connection with the film, I would reject the “celebration of heroic masculinity” line adopted by some critics like Roger Ebert.  Yu shows some bravery in this story, but he is also crude, boorish, and narcissistic towards women.  He sees femininity as just there to be exploited for his pleasures.  The other manifestations of masculinity – the leprous Li Datou, the bandits, and the Japanese soldiers – are even worse.  As Yeujin Wang remarks, Jiu’er is seen as an object [3]:

“Jiuer is carried off by men four times in the film: first as an unwilling bride carried by a group of lusty chair-bearers to the leprous bridegroom; a second time as a potential rape victim in the sorghum field; a third time as a willing mate on her second trip through the sorghum field; and finally in her kidnapping by the local bandit for ransom.“

At the same time, I don’t see the film as a “condemnation of crude, narcissistic masculinity”, either.  Jiu’er is shown to have an affinity for men who can be cooperative and work with her.  And we do see occasions of positive masculine responses to her team-spirit approach.  Consequently I would go along with the stance of seeing the film as “masculinity seen through a feminine perspective”.  Again, Yeujin Wang has some appropriate comments in this regard [3]:

“The film Red Sorghum - ostensibly about the uninhibited manners of masculinity - is ironically and structurally contained in a discourse about the maternal which is narrated by a first-person voice-over.
    . . .
In other words, it is through a feminine vision of totality that the masculine past is re-constructed and obtains coherence and meaning.“

Nevertheless and despite Gong Li’s magnetic performance, this feminine vision doesn’t truly come together in the film.  Over the course of the story, Jiu’er is subjected to a sequence of masculinity-fuelled actions of oppression, but is there any sense of narrative progression here?  She has her own feminine assertiveness, but in the end she simply falls prey to urges for revenge, the same kind of crude impulse characteristic of her male antagonists.  She just used her male coworkers as instruments for her revenge.

But the real problem with Red Sorghum’s storytelling is with its characterization of Yu.  He is the major figure of Jiu’er’s attention, but I am unable to empathize with his point of view or otherwise “get inside” him.  And why she is attracted to him is a mystery to me.  Moreover, he doesn’t strike me as a figure worthy of being a representative of the Communist common man.  So although the film has its fascinating attractions, it doesn’t quite add up.  Zhang Yimou, however, would soon go on to make some truly outstanding works of a universal nature.

★★★

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “Red Sorghum”, Roger Ebert.com, (28 February 1989).
2. Dong Zhongshu, “The Noble Yang and the Base Yin”, Chunqiu Fanlu Yuyin, quoted in
   
   • Zhang Dainian, “Zhongguo Zexue Dagang (An Outline of Chinese Philosophy)”, (Beijing: China Social Sciences and Humanities Press), quoted in
   • Yeujin Wang, “Mixing Memory and Desire: “Red Sorghum” A Chinese Version of Masculinity and Femininity”, Public Culture, Vol. 2, No. 1: Fall 1989, Duke University Press, pp. 31-53.
3. Yeujin Wang, “Mixing Memory and Desire: Red Sorghum A Chinese Version of Masculinity and Femininity”, Public Culture, Vol. 2, No. 1: Fall 1989, Duke University Press, pp. 31-53. 
4. Chris Berry, “Neither One Thing nor Another: Toward a Study of the Viewing Subject and Chinese Cinema in the 1980s”, New Chinese Cinemas, (ed. by Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, Esther Yau), Cambridge University Press, (1994), pp. 88-113.
5. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking, Basic Books, (1997).

“Coming Home” - Zhang Yimou (2014)

Coming Home (Gui Lai, 2014) is Zhang Yimou’s wistful reflection on love, memory, and the futility of bemoaning a tragic past.  In this case the tragic past concerns the period from the late 1950s to the late 1970s during which the Chinese people were subjected to brutal oppression in connection with such Maoist-led campaigns as the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution [1]. Although the famous “scar literature” subsequently emerged that sought to expose wrongdoings of this period [2], it has always been difficult to discuss such matters inside China itself, due to government suppression of these topics. Nevertheless, Zhang Yimou has been able to make some dramas that have been set during these turbulent times by skirting overt political polemics and focusing instead on universal personal values.  This was also the case with Coming Home. 

The story of Coming Home is loosely based on the novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi (2011) by well-known Chinese authoress Yan Geling, whose novella The 13 Flowers of Nanjing (Jinlíng Shísan Chai, 2011) had earlier been adapted by Zhang Yimou for his film The Flowers of War (2011).  Yan Geling’s novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi tells how the title character, a professor who dared to express his views, was extensively persecuted and forced to work in a prison work camp during the Anti-Rightist Movement and the subsequent Cultural Revolution.  Zhang Yimou’s film adaptation skips over all of those devastating elements and only covers the period at the end of the novel, when the main character is finally rehabilitated in 1979 and returns after a twenty-year absence  to a broken family that doesn’t even recognize him [3].  The film was criticized in some quarters for avoiding the presentation of controversial material about the Maoist dictatorship in order to please the Chinese authorities.  But Zhang may not have had much choice if he wanted to  have a film produced and distributed in the country.  In any case, I would say Zhang’s concentration on the period’s pervasive climate of fear and its devastating long-term effects (which are associated with the latter part of the novel) probably wound up being more subtle and powerful than any obvious depiction of tyrannical prison-camp brutality associated with earlier parts of Yan Geling’s tale [4]. 

A film about love and memory, and focusing almost exclusively on a middle-aged couple, needs strong but subtle acting performances, and Zhang chose two stellar performers for these roles  – Chen Daoming and Gong Li.  Chen Daoming is a well-known Chinese film and TV actor, who had earlier appeared in Zhang’s epic Hero (2002). Gong Li, of course, had been closely associated with Zhang Yimou’s early rise, starring in such films as Red Sorghum (1989), Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), To Live (1994), and Shanghai Triad (1995).  But after that earlier close relationship, she had only appeared in one subsequent Zhang Yimou film, Curse of the Golden Flower (2006).  Here in Coming Home she appears as an unglamorous middle-aged woman, but she still retains her magnetic appeal. 

A third important role was that of the couple’s daughter, which was well played by newcomer Zhang Huiwen.  Her ballet-dancing background was undoubtedly a crucial qualification for the role, since her character is (like Yan Geling was, herself) a Cultural Revolution Red Guard dancer; but her acting performance in other respects is excellent, too. 

The film’s mood and pacing is slow and somber, almost dirge-like, and it benefits from Zhang Yimou’s customary superb cinematography (he started out his career as a cinematographer).  Although in earlier films his cinematic expression is often full of vivid coloring, here everything is muted and grey – almost oppressively so.  And this sustains the mood of melancholy.  This  moody atmosphere is complemented by the contemplative piano music score of Chinese composer Chen Qigang.

There is one aspect of Zhang Yimou’s mise-en-scene in this film that I found surprising, though,  and that was the relatively high number of jump cuts in the visual editing.  Normally when an editorial cut-on-action appears in a film, it has been motivated by the action in the story.  For example we see someone dropping something on the floor, and the next shot shows a downward-looking view of what was dropped.  The viewer doesn’t notice the visual discontinuity of the images, because the narrative flow motivates a desire to see the next perspective.  A “jump cut” refers to an editorial cut-on-action where the two successive shots are from more or less the same angle (the same camera axis) and the image size has not changed significantly.  So the cut was not motivated by the action and stands out to the viewer as a discontinuity.  Hence we feel that the image “jumped”.  Sometimes jump cuts are intentionally inserted into a film sequence, such as in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), in order to create a psychological effect of hectic discontinuity.  And indeed Zhang Yimou has, himself, sometimes used jump cuts in the past to create a emotional montage effect, such as in The Road Home (1999) when Zhao Di is hastily preparing a dinner for the new teacher, Luo Changyu.  But that kind of intention does not appear to be the story here in Coming Home.  Instead there are a number of unmotivated jump cuts, from closeup to medium shot for example, that are only distracting.  But never mind; the film’s virtues outweigh any such minor imperfections.

Coming Home’s story moves through four main phases.

1.  Professor Lu Yanshi breaks out

The time is around 1969, and dissident intellectual Lu Yanshi (played by Chen Daoming), imprisoned in a remote labor camp for unspecified reasons during the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957-59), has just escaped from custody and made his way back to his home city in northern China.  He desperately wants to see his wife Feng Wanyu (Gong Li) and young teenage daughter Dandan (Zhang Huiwen), whom he hasn’t seen for ten years, but he knows the authorities will be waiting for him. The police fiercely warn Wanyu and Dandan not to collaborate with the criminal, and cast an aura of intimidation over the family.  Right away Zhang Yimou sets up a triangular separation for the three characters.  Wanyu and Lu are desperate to reunite, but Dandan, who hasn’t seen her father since she was three and who has been indoctrinated by then raging Cultural Revolution dogma, rejects her father as a traitor.  She is now a Red Guard ballet dancer seeking a lead role in an official production of the doctrinaire Red Detachment of Women ballet.

Lu manages to get a message to Wanyu to meet him at the train station so that they can runaway together, but the selfish Dandan wants to thwart the idea.  In an excellently choreographed sequence of ensuing triangular separation (Lu - Wanyu - Dandan/police) at the station, the couple try to escape.  But Dandan betrays them, and Lu is recaptured, while Wanyu is beaten and suffers a head injury.

2. Lu Yanshi returns
The action now shifts forward ten years to 1979.  Mao Zedong has passed away, the Cultural Revolution has been revoked, and leader Deng Xiaoping (who was once an enthusiastic supporter of the Anti-Rightist Movement) has approved the exoneration of thousands of past “Rightists”. Lu Yanshi, now rehabilitated, returns home, but finds his family in ruins. 

On Lu’s return, Wanyu is cordial on seeing her husband but doesn’t seem to recognize him.  Lu soon learns that she is suffering from psychogenic amnesia, a form of selective amnesia that can be caused by a traumatic event – in this case it was the tragic recapture of Lu at the train station ten years earlier. But we will later learn that there was another distressing episode that traumatized Wanyu.  In a frantic effort back then to save her husband’s life, she seems to have compromised her virtue with a Party official, Mr. Wang.  That infidelity is another horrible memory that must be obliterated.

In addition, Wanyu has cast Dandan out of her house and is barely on speaking terms with her daughter, who has given up her ballet aspirations and now works in a dingy factory.  Dandan’s banishment was because of her betrayal of her father and her subsequent destruction of every existing photograph of Lu from the family’s photo albums (which may have contributed to Wanyu’s forgetting what her husband looked like).

In other respects Wanyu appears to be normal, and she still works as a schoolteacher.  And she still passionately loves her husband; she just doesn’t think the real Lu Yanshi that has now approached her is actually that husband that she loves.

3.  Memory recovery attempts
Lu still loves his wife, too, and he is certain their old passion can be recovered if he can just get her to recognize him.  In some ways this is reminiscent of the situation depicted in Random Harvest (1942).  So Lu sets about trying successive ploys in an effort to get his wife to recognize him.

1st Ploy
Since Wanyu thinks her husband is still away at the prison labor camp, Lu sends her a letter as if from there to announce that he will be arriving by train on the 5th of the month.  She eagerly goes to the station to meet him, but she fails to recognize him as he emerges from the train.

2nd Ploy

Since Lu was a good piano player and Wanyu still has his old piano in their home, he presents himself to Wanyu as a piano tuner. After tuning the piano, he sits down and plays one of the pieces that he used to play for her.  This piano music, by the way, matches the melancholy soundtrack score that has served as a moody backdrop throughout the film.  Wanyu is touched by the music and for a moment seems to recognize him.  They embrace momentarily, but then she rejects the suddenly strange man who is touching her.

3rd Ploy

Lu manages to collect all the old letters that he had written to her while in prison but that were  never delivered, and he has them posted to her in a box.  Then he poses as a kindly neighbor who is willing to read the letters to her. Although Wanyu delights in listening to the letters read to her, she never makes the connection that the very man reading the letters is her longed-for beloved. 

Lu is getting despondent about all his vain efforts, but he decides to accept reality and see if he can somehow make the existing situation a little better.  So he starts inserting some freshly composed letters into the collected letter box.  These new letters, which Wanyu accepts as authentic messages from her dear husband, contain advice for her.  He urges her to reconcile with the now-repentant and more empathetic Dandan, and Wanyu does so.  Dandan, in turn, decides to return to her ballet dancing.

4.  Resignation

In the final movement of this sad composition, Yu finally learns about his wife and Mr. Fang.  At first Lu seeks revenge, but eventually learns that Mr. Fang is just another pawn that has been victimized in a heartless system.  He decides in the end to make the best of the existing circumstances and look after his damaged beloved in whatever way he can. 


Zhang Yimou’s dramatic meditation on love and memory in Coming Home is deeper and has a wider scope than a political polemic would have had.  The tragic circumstances that oppressive social forces can impose on people have consequences that can expose universal aspects of human existence.  They remind us of the fundamental nature of human relationships.  This film offers us a metaphor about love and the memories that are such an important part of it.

Essentially, our relationships with people are based on the narratives we have of them stored in our memories.  Sometimes over the course of a long relationship we hold onto the old narratives we have of people and overlook the here-and-now personage.  We fail to engage with the person sitting before us and instead imagine a past image from a remembered story.  I think men are more likely to do this than women.  They cherish the pretty young girl in their memories and overlook the here-and-now partner they are living with.  It is interesting that Yan Geling, a woman author who usually writes from the feminine perspective, has reversed the more customary gender roles in this story.  It is the man who is the here-and-now neglected partner in this story.

Like the principals in Random Harvest, Lu Yanshi is trying to recover the hallowed memory of a lost love.  But the outcome and reconciliation are different on this occasion, and perhaps this time they offer the kind of compassionate advice to all of us that can lead to our personal and collective salvation.  Seek not revenge, and love the one you’re with.
★★★½

Notes:

1.  Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, Random House (2005). 
2. “Scar literature”, Wikipedia” (27 February 2016).   
3. Yan Geling and Olivia Geng, “Writing China: Yan Geling, ‘The Criminal Lu Yanshi’”, China Real Time Report, The Wall Street Journal, (7 July 2014).   
4. Maggie Lee, “Cannes Film Review: ‘Coming Home’“, Variety, (21 May 2014). 

“2046” - Wong Kar Wai (2004)

“Love is all a matter of timing. It’s no good meeting the right person too soon or too late. . . . If I'd lived in another time or place, my story might have had a very different ending.”

– Chow Mo-wan in 2046

The films of writer-director Wong Kar Wai (Wáng Jia-wèi) always seem to be laden with a romantic expressionism that is not just a background mood but the very substance of what is being told.  It is as if the viewer is presented not so much with a story, but with a visually orchestrated “tone poem” [1].  This was particularly true of the string of films Wong made from 1990 to 2004, which culminated with his magisterial 2046.

Throughout his career, Wong has employed an off-the-cuff production style whereby he has begun shooting his films without a script in hand and has more or less made things up as he has gone along.  This has invariably led to massive cost and shooting-schedule overruns, as Wong has continued to reshoot, cut out, and re-edit major aspects of his works in progress.  And these improvisational production habits seem to have expanded over the years.  Wong’s preceding film, In the Mood for Love (2000) took 15 months to shoot, and 2046 was five years in the making [2,3,4].  Although those two films were originally conceived as two separate and unconnected works, their overlapping and evolving production led to 2046 being a direct sequel to In the Mood for Love.

The story of 2046, like the earlier Days of Being Wild (1990) and In the Mood for Love, is set in Hong Kong during the 1960s, which was a turbulent period of rapid growth for the city that perhaps may be an historically mythic image for today’s Hong Kongers in the same way as the “Roaring Twenties” has been for Americans.  The title “2046" has several references, the futuristic one of which led some people to assume (partly encouraged by some misleading pre-release publicity) that 2046 would essentially be a sci-fi film.  There is indeed a sci-fi narrative fantasy thread in the film, but the film is very much situated in the 60s.

Since those three Wong films occupy successive periods of the 60s and have some common personages in their stories, they are sometimes referred to as a trilogy.  However, the linkage with Days of Being Wild is rather weak, and familiarity with that story is not necessary for appreciating 2046.  On the other hand, I would say you really need to have seen In the Mood for Love first in order to fully appreciate what is going on in 2046. (Note that Wong once commented that it would be best to see 2046 first [2], but I disagree.)  One might argue this close dependence on another film for narrative background is a flaw (one of several) in 2046, but the film has enough virtues to overcome such weaknesses.

The story of “In the Mood for Love” is set in the mid-1960s and concerns the growing but tantalizing affection between a man and woman, Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen,  who are already married to separate spouses.  They discover that their two spouses are having an affair with each other, which brings Chow and Su together in sympathy but places moral inhibitions in the way of their own mutual ardor. The entire film is a moody rendition of romantic longing and missed opportunities to express deep feelings.  Eventually Chow and Su abandon their tacit hopes of getting together and go their own ways unfulfilled.

The story of 2046 picks things up where they were left off in the preceding film, with Chow Mo-wan (played again by Tony Chiu Wai Leung) now back in Hong Kong in 1966 after working some time in Singapore. He still moons over Su Li-zhen, but he now seems to be a changed man.  For one thing, there is no mention of his unfaithful wife, so he is evidently disconnected from her.  And whereas in In the Mood for Love Chow was a sensitive and upright individual, in 2046 he is seen to be a more callous, role-playing ladies’ man.  Over the course of 2046, the viewer sees his relationships with several woman with whom he becomes involved. Each of these relationships give Wong Kar Wai the opportunity to explore different sides of time and memory. Part of this cinematic narration involves sequences that are out of time order, suggesting that they are memories that spontaneously emerge in Chow’s mind as he proceeds with life.

There are some stylistic commonalities between the two films of course.

• There is again the moody music of Shigeru Umebayashi, who also composed the music for House of Flying Daggers (2004).  He fills the air with smooth, melancholy rumbas and other dances.
   
• The cinematography again bears the signature of Christopher Doyle (due to the film’s lengthy production period, Doyle once again had to depart at some point, and so the cinematography was also performed by Kwan Pun-leung and Lai Yiu-fai).
   
• The production design and editing was again supervised by William Chang.

But there were also some significant differences in the way the two stories were told.

• The focalization in In the Mood for Love” was balanced between Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen, but here in 2046, the focalization is almost exclusively from Chow’s perspective.  Nevertheless, as with other Wong films, though the focalization is from the male perspective, the focus is squarely on the visages of the women yearning and aching for love that is out of reach.
   
• There is much more dialogue and voiceover in 2046.
   
• Amorous fulfillment and physical eroticism, which were basically absent in In the Mood for Love, are prominently featured in 2046.
   
• And as already mentioned, Chow Mo-wan is less innocent and more selfish in 2046.  But to a certain extent we can understand him a bit more here than, for example, we could understand Yuddy in Days of Being Wild, because we know more about Chow’s past.

The number 2046 in this story has several references and meanings, all of which relate to time and memory.

• 2046 was the apartment room number in In the Mood for Love, where Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen sequestered themselves in order to help Chow write his wuxia (Chinese martial arts) serial novel.  Those were the happiest times for Chow, and 2046 represents a state-of-mind that he would like to return to.
   
• 2046 is also the hotel room number in 2046 that Chow finds when he returns to Hong Kong in 1966.  It turns out to be successively occupied by several different women of interest in this story.
   
• 2046 is the final year of the 50-year agreement (“One Country, Two Systems”) that the Chinese government made with the UK on 1July 1997 to allow Hong Kong to retain its self-governing status for fifty more years.  For many Hong Kongers that suggests that the year 2046 has no perceived future for them.  Thus 2046 symbolizes timelessness.
   
• The sci-fi portion of the film seems to have been directly inspired by a 1959 Twilight Zone episode, “The Lonely” [6]. In it a man in the year 2046 has been condemned to be imprisoned alone on an asteroid for fifty years.  A sympathetic supply-spaceship captain gives the lonely prisoner a feminine android robot to keep him company, and the recipient prisoner gradually falls in love with “her”.

When Chow-wan engages in writing a sci-fi story in the film, he calls it “2046" to suggest a mystical time and place one can go to retrieve lost memories.  Later when he tries to write a more optimistic story about undying love, he calls it “2047".  Although both stories are set in the future, they are, of course, all about Chow’s present state of mind.

The principal women characters with whom Chow has relationships are performed in this film by an all-star lineup of astonishingly beautiful and emotive actresses: Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi, Faye Wong, Maggie Cheung, and Carina Lau. They each embody different perspectives on lost love:

• Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), who was Chow’s out-of-reach love in In the Mood for Love, only appears in a few brief flashback shots in this film, but she still haunts his memories.
   
• “Black Spider” (Gong Li) is a mysterious professional woman gambler that Chow met in Singapore after the end of his relationship with Su Li-zhen.  Chow is attracted to her because she reminds him of his lost love, and he is later surprised to learn that Black Spider’s real name happens also to be Su Li-zhen (but she is a different woman).  Black Spider is romantically attracted to Chow, too, but she seems to have her own painful romantic memories that she is trying to flee, and to a certain extent she mirrors Chow.  That fact seems to dissuade her from advancing their relationship.  Chow recalls how he invited her to come with him back to Hong Kong, to which she said she would agree  only if he could beat her in an unwinnable (because she is a skilled cardsharp) card draw.
   
• Lulu (Carina Lau), who now uses her stage name, Mimi, was a major figure in Days of Being Wild.  In that film she was in love with the narcissistic and doomed Yuddy, and here in 2046 she is shown trying to bury her memories by dissolving herself in a string of jealousy-laden affairs. For this desperate woman there are now no memories, only the present. When she meets Chow after having known him (perhaps intimately) earlier, she cannot even remember him. She is the first occupant of room 2046, which is next door to Chow’s.  Her relationship with Chow is only briefly covered in the film, and I wonder if more material concerning the two of them was the victim of Wong’s late-in-the-day editing cuts.
   
• Wang Jing-wen (Faye Wong) is the beautiful daughter of Chow’s landlord and is the second (and later the fourth) occupant of room 2046.  She is passionately in love with a young Japanese man (Takuya Kimura), whose marriage proposal to her is blocked by her father’s angry memories of the Japanese War.  Chow develops a platonic relationship with Jing-wen, and during her later occupancy of room 2046, the two of them collaborate on Chow’s sci-fi novel writing.  This innocent authorial teamwork together echoes Chow’s earlier collaboration with Su Li-zhen in In the Mood for Love, and similar to that occasion, a growing affection for Jing-wen creeps up on Chow.  And as was also the case in that earlier film, Chow is hesitant to express his true feelings for the woman;  eventually he even facilitates the re-engagement and marriage of Wang Jing-wen with her Japanese lover.
   
• Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi) is a beautiful nightclub hostess who is the third occupant of room 2046.  The name ‘Bai Ling’, incidentally but probably not accidentally, happens to match that of another famous and voluptuous Hong Kong movie actress who has had a tempestuous personal life.  Here in 2046 our Bai Ling is a lascivious coquette who attracts men with her kittenish and seductive ways. Like the Su Li-zhen in In the Mood for Love, she wears body-hugging cheongsam outfits that show of her slender and curvaceous figure. Chow Mo-wan cannot help noticing this, and soon he is making all his moves on the woman.  They start off as “drinking buddies”, but their mutual sexual attraction has only one destination: the bed.  Because Bai Ling works as a taxi dancer and has a number of male customers, her relationship with Chow has the appearance of a game, and he carelessly insults her by paying her for her “services”.  But despite appearances, Bai Ling is not truly toying with Chow in this relationship and is not so self-seeking.  Soon she falls deeply in love with Chow and struggles to elevate their relationship above its artificial role-playing. Their relationship occupies a major portion of the film, and it is highlighted by their several extremely erotic sexual encounters.  Eventually the frustrated Bai Ling demands to be Chow’s exclusive woman, and when he flippantly refuses, she terminates their relationship out of frustration.

The nonlinear storytelling of 2046 covers all of these relationships, as well as dramatizations of Chow’s sci-fi tale, which feature a futuristic version of Wang Jing-wen’s Japanese boyfriend, Tak (but actually representing Chow’s persona), traveling on a train to and from the mysterious destination of 2046, where lost memories can be regained and dwelled upon.  While traveling on the train, Tak encounters a beautiful android (Faye Wong again) with whom he falls in love, just like the earlier-mentioned Twilight Zone episode.  Tak invites the android to leave with him, but for various hypothesized reasons (mechanical wear and tear, emotional indifference, . . .), she only passively receives but never responds affirmatively to his caresses and proposal.  Tak sadly retells to her Chow’s story from In the Mood for Love about how one buries a secret forever:

“Before, when people had secrets they didn’t want to share, they’d climb a mountain.  They’d find a tree and carve a hole in it and whisper the secret into the hole.  Then cover it with mud.  That way, noone else would ever discover it.”

But his android only makes a game of the sad story’s carved hole by imitating it with her fingers.  Tak also invites another android (Carina Lau) to leave with him, but again he gets only acquiescence and no positive uptake.  Again the problem is memories.  In Tak's case the problem is that the androids he encounters don't seem to have much in the way of memories.

If we think about things on a more general level, we can say that all human relationships entail memories, which provide the very basis for future hopes and dreams. Indeed our primordial understanding of time, itself, is based on the way we construct narratives out of remembered incidents and expectations [7,8].  However, the problem with revisiting a treasured memory is that the past wonderful experience necessarily included expectations and dreams which later either materialized in some definite way or did not. Either way, they no longer retain the magical nature of the accompanying dreams.  Even so, we tend to dwell on our fond memories because of the beautiful dreams that they still invoke.  As film critic Stephen Teo has remarked [3],

“Desire is better felt than satisfied.  It lasts longer. . .”

So our pasts, i.e. all of our memories, are actually narratives that we have constructed.  When we want to physically return to a memory, we cannot really go back there, because its at-the-time accompanying future component has now vanished.  In this way a remembered time is like the year 2046 for Hong Kongers: it has no real future, no dreams that may come true. In 2046 Chow Mo-wan is struggling to come to grips with this realization.

Wong Kar Wai and his production team go over these feelings with sublime elegance in 2046. Because we are dealing with evaporating memories – rather than sitting on the knife-edge of anticipation as in In the Mood for Love – this film is much faster paced. Note also that 2046 was Wong’s first to be shot in cinemascope, and he employed many interesting framings and figure compositions with that format.  For example there are numerous wide-screen closeups with the figure off to one side and facing the short side of the frame.  This runs counter to the convention of balancing the frame “weight” by having an off-centered figure facing into the frame’s open space.  But these closeup frames in 2046 were artfully composed so that the imagery behind the closeup figure’s head was  shadowy and in soft-focus and so did not distract the viewer’s attention.  The overall effect was to enhance, without distraction, the feeling of cramped confinement, which is always a feature of Wong’s crowded but lonely urban environments.  Further contributing to these effects and feelings were

• the artful short depth-of-focus shots taken in comparatively deep visual fields such that only a part of the subject matter of interest is in focus;
   
• the occasional closeups focusing on moving feet or hands of a principal woman, which mysteriously blends well with the moody dance-theme music that pervades the background throughout the film;
   
• the numerous well-composed shots with mirrors such that the subject figures are seen from multiple perspectives.

All of these effects and more pull the viewer into Chow Mo-wan’s dreamlike reveries of past memories, most of which recall and evoke past feelings of loneliness and some of which resonate in the mind long after the film finishes.  There are moments of passion, too.  For example just before Chow and Black Spider part for the final time (at her behest, not his), they engage in a passionate 35-second kiss that embodies all his fervor for wanting to be with her.  And there are the intensely erotic scenes with Bai Ling that convey her romantic zeal for Chow.

Like many people with no family, Chow was particularly lonely on Christmas Eve, and the film focuses on his memories of successive Christmas Eves throughout the late 1960s, when he was particularly in need of feminine company.  His 1967 Christmas Eve was spent with Bai Ling.  His 1968 Christmas Eve was with Wang Jing-win.  And he spent his 1969 Christmas Eve in Singapore looking for Black Spider, who, he was only told, had either died or had returned to her original home in Phnom Penh.

For Chow, these women of interest are occasionally conflated in his memories, and he sometimes mixes them up.  Indeed all five of the key women wear their hair in roughly similar ways, as stylish “updos”.  On this topic I can recall being instructed in film school that if your film project scenario is to have a man involved with two women, you should make sure that one of the women is a blonde and the other a brunette.  This would ensure visual distinctiveness.  Here Wong Kar Wai does just the opposite, but it is more realistic.  Men are often attracted to women who unconsciously evoke past memories in their minds, and so there may be physical similarities to the women they seek.  So it apparently was with Chow.

But despite some fashion similarities, Chow’s women in 2046 are very different with respect to their own memories.  Some of those memories are closed off by past events and are only obstructive for future engagement. Lulu wants to forget her memories and wallow in present-moment sensuality.  Black Spider cannot escape her own sad memories.  Wang Jing-wen’s memories of her Japanese boyfriend were for a time thought to have been closed off, too.  But Chow selflessly helped her resurrect those dreams, even though they didn’t involve him.

However, It is Bai Ling’s memories that offer the truly fertile ground of an open future for Chow.  She remembers the joy the two of them had experienced together and wants to continue the engagement.  “Why can’t it be like it was before?”, she begs him.  

There it is, staring him in the face – a romantic future with someone who lovingly offers him her body and soul.  Indeed it is this unnecessarily shortened relationship that is the key to the film and elevates it to greatness.  Without Zhang Ziyi’s soulful depiction of Bai Ling’s passionate ardor, the film would not have ascended into this sublime sphere of Wong Kar Wai artistry.  This is the most moving and effective screen performance I have seen from her.
 
But Chow cannot extricate himself from both his own self-centered memories and his now customary Casanova-style role-playing. So he coldly lets her go.  At the end a hitherto unheard external voiceover comments:

“It was if he had boarded a very long train, heading for a drowsy future through the unfathomable night.”

★★★★

Notes:

1. Acquarello, “08-28-04: Editions Dis Voir: Wong Kar Wai by Jean-Marc Lalanne, David Martinez, Ackbar Abbas, and Jimmy Ngai”, Journal Notes, Strictly Film School, (28 August 2004).
2. Chale Nafus, “2046", Austin Film Society, (n.d.).
3. Stephen Teo, “2046: A Matter of Time, A Labour of Love”, Senses of Cinema, (April 2005). 
4. Nathan Lee, “Elusive Objects of Desire”, Film Comment, (July/August 2005). 
5. Ian Johnston, “Unhappy Together: Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046", The Bright lights Film Journal, (31 January  2005).  
6. "The Lonely”, The Twilight Zone, (13 November 1959), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_(The_Twilight_Zone)    
7. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, (1984, 1985, 1988), The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1962), Harper & Row.

“Curse of the Golden Flower” - Zhang Yimou (2006)

Loyalty, Filial Piety, Ritual, Righteousness

These are the four virtues of Confucianism, which have been a guiding moral compass for traditional Chinese society but which have also been cynically exploited by extractive social elements in that society, too.  All four virtues express the advocacy of restraint and the submission of individual aspirations before a common plan. The ramifications of this notion are an underlying theme of Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower, which was both a big-budget [1] historical epic (with the usual violence and histrionics) and an artistic success.

     

Zhang Yimou’s early films centering around the struggles individuals trying to make their way in difficult social circumstances established him as one of the world’s foremost film artists.  His film narratives were not just about the struggle to find fulfilment in China – they movingly explored the existentialist depths of human longing and resonated on a universal plane.  But then having moved to the top of his profession, Zhang seemed interested in widening his expressive repertoire by venturing into the escapist Chinese wuxia martial-arts genre (Hero, 2002; House of Flying Daggers, 2004). Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) was his third venture in this cinematic style, but to me it represented another shift in direction.  On this occasion Zhang recovered his artistic bearings and managed to produce another powerful statement about the human condition that was worthy of his earlier masterpieces. 

Although it is masterful, this film is a dark, disturbing work – about as bleak as you can go, and Zhang’s artful cinematic expressiveness is employed at full throttle to convey a sense of gloom and despair.  Indeed it is worth comparing this film to its cartoon-like wuxia predecessors in Zhang’s work, Hero and House of Flying Daggers, because the themes and visual stylistics are so sharply in contrast. One thing that all three films share, though, is a complicated set of interlocking relationships involving multiple deceptions as to who one is.  In all three films, the principal characters and the viewer, too, are often deceived about the true identities and past histories of several key people.  Along the way, there is always the question, in the minds of us viewers, as to just when these secrets are uncovered in the minds of the main characters. Because of these complications, I will go over some of the details of the narrative.

Zhang adapted his script from Cao Yu’s 1934 play, Thunderstorm, which concerned moral degradation in contemporary Chinese society.  Zhang moved what was a contemporary story way back in the year 928 of the Later Tang Dynasty [2] around the imperial court of a Chinese emperor (although the story is entirely fictitious). The principal characters are

• Emperor Ping (played by Chow Yun-Fat)
• Empress Phoenix (Gong Li)
• Crown Prince Wan, the oldest son of Emperor Ping (Ye Liu)
• Prince Jai, the 2nd oldest son of Emperor Ping (Jay Chou)
• Prince Yu , the youngest son of Emperor Ping (Junjie Qin)
• Imperial Physician Jiang (Dahong Ni)
• Mrs. Jiang, the mother Jiang Chan (Jin Chen)
• Jiang Chan, the Jiang’s daughter (Man Li)

The plot does not have a clearly identifiable structure, but I will divide it into four main stages or “acts”.  Stage 1 concerns the introduction of the principal characters and is dominated by Emperor Ping.  It also establishes that something is clearly wrong with Empress Phoenix. Stage 2 covers more complicated relationships that are evolving in reaction to Ping, who is largely out of the picture in this section.  Stage 3 returns to the imperial court and personal confrontations between the principal characters.  Stage 4 depicts the climactic showdown between Ping and those who oppose him.  Because there are so many deceptions going on in the story, I identify some of them with a “D” at various points along the way.

1.  Emperor Ping and His Court
Initial images show the imperial palace run by thousands of attendants operating in massive mechanized synchronization, with no accommodation for individuality.  At the same time an imperial army led by Prince Jai returns to the capital after a three-year campaign.  When Emperor Ping greets  Jai’s return, it is evident that Ping is still a formidable swordsman and that there may be some future conflict between Jai and Ping.

However, a more prominent conflict is quickly revealed.  Crown Prince Wan has for three years been having a secret affair (D1) with Empress Phoenix, who is not his birth mother.  Also, Phoenix is suffering from some strange illness, which turns out to be due to Ping’s secret order (D2) that imperial physician Jiang add poison to Phoenix’s regular dosages of medicine to cure her alleged anemia.  Administered over two months, this poisonous fungus will destroy the empress’s mental faculties.  In order to protect his own position, Jiang wishes to use his daughter, Chan, who is one of Phoenix’s servants, as a spy; and for similar reasons he encourages her to have a secret affair (D3) with Crown Prince Wan.

When Ping calls the royal family together, we get a picture of his doctrinaire rule.  He sternly reprimands them for not properly aligning themselves with the Heavens (i.e. not following his rules).  Seeing that Phoenix is reluctant to take her two-hourly medical dosages, he insists that she must follow heavenly ordained orders: “medicine is governed by dosage, just as life is governed by natural law,” he reminds her.  In fact he sees it as his duty to maintain law and order within his own family in order to set an example for the whole country.  This follows Chinese tradition, according to which an emperor’s commands are to be rigidly followed according to Confucian tradition, provided that the emperor is recognized to have Heaven’s mandate to rule.  Sitting at the top of the hierarchy, the emperor must embody and enforce the Confucian rule-based system for all to follow.

So the narrative goal of Phoenix is how she can survive in this oppressive situation.

2.  The Jiang Family Intrigue
Phoenix interrupts a tryst between Wan and Chan, and learns about their affair.  From a clandestine meeting with physician Jiang’s wife, she also learns about the poison being administered to her.  But after this meeting, Mrs. Jiang is captured by palace guards and brought before Ping, who recognizes that she is his former lover of 25 years before.  We learn from Mrs. Jiang that back then Ping had been an army officer who had conspired with the King of Liang to take over the throne and marry his daughter, Phoenix. Ping had ruthlessly then ordered the destruction of his lover’s family, but unbeknownst to Ping (D4), she had escaped and married the royal physician.   Given the fact that Crown Prince Wan was not mothered by Phoenix, we suspect that Mrs. Jiang is his birth mother (D5). This would mean that the Wan-Chan relationship is incestuous. In any case, to get rid of the Jiang family messiness, Ping assigns the imperial physician to become the governor of Suzhou and to depart with his family immediately.

So far Phoenix has been seen as powerless, but now it is revealed that she has secret plans afoot to stage a rebellion (D6).  She informs Jai that she wants to force Ping to abdicate the title to Jai, and not the crown prince, Wan.  Jai, citing his devotion to the Confucian value of filial piety says that he cannot act against his father.  But seeing his mother being slowly poisoned by Ping,  he changes his mind; he decides to forgo the Confucian dictum and act according to his compassionate feelings for his mother.

Meanwhile Wan rushes off on horseback to chase after his lover, Chan, who is now on the road with her family to Suzhou.  He meets the family at a roadside inn and learns from Chan that Phoenix has been conspiring with the state army in some way, so he races back to the capital to see if he can put a stop to it.  When Chan’s mother, worried about incest, cryptically tells her to forget about Wan, Chan also rushes back towards the palace.  At this point some mysterious black-clad ninja-like warriors (moshuh nanren?) descend on the Jiang quarters and methodically start killing everyone.  It is clear that Ping’s intention is to exterminate the Jiang clan; only Mrs. Jiang manages to escape, and she also races back to the capital.

3.  Confrontations and Revelations

Back at the palace, the fearful Wan confronts Phoenix about her plans for rebellion.  When his apprehensions are confirmed, Wan angrily stabs himself, but not mortally.  Ping goes to his son’s bedside seeking to gain his confidence and informs him that he has always known about Wan’s affair with the empress.  That evening at a royal banquet honoring Jai’s appointment to lead the palace guards, Chan and her mother, who have been captured by guards, are brought before Ping.  With all the contestants finally in front of each other, angry revelations are made.  Wan and Chan are informed of their incestuous relationship.  Ping tells Chan and Mrs. Yang that they know too much and must be exterminated.  Chan runs away, but the black ninja-like warriors quickly and silently kill both Chan and Mrs. Jiang.

4. The Armed Rebellion
Now the most dramatic and disturbing events of the story take place.  With most of the secrets revealed, the armed rebellion is launched, and Prince Jai’s force of ten thousand soldiers attempts to storm the palace.  Inside the palace and to the surprise of all, Prince Yu suddenly kills Wan and attempts to seize royal power for himself with a small armed force.  But Ping’s ninja-like warriors quickly kill Yu’s men, and then Ping takes off his cloth belt and laboriously and sadistically beats his own son to death with it. 

In the meantime Jai’s attack continues.  Although his forces are initially successful, it becomes clear that Ping had been forewarned by Wan and had prepared a huge imperial army that attacks and overwhelms Jai’s forces.  In one of cinema’s most devastating scenes of military slaughter, we see Jai’s army utterly annihilated. Jai is captured alive and taken before Ping, who informs him that his punishment will be to personally administer his mother’s daily poison until she becomes a vegetable.  Rather than submit to such a horror, Jai kills himself, while the sadistic Ping casually watches and munches on his food.  The film ends with Ping ordering the defiant and completely defeated Phoenix to take her medicine once more.

What are we to make of this quasi-Shakespearean tragedy, filled as it is with such carnage and grief?  Narratives always involve a (usually metaphorical) journey of some sort.  There are invariably various roadblocks, lost trails, and adversaries that must be overcome along the way in the effort to reach the desired destination.  In Zhang Yimou’s films the protagonist’s goals are rarely achieved, and it can be a success even to survive the difficult narrative journey.  With Curse of the Golden Flower, as in Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and Shanghai Triad (1995), even survival is denied: all is lost, all hopes are crushed, and the protagonists are annihilated, but this time on a more epic scale.  At its essence this film is a horror story, and it carries the fascination that a good horror story can offer.  In examining the film’s virtues, there are two perspectives worth considering: it’s expression and its larger meaning. 

With respect to the film’s expressive qualities, this is truly a dark and disturbing masterpiece of expressionism.  Zhang Yimou pulls out all the stops to create an oppressive, threatening environment that renders the imperial palace an opulent prison.  The cinematography has its share of martial-arts “wire-foo” swordplay, but it is much more constrained on this occasion and fits much better into the story than such pyrotechnics did in Hero and House of Flying Daggers.  In the action scenes here there is the characteristic stop-and-go cinematic pacing that offers an impressionistic presentation of the action.  Such wildly varying temporality is the way one remembers one’s own experiences of intense actions, and Zhang effectively conveys those feelings here.

But those swordplay action scenes, skillfully presented though they may be, are not what create the truly expressionistic atmosphere of the film. It is the film’s larger scope and long shots involving thousands of people that create the relentless sense of confinement and doom.  Emperor Ping, masterfully played by Chow-Yun Fat, is the embodiment of calculating cruelty that sits at the very top of this overbearing system of coercion.  He is not a howling, fiendish animal, as might be portrayed in lesser horror films; his manner and demeanor is recognizable to us.  We recognize elements of his character in our own midst, and that makes his role even more unnerving to see, even more horrifying to contemplate. Ping is gradually seen to be merely the human face of a some mysterious dark force, which is also manifested by the contingent of ninja-like warriors who suddenly drop down from the sky out of nowhere and swiftly annihilate their victims.  These inhuman killers work silently and seem to represent some satanic force of nature that is beyond human comprehension.  In this sense, they are like ghosts or spiritual demons from whom there is no hope of escape.

The climactic battle scene in which Prince Jai’s army is destroyed is a signal example of this idea.  The giant moving metal wall that imprisons and confines Jai’s army is a figurative indicator of the claustrophobic sense created.  Jai’s army is symbolically crushed by this confinement and is quickly emasculated.  His men are unable to engage in the swordplay for which they are prepared and are instead quickly exterminated by a massive onslaught of arrows fired from over the confining wall.  As we watch this scene, we see human agency crushed by unfathomable, mechanical power.  After the bloody annihilation, thousands of diligent workers rapidly remove all the dead bodies and replant the chrysanthemums in the palace courtyard, leaving it exactly like it looked it before the battle.  No trace of resistance to the pervasive imperial domination is allowed to remain.

These expressionistic elements all contribute to the larger themes underlying Curse of the Golden Flower.  The foundation of the oppressive horror that pervades the environment is the notion of a vast mechanical system that is powered by ordinary humans, not demons.  From the earliest scenes of the film, one sees the imperial system mechanically operating by means of people forced to suppress their individual human traits and act in synchrony with those around them.  Their humanity has been lost and has been made part of an inhuman machine.  To support this suppression of humanity, the four Confucian virtues of “Loyalty, Filial Piety, Ritual, Righteousness” have been invoked in order to promote blind subservience to the authorities. Zhang’s depiction of this blind subservience to autocracy as something that fuels an unspeakable horror is diametrically opposed to his message in Hero, which advocated blind subservience to an all-powerful ruler for the sake of social order.  This sets right the imbalanced view that was projected by Hero.

On this account I would comment that of course we know that social disorder is a fundamental problem and that human social welfare has risen above primitive conditions by means of human institutions that curtail random violence and chaos.  However, these same institutions (such as for example the traditional Confucian social framework) can often be exploited by coercive elites in order to maintain their dominance and suppress human autonomy to an extreme degree.  In films like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, this oppressive social confinement – a system that makes humans operate according to inhuman, mechanical rules – is in the background.  But here in Curse of the Golden Flower, this oppressive system is more explicitly represented. 

This is where the Jiang family plays a role in the story.  The imperial physician is not an evil man, but he has to play his part and contribute to the mechanized evil.  He knows that if he disobeys the emperor’s commands, he and his entire family will be exterminated.  So he and his innocent daughter consent to the system’s commands and participate in the slow poisoning of the empress.  Yet in the end, they “knew too much” and were all exterminated anyway.  Similarly, Crown Prince Wan also submits to the demands of the system and is unwilling to act against it.  His revelations of his mother’s plans to his father ensured that rebellion’s doom.

There were two figures, however, who defied this oppressive system, and interestingly, they were both women: Empress Phoenix and Mrs. Jiang.  These two heroines defied the unvanquishable oppression knowing that they would be destroyed, but they could not agree to suppress their own innate feelings of what is right.  At one point Empress Phoenix confides that she knows she will eventually be defeated and turned into a cretin, but she will not give up without a fight.  In the end Prince Jai was won over to this level of thinking, too.  He tells his father in the last scene that his rebellion was not for personal gain (that is, to become emperor), but to act in support of his mother.  He was acting according to the authentic feelings of his conscience and his heart. 

Gong Li has a difficult role in this film, since her options for action are so limited and she is mostly shown grimacing in pain. Nevertheless, she manages to represent the unquenchable spirit that has characterized some of Zhang’s best films.  In the end and crushed in every way, she doesn’t submit.  She still throws the medicine away in defiance.
★★★½

Notes:

1. At the time of its production, Curse of the Golden Flower had the largest production budget, $45 million, in Chinese film history.
2. This was a short-lived rule (924 - 936) that prevailed after the fall of the epic Tang Dynasty (618 to 907).