Sex and scandal dominate Zhang Yimou’s follow up to blockbuster hits Hero and House of Flying Daggers. But how does this third installment in Zhang's Wuxia trilogy compare to the rest? Ben Johnson soaks up the stunning imagery to find out.
Distributor: Sony Pictures; Format: Region 2 (PAL); Length: 114 min.; Aspect Ratio: Widescreen (2.35:1); Audio: Mandarin; Subtitles: English, Chinese; Extras: ; Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1, Stereo
Year of Release: 2005; Origin: China, Hong Kong; Studio: Beijing New Picture Film Co., EDKO Films, Elite Group Enterprises
Director: Zhang Yimou; Producer: Bill Kong Chi-keung, Zhang Yimou, Zhang Wei; Script: Li Feng, Wang Bin, Zhang Yimou; Action Director: Tony Ching Siu-tung; Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Gong Li, Lau Yip, Jay Chou Kit-lun, Li Man, Li Li.
Alternative Titles: City of Golden Armour, Autumn Remembrance
Trailer: Click below to view the trailer for Curse of the Golden Flower
Plot Synopsis
Tang Dynasty, China: A sordid family secret is brewing behind the walls of the Forbidden City, where it is revealed that the surly Emperor Ping (Chow Yun-fat) is slowly poisoning his unstable wife, Empress Phoenix (Gong Li). This is revealed to their second son who forms his own Imperial army to mount a scathing, revengeful attack on his own father. The Emperor, a serial adulterer himself, is suspicious of his wife’s intentions towards his son, the Crown Prince and next heir to the throne (Lau Yip), who has feelings for his step-mother which are reciprocated: the Empress can barely contain her sexual flamboyance in his young, masculine company. Phoenix, like some battered diva, mounts a scheme to take down her mean old husband and run off with his son during this year’s Chrysanthemum Festival. A discomforting thought, made all the more offensive when the blood mother of the Crown Prince is revealed to be alive and well, if slightly sore, following her banishment from the Royal Palace at the hands of the bastard Emperor, who then tries to wipe out her entire village with high flying Ninjas in order to save face in front of his people. Then it is revealed that the Crown Prince has been sneaking off and having liaisons with his mother’s young daughter, which is (of course) his sister… errgh! All is revealed in a catastrophic battle of bright colours and heavy armour until you’re so disgusted by all the characters that you don’t really care who snuffs it.
Review
Zhang Yimou’s wuxia trilogy concludes with perhaps his most gloriously meticulous installment, with visuals so strikingly vivid and overwhelming that you’ll need a pair of sunglasses to deflect the glare. Unfortunately for Zhang and co, once you’ve struck a golden formula on such instant classics as Hero and House of Flying Daggers, such stunning cinematography becomes the norm, and even though you’re still witnessing a cast of around ten thousand armoured Imperial guards clashing sabers in slow motion to the pounding rhythm of tribal drums and blades slicing through flesh and steel, you can’t help but feel that you’ve seen all of this before. There’s no pleasing some people. And Zhang Yimou goes to so much effort. The costumes and set design are impeccable, as you’d expect, and each frame looks like it has been lifted from an exhibition of Oriental art with suits and weaponry borrowed from a museum of hidden architectural treasures. All the sweeping mass shots are done on computers, along with much of the trickery and tinkering in the battle scenes, but where Hero utilized CGI to a minimal and aesthetic affect, here Yimou is depending more and more on digital tampering to help create huge scale effects of perfect symmetry in an attempt, possibly, to mask what is essentially a soap opera of daytime TV proportions, with the kind of premise you’d find on something like Family Affairs.
Zhang’s tale of family dysfunction is rabidly charged, both erotic and scandalised with a Shakespearean élan, and its passionate premise of betrayal is made all the more heated by a stellar cast of players more than adept at handling great drama. Chow Yun-fat made his name in Chinese soap operas, after all, (even if he still only looks good when he’s holding a double barrel shotgun) while this is perhaps Gong Li’s most ravishing performance. Zhang’s favourite muse who starred in his first six films, Gong Li – now 41 and still youthfully decadent - dives into Zhang’s wuxia paycheck with casual aplomb, mastering both a sense of sadistic reverie and an intense vulnerability which verges somewhere between Lady Macbeth and Gloria Swanson. It has taken Gong Li ten years to work with Zhang Yimou again, possibly reuniting as a backlash to Zhang’s obsession with his latest muse Zhang Ziyi. But Yimou’s lens lingers lovingly over Gong Li like an old flame, and you can’t help but feel that the director has missed this affection. She really is quite stunning, even if she’s not particularly likeable, but then neither is anyone else. The totalitarian morality which resonates through both Hero and Flying Daggers remains intact, even if stylistically this film bares a closer resemblance to Hero. But, essentially, the state remains standing following the carnage, and regimented uniformity remains. If Jet Li’s assassins couldn’t topple the government in Hero, and Zhang Ziyi’s female entourage struggled in Flying Daggers, then Chow Yun-fat’s chaotic family don’t stand much of a chance either.
But they try very hard, resulting in all out warfare by way of Lord of the Rings, where the Imperial guard create a force field of shields against second son’s golden army as a means of disguising their formidable archers and spear heads. There are one or two sword fights which Tony Ching coordinates with style, and there is a particularly noteworthy bit where a clan of night crawling Ninjas swarm an outback village like vultures swatting and pecking at the town’s folk as they escape on horseback. But this is far from the fight fest that Hero was, and it doesn’t quite carry the same emotional weight as Flying Daggers. So, by a process of elimination, Curse is possibly the weakest of the trilogy. But this is still a relentlessly gorgeous production, and best encapsulates the lavish extremes of modern China’s fascination with both the martial arts film and its ancient history.
Sex and scandal dominate Zhang Yimou’s follow up to blockbuster hits Hero and House of Flying Daggers. But how does this third installment in Zhang's 
Zhang’s tale of family dysfunction is rabidly charged, both erotic and scandalised with a Shakespearean élan, and its passionate premise of betrayal is made all the more heated by a stellar cast of players more than adept at handling great drama. Chow Yun-fat made his name in Chinese soap operas, after all, (even if he still only looks good when he’s holding a double barrel shotgun) while this is perhaps Gong Li’s most ravishing performance. Zhang’s favourite muse who starred in his first six films, Gong Li – now 41 and still youthfully decadent - dives into Zhang’s wuxia paycheck with casual aplomb, mastering both a sense of sadistic reverie and an intense vulnerability which verges somewhere between Lady Macbeth and Gloria Swanson. It has taken Gong Li ten years to work with Zhang Yimou again, possibly reuniting as a backlash to Zhang’s obsession with his latest muse Zhang Ziyi. But Yimou’s lens lingers lovingly over Gong Li like an old flame, and you can’t help but feel that the director has missed this affection. She really is quite stunning, even if she’s not particularly likeable, but then neither is anyone else. The totalitarian morality which resonates through both Hero and Flying Daggers remains intact, even if stylistically this film bares a closer resemblance to Hero. But, essentially, the state remains standing following the carnage, and regimented uniformity remains. If Jet Li’s assassins couldn’t topple the government in Hero, and Zhang Ziyi’s female entourage struggled in Flying Daggers, then Chow Yun-fat’s chaotic family don’t stand much of a chance either. 
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