After being disgusted with Hero's CCP boot-licking and disappointed with House of Flying Daggers' empty commercialism, I was going to give this third Zhang Yimou Goes To The West movie a miss. But I'm a big Chow Yun-Fat fan and so I dutifully went to catch Curse of the Golden Flower last week.
In a way I am glad I did because Chow's portrayal of the Later Tang Emperor was an interesting contrast to the Qin Emperor in Hero. As pointed out by Dr Mark Harrison's film reading, the Qin Emperor successfully justifies his 'authoritarianism and oppression of his people is actually for their own good, so that he can enforce peace and unity to bring greatness to the people of China' to his would-be assassin ("Zhang Yimou's Hero and the Globalisation of Propaganda", Millennium: Journal of International Studies, V34N2 (Feb 2006), p.571).
Chow's Emperor is intensely charismatic but won't be winning any hearts and minds (unless he carves them out of you with a sword). He exudes the charismatic authority of a rags-to-riches gifted man-of-merit-made-good, repeatedly invokes the Confucian traditional authority of the father figure and the authority of the laws that mete out harsh punishments for anyone attempting to seize his Imperial throne. However, everyone in the movie, even (or perhaps especially) members of his own Imperial family, fear him greatly.
In a raw, ruthless display of power and wealth, the bloody aftermath of the slaughter of more than 10,000 rebelling soldiers in the palace is speedily removed with NDP-like efficiency and the Chrysanthemum ceremony goes ahead as if nothing has happened. Chow's Emperor deftly deals with all the challenges to his position and power but it seems that the future is lost to him because the Imperial succession is now in question. While all the scheming and plotting of his consort, also played immaculately by Gong Li, comes to naught but putting down the turmoil inspired by her, the pretense at familial order and harmony - explicitly linked to order in the state and the world - is swept away.
The topic of the futility of resisting overwhelming power has been on my mind a lot lately. This film also seems ambiguous in this respect. On the one hand, the various characters especially Prince Jai (rather distractingly played by Jay Chou - I kept thinking 'When is he going to sing?') tries to do the right thing, torn between conflicting moral imperatives. One of the other hand, there is no happy ending of those who do try to set things 'right'. Absolute power remains absolute and the only escape seems to be death or madness.
There was also a particular chilling echo to recent events back home. The Emperor urges the Empress to drink her medicine in a way that emphasizes his benevolence ("It's for your own good"), his wisdom ("My own special formulation") and, of course, his power ("You cannot not drink after I have asked you to"). Everyone seems to know or suspect that the medicine is poisoned but yet everyone has to pretend that it isn't because Imperial power has determined that black is white and that 2 plus 2 is 5.
While Hero presented 'a totalising and totalitarian cultural vision to the world' (p.572), the moral ambiguity of Zhang Yimou's more recent offering offers a powerful insight into the power of power to subordinate all else to its whims but also how its naked exercise, in turn, consumes and obliterates the various efficacy of charisma, tradition and law in justifying its absoluteness to those subjected and dominated by that power.
