With a cast of the best Chinese actors, a crew of the best from the trade and 45 million American dollars, director has made sure every frame people see on the big screen deserves every penny they paid at the box-office counter. Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou’s the third multi-multi million dollar historical drama, is a lavish feast of colors, gold especially, and a emotional drama about how a rotten royal family collapses in just one night.

Bare this in mind, it is not fair to thumb down the film just because the production design is overwhelming and it is not fair to disappoint just because martial-art is not as big as in Zhang’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers, and it is also not fair to dismiss the drama as a Shakespearean-like soap just because the reviewer fails to catch the deeper layer of the story.

The story took place in an autumn during China’s Tang Dynasty during a period called “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms” (907 – 1125); or it doesn’t matter, because it is based on Lei Yü (Thunderstorm), a play Cao Yü written in early 1930s and was about a story took place in early 1930s China.

Emperor Ping, played by the amazing Chow Yun-Fat, is a quiet but menacing ruler, who is never tolerant anyone or anything of his empire fails to run like a clock according to the rule he set. His gigantic palace compound is lavishly decorated with gold and precious stones. He orders everyone from his family, including himself to wear chokingly lavish golden robes everyday. But just like what Zhang Yimou said in one of his interviews, “Gold and jade on the outside, rot and decay on the inside”, the imperial family is in the final stage of cancer and each member is either twisted or corrupted.

(Beijing New Picture Film Co.)

The emperor’s wife, Empress Phoenix, played by the gorgeously gorgeous Gong Li, has been ill for many year, at least that’s what has been claimed by the emperor, who seems more interested in being a pharmacist than a ruler. For decades, the emperor is forcing his wife to drink one dose of medicine each hour, even those he hates it. There has never been love or anything remotely similar to love in between them. She was the princess of the King of Liang and married Ping purely for political purpose. Phoenix is have a secret affair with Prince Wan (Liu Ye), the Crown Prince and the emperor’s first born, who has felt sick about his relationship with his stepmom and turned his attention to a cute court maid Jiang Chan (Li Man), daughter of the imperial doctor (Ni Dahong). Wan is the emperor’s favorite son, maybe because his mother was dead when he was very young. Wan has no interest of the throne and the emperor knows the one right for the job is actually Prince Jie (played by super-diva Jay Chou), the mid-son of the imperial family, who loves his birth mother Phoenix and hates everything the emperor has done. The emperor has his plan – he would pass the power to his second son, but before doing so, he would kill his mother first. But of cause, the Empress has her own plan. This only cover about the first half hour of the movie, just in case you think the story is complicated enough. There are more to come – who is the imperial doctor’s wife (Chen Jin) and why does she work for the empress, why phoenix keeps making embroidered chrysanthemum despite her deteriorating health, and what the youngest Prince Cheng (Qin Junjie) have in mind? You need to see the movie to get the answers.

Chow Yun-Fat is badder than ever in the film and having been in the business for three decades, he is on the top of his career, even better than what he did in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. His trip to the Hollywood is regretfully a failure. Neither Replacement Killer nor Bulletproof Monk offers him any role more than cheap reproduction of roles he played in John Woo’s classics. I don’t really expect anything from Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End. What he plays is deemed to be something one-dimension stereotypical.

We have waited more than a decade to see Gong Li working again with Zhang Yimou. The waiting is worth every second of her screen time. At the age of 41, she is dead on portraying a desperate housewife crashed bit by bit by her sick-minded husband. Her performance in Memoirs of the Geisha is good but restricted, her part in Miami Vice is nothing more than a joke, and what about Lady Murasaki in Hannibal Rising? No I don’t think so.

(Beijing New Picture Film Co.)

Curse of the Golden Flower is only the second movie for Jay Chou stars in but and he has proved he could act other than singing. Liu Ye must be the favorite man for playing some with a weak mind. He was wasted in The Promise last year, but his time, he did his part just right. Chen Jin and Ni Dahong, as skilled actors, and Li Man and Qin Junjie, as new to the industry, played all made their small parts memorable.

The set, I just have to say something about the set. The palaces you will see in the movie, may look so unreal, but are actually part of a near full-scale replica of Beijing’s The Forbidden City, built in Hengdian World Studios. The palace interior was built inside Beijing Film Studios. The imperial post was built in the bottom of a place called “Heavenly Pit” near Chongqing city. Contrary to what he did for Hero, designer Huo Tingxiao made the set lavishly suffocating.

Zhang Yimou has push game of color into a new level and the cinematography Zhao Xiaoding’s (House of Flying Daggers, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles) made these colors alive. Costumer Yee Chung-Man (Perhaps Love, Comrades: Almost a Love Story) perfectly transferred Zhang Yimou’s idea of “golden armor” (as in the original Chinese title) to the real thing. Ching Siu-Tung returned as the action director. The fight sequences are no longer in slow-motion and seem lasting forever. They are short, quick and effective.

Curse of the Golden Flower is like a scaled-up remake of Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern. You should always remind yourself, while watching it – don’t just simply blown away by the colors, the actions and the overly exposed women’s chest (women did dressed like that at that time), otherwise you will miss many layers of the nicely written and carefully told story.

- MP

Moriarty of AICN, John Li of movieXclusive.com and J-Skell all love this film. There reviews cannot be found at RottenTomatoes..

Review by Moriarty of Aintitcool.com.

Review by John Li of movieXclusive.com. (Thanks to Ethan Teo.)

Review by J-Skell.