Curse Of The Golden Flower Blooms

It's good to be the king, but not so great to be the emperor.


Acclaimed director Zhang Yimou's "Curse of the Golden Flower" hit Chinese cinemas last weekend. The film is not expected to fuel the box office, but is bringing a windfall for those who have registered "Huangjin Jia" or "Golden Flower " as a trademark. Deng Wei tells us who's cashing in on the bloom.

Zhang Yimou's latest martial-arts epic stars Chow Yun-Fat as a wily 10th-century Tang dynast with some family drama: his wife (Gong Li) is having an affair with his eldest son, his middle son clearly has designs on the throne and his youngest son spends most of his time brown-nosing and skulking around the palace grounds.

The emperor's innovative solution for all of this, at least at first, is to turn his wife insane by slowly poisoning her. Meanwhile, someone's raising an army to strike at the heart of the empire during the annual chrysanthemum festival, someone else is searching for a long-lost relative, and so on.

All these palace intrigues play out across a gloriously colorful version of imperial China; Curse of the Golden Flower is a triumph of set dressing, cinematography and costuming.

Now if only it were compelling. The curse of this movie is that every twist in its plot is either revealed long in advance or appears in completely arbitrary fashion. You're either irritated, or wondering aloud, "Hey, when did all those black-clad guys with sickles get here?"

This is a stumble for director Yimou, a film with neither the mythic qualities of Hero nor the approachable story of House of Flying Daggers.

There's probably a lesson in it somewhere, but none of the characters learned it. All I learned was, essentially, to never cross a guy with access to hot-and-cold-running goons. Sadly, that's just common sense. eonline