VARIOUS: Elaborate costume drama "The Curse of the Golden Flower" introduces high Chinese drama to western audiences.

Acclaimed Asian film director Zhang Yimou brings a popular Chinese story back to life in "The Curse of the Golden Flower," which stars Chow Yun-Fat and Gong Li as an embittered emperor and empress during the later Tang Dynasty. Set in the 10th century, the film is a colourful re-make of Cao Yu's 1934 drama "Thunderstorm" and is well-known among the Chinese -- but audiences elsewhere will now be introduced to its story in an action-packed blockbuster, which at 45 million U.S. dollars (USD) is the most expensive film to come out of China yet. "Everybody in our society knew about this character, knew about this story. For me it is nothing new. But for the western audience, maybe they will be like 'wow. What's going on? What's going on?'," explained actor Chow Yun-Fat, star of "The Curse of the Golden Flower." In the film, Chow Yun-Fat plays a greedy emperor in the forbidden city who is humiliated by his wife's infidelities, and orders to have her killed by ingesting poison several times a day and disguising it as herbal medicine. Gong Li, who plays the empress, catches on to his scheme and goes along with it to not seem suspicious, and meanwhile plans a coup during the chrysanthemum festival. Both characters stop at nothing to achieve their goal of the other's defeat, and the result is a soap opera-worthy drama of the ages, complete with tabooed romances, familial power struggles, and ghosts from the past that manage to sneak in to the imperial palace late at night. Actress Gong Li, star of famed Chinese movies including "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Farewell My Concubine", who also earned praises in her work for "Memoirs of a Geisha," believes that this is just a typical dysfunctional family, but defends her character as a woman who is doing what she can to survive, and not the monster her husband leads her family to believe she is. "Well, I don't quite agree with that because there's a lot of things that are influencing this character and the way she develops, for example, having to take this Chinese medicine all the time as it turns into a kind of oppressive practice for her. She has to do it, and there's poison in it too, so in this kind of society, a kind of feudal society, in which there's all sorts of rules and regulations even for the empress, becomes a matter for her of struggling, struggling against these kind of constraints, so it becomes a kind of tragedy for her. So for me, it's not a matter of there being something evil and dark within her, but really it's a matter of the situation that produces this effect on her," she said. Director Zhang Yimou, whose films "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers" became huge international hits, strove to create a film that regardless of language, would appeal to people everywhere. He believes that while the film's content may be highly dramatic and known only to Chinese audiences, people will be able to see the human element of the story. The production was meant to impress with elaborate costumes and set design, and the film is also the China's official selection for "Best Foreign Language Film." In a recent interview with Reuters, the director gave insight into the meaning of the film's title, which is represented by thousands of chrysanthemums in the courtyards of the forbidden city. "The chrysanthemum is a very special flower in the Chinese tradition, and it represents a kind of spirit, a kind of perspective on looking at things. On the one hand, there's a specific type of chrysanthemum that only blooms in late autumn after all the other flowers have already died away and they're gone, and this one suddenly blooms, so that in itself is a kind of resistance, and is going against everything else and fighting for its life when everything else around it is dying, and so that's a kind of important aspect to the chrysanthemum in this film, and there's actually a huge body of poems that are written about chrysanthemum, especially when they fade away and die -- you can't even count them there are so many poems about this -- and actually, the original Chinese title of the film is a quotation of one of these poems, and that poem refers to someone kind of resisting the power of the empire and standing up against everything. And for the film, you could really read it in two ways: one the one hand it's Gong Li, her character's resistance of the emperor, and then the other hand, it also represents the emperor and his sort of very superficial world that he's surrounded by, which in the end is all empty inside," said Zhang. "The Curse of the Golden Flower" will be released in the United States on December 22nd.

ITN Source | December 14, 2006

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