Most of you have met my friend Carl, who is now living in Shanghai trying to make a name for himself (and with good success so far), in the Chinese movie industry there.
Among the many side projects that help him pay his rent is one as a movie reviewer for a magazine that is published in both English & Mandarin versions (so he gets to write one review each since he's totally fluent). Here's his latest, and if you like good prose & sound, thoughtful criticism, this is a great read even if you've never seen any of the movies he's referencing.
Here is my article about the Banquet. It is written to meet the longer length requirements at the Chinese language film magazine, but the editor at the English magazine likes it so much she is talking about bending their normally strict word limits to publish it almost in its entirety.
The Banquet (Ye Yen), Feng Xiaogang’s contribution to the burgeoning juggernaut of contemporary Chinese wuxia (“heroic martial arts”) films is a martial arts version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet set in Tang Dynasty China. It is clearly aimed squarely at the hearts and minds of western film critics. And atypically for a Feng Xiaogang film, it looks set to hit this target. Feng is easily the best-known director in China, but has yet to build any recognition whatsoever in the West, partly because his stock and trade is comedy and his comedies generally don’t translate all that well. My prediction is that this film will be hailed as a masterpiece throughout the US and Europe, while here in China it will by and large be dismissed as a silly extravagance.
On a literary level, this is a fascinating film because Feng and his screenwriters Qiu Gangjian and Sheng Heyu have shifted the focus of Shakespeare’s story from the Hamlet character to the Gertrude character, here called Empress Wan. I strongly suspect that the primary motive for this change is that she is played by Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Memoirs of a Geisha), who for some inexplicable reason is the biggest box office draw China has ever known. But whatever the motivation, this shift in emphasis is carried off fairly successfully and makes the story considerably more dynamic than Shakespeare’s original. Let’s face it, Hamlet, in Shakespeare’s conception of the story, is basically a story about a poor little rich twit who literally can’t make a decision to save his life. There are some interesting elements of intrigue in the plot, but what makes the play sing is the eloquence with which the central character describes his moral dilemma. But Gertrude, now there’s a fascinating character to begin with. She’s a woman who loves her husband and son, but is somehow persuaded by her brother-in-law to collude in betraying them.
In Feng’s re-envisioning, Empress Wan is not actually Hamlet’s mother, allowing the film to neatly sidestep the issue of whether there is anything oedipal going on between them, and perhaps more importantly, allowing the rather young Zhang Ziyi to believably play the role. Instead, she starts out as the girlfriend of Prince Wu Luan (Hamlet) until she gets noticed by his father, the Emperor, who snaps her up and makes her his new favorite wife. No one objects since the Emperor’s will cannot be questioned, but the Prince exiles himself to a remote theatre where he and his troupe of performers practice some sort of mystical dance. He and the new Empress continue to pine for each other from afar. Enter brother-in-law Li, who kills the Emperor, proclaims himself the new emperor, and asks Empress Wan to marry him. The alternative is certain death for her and her beloved prince, while if she accepts the villainous Li’s hand in marriage, she may be able to save Wu Luan’s life as well as her own. Now that is a serious moral dilemma.
Over the course of the film, Empress Wan is repeatedly placed in a position of having to make similarly morally ambiguous decisions and they gradually begin to taint her. Gradually, her attitudes and priorities shift, leading to her ultimate downfall. Her character remains morally ambiguous to the end.
This ambiguity is likely to play well with critics in the West, where moral ambiguity is enshrined as a great literary virtue, and not so well with Chinese audiences. Xuxia is a firmly established, well-defined genre here, and local audiences understandably like their wuxia films to have clearly distinguished heros and villains. The Gertrude-centered spin on Hamlet is also likely to make the film seem fresh and intriguing to western critics brought up on Shakespeare, while its significance may be lost on a Chinese audience much less familiar with the original script.
The biggest problem the film is likely to have with Chinese audiences is the overly wordy and often pompous dialogue. This will not be a problem for Western critics because they won’t understand the dialogue and will be relying on subtitles. But it is a very real and very major problem of the film for anyone who actually understands the dialogue. At the press screening I attended, there were titters of laughter throughout at excessively pompous moments, many of which fell to the character of Emporer Li. This is unfortunate because despite the awkwardness of his dialogue, Li is played with verve by Ge You, an actor known mainly for his work on lightweight comedies. It is good to see him stretch into a meaty role of the kind he really hasn’t had an opportunity to play since his masterful portrayal of Xu Fugui in Zhang Yimou’s epic film To Live more than 10 years ago.
In fact, as a character, Emporer Li ought to be a good deal more interesting than Claudius in Shakespeare’s play. He is a man torn between two desires – his megalomaniacal urge for power and his desire to truly win Empress Wan’s affection. To bad this potentially dynamic internal conflict is handled so inelegantly – stated too obviously in his dialogue and then repeated ad nauseum with little sign of any real impact on his actions up until a point late in the story, where it suddenly comes into play but rings false. This misstep is a crucial flaw that seriously undermines the film’s climax.
There are other, smaller problems that contribute to a sense of unevenness. There are several odd choices that seem out of place given the film’s Tang Dynasty setting - China’s golden age. The dance that Wu Luan and his troupe perform looks for all the world like contemporary Japanese Butoh, and distinctly unlike any Chinese classical form that I am aware of. The fight choreography is at times brilliant, but at other times seems lazy, relying too heavily on fancy aerial wire work with little connection to the actual fight in progress. Tan Dun’s musical score seems to be a confused hodgepodge of classical Chinese, contemporary new age, and Broadway show tune genres.
Another problem is with the film’s final moments. I don’t want to give any secrets away, but the denouement is a little too clever for itself. Intended, I believe, to provoke either contemplation of the central character’s shortcomings or perhaps a meditation on the karmic balance of nature, it does neither, instead leaving me wondering what the hell I just saw.
Yet there are still good reasons to see this film. The art direction is nothing short of spectacular – lush sets compete with elaborate costumes in nearly every scene. The cinematography is gorgeous – all deep, vivid colors, striking textures, and breath-taking lighting, slyly augmented by just the right amount of camera movement.
The acting is also generally very good, despite the heavy, awkward dialogue the actors are laboring under. Ge You and Huang Xiaoming, who plays the Laertes role, deserve special mention in this regard. I am not a fan, but overall, I have to concede that this is one of Zhang Ziyi’s best performances. Despite moments when her performance seems a bit brittle, for the most part she handles the complexity of her part with aplomb. Empress Wan is a far more challenging role than the turn in Crouching Tiger that first brought her into the limelight, and much of her work between these two roles has been anemic at best.
Paradoxically, I believe that both the Western critics who will likely laud The Banquet and the Chinese audiences who will likely shun it are right. There is much to recommend this film, yet it also has major shortcomings. It is probably no accident that the major investment in the film went into those aspects likely to carry more weight with Western critics. Surely it would not have been too difficult to also invest in the aspects more meaningful to Chinese audiences, which are also elements that would contribute to the film’s overall universality and longevity. Since we seem to be destined to endure watching these Western-oriented Chinese historical action films get churned out for as long as they make box office in the West, I hope that future Chinese directors will start taking this consideration into account. But I’m not holding my breath.
