Spanking the Monkey; Curse of the Golden Flower

Curiously, our two most recent films both feature incest between a mother and her son. Coincidence? I don't know. Sometimes the universe thinks it's pretty funny. Nonetheless, I really got into both these films, though they both had their weaknesses.

I first heard of Spanking the Monkey years ago only because there was a poster at the old Cinema de Paris on St-Catherine St. in Montreal. I didn't see it back then, and knew next to nothing about it. Only years later, after seeing David O. Russell's excellent Three Kings, did I realize that Spanking the Monkey was by the same director, and so I put it on our to-see list. Finally, it arrived. And wow, is it ever uncomfortable to sit through! The film handles the build-up to the incest with subtlety and tension. Very believable, solid and well-rounded characters. And truly, truly, squeamishly, painful to watch. In a good way!

We've had Curse of the Golden Flower kicking around for a while now, but Joe was reluctant to see it, for no reason he could really name. I knew what he meant. Zhang Yimou films are grand, epic, relentless, and very long. Sometimes too long and relentless. His early works like Raise the Red Lantern were smaller in scope but epic in human drama, but some of his later works, like Hero, while gorgeous to look at, were cold in characterization. But finally, we watched his latest film, and we were surprised at how quickly we were sucked in to the escalating drama. Curse of the Golden Flower is Shakespearean in scope, the story of an empress who is sleeping with her stepson, the emporer who is trying to poison her into insanity, an attempted coup, revenge, tragedy, betrayal. It was fantastic, and incredibley art-directed as usual, though really, we had to laugh sometimes at how over-the-top it got. And then near the end, the climactic battle scene started to resemble The Lord of the Rings! Thousands of CGI soldiers storming the walls, the bows and arrows, the armour, it was all there, only with Chinese soldiers instead of Orcs and Elves. Normally, Zhang Yimou makes realistic, effortless use of computer graphics, but here, the sheer size of the armies, while fairly well done, still foregrounded their unreality. Joe said it reminded him of insects, crowds of insects. This may be intentional, as part of movie's theme was about the absolute power of the Emporer over his minions. But at the same time, the humanity within the tragedy, so evident in his earlier works, was lost.