The Curse of the Golden Flower

In Curse of the Golden Flower, the staggeringly gorgeous, luxury-laden production design trumps all. It’s almost difficult to consider anything else, so blindingly beautiful is the visual work on Yimou Zhang’s newest period epic. From the costumes to the sets to the almost musical-like mise-en-scène of the action scenes, film positively glows with lavish period grandeur—whatever else, it’s a sight to see.

The first half of the film often concerns itself with the elaborate lengths to which the royal servants go to provide luxury for their masters. These sequences, which focus on the steady, rhythmic movements of anonymous people and useful objects, are cut together almost like industrial documentaries—guides to the laborious physical processes necessary to generate luxury. Even as the film showers us with wealth and beauty, it reminds us of its human cost.

But the gilded elegance of the aesthetic is not visual eloquence for its own sake: Flower is a movie steeped in restrained passions, and its production design, at once bursting with abundance and precisely managed, reflects this. All of the film’s characters are bound in by custom and tradition; like the gloriously patterned walls that surround them physically, these customs are both magnificent and stifling. And, tellingly for a grandly produced movie out of modern China, the film exhibits both a respect for history and tradition and a desire to break free from its shackles. By focusing on the royals, the movie shows us people who, because of tradition, have anything and everything they could possibly desire—except, of course, the one thing tradition will not allow them: true ownership of their lives.