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Everything in Curse of the Golden Flower is spectacularly opulent: the sets, the costumes, the make-up, the colour palette, the fight scenes. It's no surprise that it's the most expensive Chinese movie ever made. You'd expect it to look great too considering that the man behind the camera is Zhang Yimou, who is concluding his wuxia trilogy with this film. The previous two, Hero and House of Flying Daggers, are renowned for their cinematography and balletic violence (Hero is the more illustrious but I prefer Daggers simply because I find its story more engaging). Curse of the Golden Flower stands somewhere in the middle ground between the two earlier films, as it shares Hero's stylised, saturated colours and Daggers' more intimate character focus. In fact, one of the more surprising elements of Curse is that despite the visual scope of everything, the narrative itself is mostly a small-scale drama dealing with scheming and deception within the Chinese Royal Family, bearing overtones of a Shakespearean tragedy. A consequence of the story's concentration on the family of the Emperor is that the majority of the film takes place inside the royal palace, creating a rather hemmed-in feel. The magnificent sets are stunning but to an extent do look like sets, although I've never seen what the interior of a 10th century Chinese palace looked like so they could be quite accurate. The more earthy tones of the countryside appear intermittently and provide welcome variety; my favourite action scene in the film involved dozens of abseiling assassins (doing their best Spiderman-with-swords impressions) attacking a remote inn.
Another potential flaw could've been that there's no-one for the average person - by which I mean people who do not belong to a real royal family - to relate to in the story, but that is overcome thanks to Gong Li's strong performance as the main character of Empress Phoenix. The Miami Vice star also helps keep the melodrama under control, as at its heart Curse of the Golden Flower is a rather melodramatic story. Those who watch the film hoping for another action-packed martial arts showcase will likely be disappointed; there are relatively few action scenes and the main two come in the third act. It means that the plot needs to be engrossing enough to sustain interest without people hitting each other in slow motion every ten minutes, and thankfully the Machiavellian scheming and intrigue easily held my attention for the whole running time, despite finding the ending slightly unsatisfying (admittedly, I don't see how it could have been any different). The film is not quite up to the standard of Yimou's earlier lavish spectacles, but they did set the bar very high.
The summary
An engrossing story that's just hamstrung slightly by its confined setting, and I suspect many would be unhappy with its shortage of fight scenes. In my opinion the drama was good enough to make up for it.
