As in his other recent martial-arts epics, Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou in his newest film practically eliminates character psychology to underline the allegory of his filmmaking. In Curse of the Golden Flower the allegory is of four central Chinese tenants of character (loyalty, filial piety, ritual, and righteousness) expressed through the individuals of a 10th century Tang-dynasty royal family. Adapted from Cao Yu’s play, Zhang’s scenario pits the Emperor of China (Chow Yun-Fat) against his Empress (Gong Li), their son Jai (Jay Chou) and the Crown Prince from the Emperor’s previous marriage, Wan (Liu Ye). The relationships are complex and multifaceted, but not necessarily clear: recently the Emperor has begun slowly poisoning his wife when she takes her daily medicine, Crown Prince Wan has been pseudo-incestuously sleeping with his step-mother even as he longs to escape the palace with his lover, the daughter of the court doctor, Jai’s rigid loyalty to his father is shattered when he finds out about the poisoning of the Empress, and a female spy who infiltrates the court calls into question the Emperor’s honorific relationship with Wan’s supposedly deceased mother. The source of all this turmoil, as well as the actual allegiances of the characters, is obscure, but the murderous, bloody results are positively Shakespearean in result.

To spice up the repetitive palace chambers of the play, Zhang has enlisted the considerable creativity of production designer Huo Tingxiao and costume designer Yee Chung Man to conjure what has to be one of the most hyper-ornate and anti-realist mise-en-scènes outside of Douglas Sirk pastiches. Avoiding much of the computer-assisted imagery of House of Flying Daggers, Huo and Yee’s work is concretely on camera and is all rainbow pastels, plunging cleavage, intricate armor, elaborate embroidery, and golden, crystalline sets. The palace and the court of Curse of the Golden Flower is not so much oneric, stifling, or perhaps even rendered ironic in this ornateness as it is arid and impersonally ceremonial. Within these walls and these costumes, is it any surprise that character motivations, and, indeed, the definition of the characters themselves, seem muddy? This palace is freestanding; insular and exquisite, for the rooms, formal costumes and armor of the Tang, the Emperor and his family are only passing through, one of an innumerable amount of royal personages destined to temporarily fill their rolls, intrigue against one another, and eventually extinguish themselves or others while the dynastic line, immortal through the Confucian tenants, lives forever on. The palace provides a ritualized, cloistered environment ruled by the laws of the land, and as the personages bounce around inside their crystal and golden cages their franticness paradoxically makes their intrigue and counter-plotting have the air of normality and regularity. Like in the hotel in The Shining this has always happened, and the result is always the same. The absence of an actual court (there are only lackeys and time-tellers), a world (only the single “Official Inn” outside the city) or a populace (only an abstractly copy-and-pasted CGI army and the palace’s servants) beside these few royals reinforce that their actions are merely the petty, vengeful thoughts of individual personages completely divorced from their political, national power. Their squabbling, just like the eventual, seemingly total, but ultimately futile bloodletting of the film, is taken for granted by the court and the benign, unseen and perhaps uncaring or perhaps ignorant nation outside the walls of the Forbidden Palace. The strength of the laws guarantees the power of the nation and the continuation of the dynasty and so the internecine struggles of the family seem like all for naught in the big picture.

It is interesting, in this respect, that in a film where every royal character’s view of their duties, passion, and relationship to the crown is twisted, that Chow Yun-Fat was cast as the most evil of them all. Chow’s contemplative, wise face makes the Emperor—even as he is nearly beating one of his sons to death—have the benefit of the doubt in the court intrigue. Even in a film whose script purposelessly never makes quite clear the motivations behind anything (why the Emperor was poisoning the Empress and when she actually started planning a coup being the most important), the casting of Chow, whose inherent smugness is always positively offset by the kindness in his face, cleverly places a default confidence in his actions and ideology, however hidden. This can be contrasted against a similar casting-coup in Gong Li, who, while eliciting automatic sympathy for once again being placed within the repressive formal strictures of a female consort—not to mention her poisoning by the Emperor—is directed in a mode that emphasizes emotional instability, malice, and psychosis that makes the character one would conventionally be rooting for both morally and mentally highly questionable. These kinds of contradictions unfortunately do not extend to the light-weight character and acting of Jay Choi’s bland Jai, but Liu’s Crown Prince gets the film’s best role as the one character who is allowed to, at least partially, open his eyes to the corrupt intrigue and shady motivations of all those around him, which takes his character towards a delightfully melodramatic madness just barely hinting the kind of physical and mental deterioration embodied so well by Sam Jaffe’s idiot-prince in Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress.

Surprisingly, Zhao Xiaoding’s photography does little to take advantage of the ornate production design, and aside from Zhang’s characteristic shots of a backwards tracking camera preceding characters as they strut, plunge, or sneak their way down palatial corridors, and full-frame close-ups of a heaving Gong and a serene Chow, there seems too little of a directorial formal grip on the material, for once a complaint of too little handholding in both the script and the direction. Even the action scenes lack the panache and purpose Zhang has exhibited in the past; with the exception of a night attack of the Chinese equivalent of ninjas—brilliantly staged during the only sequence outside the palace, one fraught with darkness, betrayal, and the claustrophobia of a natural gorge—much of the choreography lacks personality, and by the time the brawls ramp up to army level, well-dated CGI is employed to create a featureless horde of anonymous combatants mowed down in a fight of near total abstraction. This rather pathetic attempt to render epic the insular story of Curse of the Golden Flower is obviously also another instance of the pointlessness and inevitability of the royal bloodshed taken to a larger stage, but still the action remains but an inhuman allegory through Zhang's unusually uninspired filmmaking. For all the conspiracy and the near-bizarre mise-en-scène, the abstraction of the courtly intrigue combines with the vagueness in definition, motivation, and psychology of all the main characters, and renders what seems to be a chamber drama dramatically and thematically inert. Without it being clear what exactly is being plotted and why, it is as impossible to care about the proceedings as it is to evaluate them and determine whose actions may be of the right or of the most importance. Once again, the anti-authoritarian message of Zhang comes in loud and clear, but here through a vessel of questionable clarity and intelligence.