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Sunday, January 14, 2007

Curse of the Golden Flower

Current Mood:
CC is listening to: Mulata de Mi Amor--The Rippingtons (Wild Card)

My Google homepage is set up to show 3 daily quotes from the website Quote of the Day. Today's quote was interesting. From David Brin:

"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power."

I never thought about it that way, but it makes sense :-).

It's also the perfect introduction to the movie that Steve and I watched yesterday. We saw Curse of the Golden Flower. It's a subtitled Chinese movie with Chow Yun Fat and Gong Li.

If you're planning to watch the movie, don't read on--there'll be some spoilers in this entry :-).

When I watch a movie that defies the traditional formula of the good guy winning in the end, I always try to figure out what the lesson is. Curse of the Golden Flower is a story about a royal family that tears itself apart because of secrets and lies.

Chow Yun Fat, the Emperor, comes back from three years on the battlefield only to find that the Empress (Gong Li) has been having an affair with the Crown Prince (the Emperor's son from his first wife).

Unfortunately, out of his three sons, the Crown Prince is the Emperor's favorite. Exposing the Empress's infidelity would mean exposing the Crown Prince as well. So what he does instead is add an ingredient to the Empress' daily medicinal tea that would slowly drive her insane in ten days.

The rest of the plot follows a "who-knows-what-and-decides-to-tell-whom-so-what-are-you- going-to-do-now?" storyline.

The result? At the end of the movie, all three princes are dead.

It seemed to me that the film was a lesson about the assumptions and decisions we make when we don't have all the information we need. The two older sons did what they thought was the right thing given the information they had:
What's ironic is that the son who *did* have the most information--the youngest prince--didn't do the right thing with it. Probably not even 18, he ends up killing the Crown Prince simply because he was jealous that his two older brothers were the ones getting all the attention. He also made an attempt to overthrow the Emperor with only *six* guards. It's the kind of thing that makes you shake your head and mumble, "Oh, you idiot."

So what's the connection between Curse of the Golden Flower and the quote at the beginning of this blog entry, about power attracting the corruptible?

The Emperor lied and cheated his way to the top. He used to be a "lowly captain," but he left his first wife (even though he still loved her--that's why the Crown Prince is his favorite son) for the chance at power and the opportunity to marry a princess. Throughout the movie, the Emperor is trying to get his *first* wife killed too because she knows his secrets.

This first wife is the spy that tells the Empress she's being poisoned, and everone finds out later that her daughter was *also* having a secret affair with the Crown Prince.

Yes. "EEEEEeewwwww!"

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