Just like director Zhang Yimou's career, Curse of the Golden Flower has two distinct halves. Echoes of Yimou's past, Flower's first hour is an intricately constructed intimate drama among a royal family on the brink of internal upheaval. It features the return of Zhang's muse, Gong Li, as the family's matriarch, the Empress Phoenix. She manipulates each of her three sons against their father (Chow Yun-Fat) after she discovers he's trying to poison her. When a mysterious woman shows up to aid the Empress, Flower's second hour evolves into a martial arts extravaganzas much like House of Flying Daggers and the others he's made in recent years.
Curse of the Golden Flower may be one of Zhang's most erratic, even to major fans, but it still manages to also be a successful marriage of the storytelling that he built his career on (cf. Raise the Red Lantern) and the large scale epics he's making now. Gong hasn't worked with Zhang since 1995's Shanghai Triad, but she is still a natural in front of his camera. She eases the transition between the story's halves, deftly playing a meticulous schemer one minute and an emotional crackpot the next.
Action fans might find the film's first half somewhat of a slog to sit through because of its carefully honed exposition, while those used to Zhang's dialogue-heavy dramas are sure to be surprised by the film's brutal second half where blood spurts more than the words. Zhang might have upped the ante to break through the glut of flying swordsman epics that have been winging it out of China in the wake of Zhang's own Hero, which was itself an answer to his star Chow's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Yet Zhang's expert way of ratcheting up the tension within the royal family makes the epic battles actually mean something. He also is unparalleled in his use of color, which makes Flower nothing short of a moving painting.
Although it comes at a time when audiences may be suffering from martial arts fatigue, Zhang makes his latest entry into the genre wholly entertaining, even if he's having a little bit of an identity crisis. —Stephen Saito
