The Banquet

The sin that The Banquet commits - that of championing idiocy and making unrequited love a virtue - is not one uncommon to literature and film when masters like Dostoevsky and Herzog themselves occasionally lapse into it. The idiot is often seen as being pure-hearted and untainted by the world's evils, oblivious of everything else other than his love (for mankind or for a particular person) and set apart for that very reason. In an even further simplification of this romantic idea, unrequited love or anything that makes one seem remotely victimized or vulnerable is often seen as something noble, a naive notion that giving - rather than receiving - is always better.

But perhaps we are all prone to these romantic delusions - it always seems easy to project our fantasies on and idealize people who can't defend themselves, when in life we have to face morally ambiguous decisions that sit uneasily with our conscience. In this way, the characters in The Banquet remarkably resemble humans in real life. A dark reimagining of Shakespearean irony in an ancient Chinese court, this film does to wuxia what previous Kurosawa adaptations of Shakespeare does to the samurai movie genre: it adds complex and ambivalent characters to a harsh Spartan landscape - in this case, a landscape where the heroic jiang hu of rebel warriors and codes of honor don't exist. In fact, one wonders why it took so long for a Shakespearean tragedy to be transplanted a Chinese palace, since Chinese history has always been ripe with usurpers and incestuous cannibals.

Flying people have been associated with Confucian ideals like chivalry and integrity so much that Feng Xiaogang's dark and terrible take on the new wave of arthouse wuxia comes as a very welcome breath of fresh air (is it still a wuxia movie without jiang hu?). Much more coherent than either of Zhang Yimou's art direction/cinematography-obsessed wuxia debacles (In one scene, the emperor (played by Ge You) even recites two lines of a poem that were first invoked in House of Flying Daggers, a wink at his trend-setting senior), it, however, abuses yet again the slo-mo action sequences that are supposed to evoke a lyrical poeticism. I have to admit to having no knowledge of Feng's previous films, but his direction here - in spite or maybe because of its opulent visual style - comes in clean broad strokes (with a special delight for slick and wanton violence), leaving ample room for its complex melodrama to unfold.

Its portrayal of timeless power struggles ensures its relevance in our weary world of duplicity and subterfuge - every character has an ulterior motive and is constantly double-crossing one another, thanks in large to the complex and winding screenplay. The screenplay is an actor-centric one; though it starts off shaky, it quickly becomes spare and rather elegant, leaving its implications to the subtleties of the players' expressions, but leaving room for a dramatic soliloquy here and there for each character. And every character, all contemptuous and selfish people, remains unlikeable throughout the film, though it must be said that the main pleasure of the film is derived from all the countless backstabbings. It somehow reminds me of another palace intrigue period melodrama earlier this year, the Korean smash hit The King and the Clown. Much less looney and unsympathetic of its characters, The Banquet lacks the hypocritical sugar-coating of a love story over what is essentially a power play between the characters in the former, though it does also commits the same offense - romanticizing the lover almost to the point of demonizing the beloved.

Zhou Xun, giving the most in her deceptively doe-eyed fashion, has the most shallow and unlikeable character tin the movie as a maid infatuated with Daniel Wu's prince and tortured by (the ever-reliable) Ziyi Zhang's ruthless and conflicted empress for that reason. Along with the prince, the two typify a youthful recklessness - though Wu's character is actually younger than Zhang's - that worships free love and rejects compromise with a stubbornness that costs the lives of countless around them. By the end of the film, it is unexpectedly the empress that is the most sympathizeable, with Zhang at her finest, switching between disparate emotions with the ease of a pro. The ending itself is a magnificent stroke of inspiration, lingering on a single shot that stings all the more for its uncertainty and ambiguity, the very themes of the entire film.

Yet, ultimately, it is eventually clear where the film stands when - spoilers ahead - the emperor kills himself and, with him dying in her arms, the empress comes to a heart-breaking epiphany that she has killed the only person who'd ever really loved her. The film celebrates self-sacrificial love, innocence and honor, in spite of its edgy, cynical exterior. One thing is clear about films that commit this sin (if it can be seen as a sin at all) - they seem to represent the makers' hope in restoring innocence, however preciously little, in a world where being hardened and jaded is the only way to live. In potraying this innocence/idiocy, some achieve this with a transcendence that resembles hope, while some only manage a jarring and hypocritical incongruence that doesn't glue. I think The Banquet ends up being a bit of both; its 'innocent' and slightly cloying love story feels jarring when compared to the transcendence - one that is achieved through irony - of its bleak and terrible world.