The Banquet (aka: Ye yan) — movie review
If you have even the most rudimentary interest in Chinese Art cinema, you might be wondering where all the intelligent pictures have gone. The Raise the Red Lanterns have been replaced with Flying Daggers, the Farewelling Concubines with flying bird women. Well, now, with Xiaogang Feng’s The Banquet you have something to look forward to.Opting for elegance over excess, The Banquet is a wonderful piece of restrained beauty and masterful storytelling, standing perfectly at odds with Chen Kaige’s gaudy The Promise or Zhang Yimou’s bloated Curse of the Golden Flower (by Yimou’s own admittance it is his Soderberghian cash in, manufactured for the wider Western audience). Gangjian Qiu and Heyu Sheng’s “Hamlet with an Eastern twist” is so completely gripping and intensely focused it has restored my faith in the long floundering scene.
Like Hamlet, The Banquet’s Tang Dynasty drama concerns a prince, Wu Luan (Daniel Wu), whose father, the Emperor, has suffered murder at the hands of his wife and brother, Empress (Zhang Ziyi) and new Emperor Li (You Ge), respectively. Most of Hamlet’s supporting characters, including Laertes, Ophelia, and Polonius, all have their counterparts here (Only Fortinbras, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are truly missing). Many events from Hamlet are prominently featured, but ever so slightly tweaked, both to maintain audience interest, and infuse the tale with issues more easily palatable for its domestic audience. Prince Wu Luan gives a performance for his parents, ruminates over the death of his father, but instead of playing mad works toward honing his vengeance. Likewise the tale features a handful of plot points emphasizing its place in Chinese history, as well as a wonderful and exciting twist on the classic Hamlet ending.
Continuing the motif of twisting on the familiar, director Xiaogang Feng incorporates elements from martial arts films and classic Greek theater to tell his tale, the former including quite a bit of bloodletting and the most excellent use of fight as dance in recent memory. Set designs and costuming, the synthesis of wood, metal, and cloth, are lavish and rich, displaying an absolute refinement of taste. And Feng doesn’t just stop at making pretty pictures. Seeing both camera placement and movement and image juxtaposition as tools for metaphor, he further layers nuance and meaning on an already intricate, literate tale.
Lastly, rounding out an already exquisite package, are excellent performances from the two leads. The overdubbing of Daniel Wu, initially jarring (Imagine the voice of a gravelly Bass in place of a Tenor), is grown accustomed to quite quickly. One must commend both Wu and Ziyi, Wu being a non-Chinese speaker and Ziyi being equipped with only the most rudimentary English skills, for selling every scene together. Furthermore, while Ziyi has had her share of serious dramatic roles, Wu has oft been relegated to pretty-boy, bad-boy, and comedic roles in films ranging from Beijing Rocks and Gen X Cops to Beauty and the Breast. His turn as Prince Wu Luan, however, proves he is a competent serious actor, and worthy of the fan-base he already commands.
The Banquet is easily one of the best pictures of the year. Intelligent, measured, sure of self, and completely lacking pretension, it’s the most refreshing period entry in years, and the most interesting take on the Hamlet tale since Kenneth Branagh’s. If it loses the Oscar for best foreign film to Yimou’s Curse, one can safely declare the proceedings officially dead.
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