Rhapsodies

For this week was a bit of a puzzler what I was going for was really interesting non traditional non western versions of Hamlet but I had absolutely no luck with finding andy of the other films on my list. So finally I had to five up and settle for doing Chinese Tragedy. Specifically two Wuxia films taking place in the Tang Dynasty.

The film that started this quest was the first on my list Curse of the Black Scorpion also known as the Banquet, by Feng Xiaogang . This is a wonderfully loose and subtle take on Hamlet stripping down the Shakespeare to it’s bare essentials to the point that you barely notice many of the elements of the play unless you are especially looking for them to this respect I especially liked this films version of the Mousetrap sequence as well as the way it changes the interplay between the Polonius and Ophelia characters (Polonius lives). But what really makes this film fascinating is how it changes the role of Gertrude.

Here she was the Hamlet’s character former lover before she married his father cranking up the incestuous subtext from the original play up to eleven. From there this is all Gertrude’s film as she moves her way up the ladder using both Hamlet and Claudius as her unwitting pawns.

All in all this is a beautifully filmed plays with many of the fight scenes almost feeling like complex dance routines.

Curse of the Golden Flower (which for reasons I’m not sure of I keep calling Curse of the Golden Lotis)  directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Chow Yun-fat and Gong Lis an even darker story. Dealing with family conflict, dynastic politics and civil war this a gorgeous film that deals with the royal family gathering to attend the Golden Chrysanthemum festival while everything falls apart around them. What especially fascinated me about this film was the upstairs downstairs vibe showing an army of servants behind the scenes making everything in the palace work, maintain the facade of stability and most importantly in the films bloody climax cleaning up the mess as if none of it ever happened.