To be or not to be: Hamlet in China

Touted as the film China will submit for consideration as Best Foreign Film in next year’s Academy Awards, The Banquet (Ye Yan) continues in the tradition of recent Chinese films that exhibit dizzying visual pageantry. It’s highly-stylized filmmaking as only the Chinese seem to be capable of producing nowadays. Think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero and House of the Flying Daggers.

And just as Akira Kurosawa would create Japanese versions of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Throne of Blood) and King Lear (Ran), so does Banquet’s director, Feng Xiaogang, borrowing liberally from Hamlet in bringing us this film of courtly drama, illicit love, intrigue and ambition in Ancient China.

Under suspicious circumstances, the Emperor has died, leaving his widow, Empress Wan (Ziyi Zhang), to cope with the advances of the Emperor’s brother, Li (Ge You). Li seems hell-bent on assuming the role of Emperor and annexing the Empress as his new wife. In the wings, there’s the Crown Prince Wu Luan (Daniel Wu), who it seems was banished from the kingdom, as something more than maternal love seems to exist between Wu and his stepmother, Wan. Flitting around these main characters, there’s the woman who loves Wu, Qing Nu (Zhou Xun), and Qing’s father (the high-ranking and trusted Minister Yin) and her brother.

Opening credits flicker and appear beside and against the background of candles that dot the court’s chambers, and right away, with this optical trick, we know we’re in for something highly-stylized. Throughout the film, the actors, their costumes, the scenery, all form elements in a canvas director Feng has put a lot of thought into.

The lush photography, the detailed choreography – whether of battles, martial arts displays, or of lovemaking, all points to a distinct form of poetry through filmmaking that Feng is aspiring for. It is in the plot development that we sometimes feel that time is dragging; and that a faster pace would have serviced his intentions as well. Meticulously plotted and expounded upon, there are moments when our familiarity with Hamlet and the ways in which these stories so often develop, become reasons we wish he’d hurry along. Having said that, I can imagine how Western audiences will lap up this kind of local color and attention to detail.

The Empress Wan is as much Lady Macbeth as she is off the pages of Hamlet, and she makes for the most intriguing character in the film. There’s steely ambition and resolve while having to play subjugated woman; and these thought processes are wonderfully etched on Ziyi’s face – how she has to hide her true feelings and intentions. Ge You as the scheming and plotting Li is wonderful, especially as we sense how up against a woman he has always loved from afar and now has in his grasp, he fights hopelessly not to be putty in her hands.

For the patient viewer, The Banquet offers many rewards – it’s a potent reminder of how movies can be spectacles, transporting us to exotic worlds.