The Banquet (2006) 8/10
Chinese films seem to be on a roll this year, with yet another solid film on the footsteps of Isabella, Dog Eat Dog and Election 2. That’s not even considering a few other China/HK productions that will be released later this year which i have high hopes of. Truly, this has been a bumper crop of good film releases for chinese cinema.
If movies were assessed on asthetic qualities alone, the Banquet would be a shoo-in for Best Picture. Visually sumptuous, with easily the best constumes, scenery and mise en scenes since House of Flying Daggers, The Banquet is the big budget chinese film of the year. And not surprising, considering that it stars a top-notch cast, among them Zhang Ziyi and Zhou Xun, easily the 2 best actresses in China. And did i mention that everything looks gorgeous?
The Banquet is director Feng Xiaogang’s foray into the wuxia genre, and it is a fine debut. Based loosely on Hamlet, the plot gets plodding at times, but all this is secondary to the beautiful imagery and plenty of screen time for Zhang Ziyi. Filmwise, Zhang Ziyi’s character has the most screentime and she is the one that holds the film together. Her performance here is once again excellent. Zhou Xun is similarly captivating, but her character is too one-diemensionally nice. Ge You adds gravitas in the role of the Emperor, and although i would have preferred someone like Chen Daoming play such a role, i felt that Ge You’s performance was fairly good. And the weakest link in the otherwise solid cast is Daniel Wu, who is perhaps HK’s version of Keanu Reeves. Pleasant looking but quite wooden in emoting. Granted, the character of Hamlet is supposed to be wimpy, wishy-washy and basically just pathetic, but Daniel Wu is better when he acts wearing a mask than without a mask.
The action choregraphy is also very good, although its more poetic beauty kind of action than the fast and furious action that you might expect. In fact, the action scenes are almost like a poetic dance, more asthetically beautiful than truly heart-pounding action. Sountrack is impeccable, as usual and is credited to Tan Dun, who also did Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The film is also more than just lavish costumes and eye candy. The emphasis on color also comes across as a subtheme in the film, although most casual viewers will probably miss this. The interplay of black and white in this film is perhaps a reference to Shakespeare’s Othello, which similarly uses color to reflect the goodness and evil in men. For example, consider that the very first scene Zhang Ziyi is introduced, she walks across the hallway in a long white dress, whilst at the film’s last scene, she wears black. Similarly, consider that in the film’s first action scene, which depicts a massacre, the vicitims are actors clad entirely in white who are killed by soldiers dressed in black. This reflects the interplay and tension of good and evil, how all is tainted by it, and consumed by it. Nearly every character is depicted with a dark or deplorable side, save Zhou Xun’s character who acts as the moral touchstone of this film. Having said that, it is revealing that Zhou Xun’s last scene depicts her (the only truly good character) clad in a blackened mask who was once white. Again, the use of colors, including the motiff of red, offers plenty of space for the film student to argue and dissect the film on. And that is merely one aspect.
With a deliberately ambiguous ending (i liked the ending but agree that it might have been better to end the films five mins earlier), and a deliberately slow pacing, director Feng seems to straddle the fine line between arthouse and mainstream, and thankfully refrains from turning it into a crass commercialised film that it could easily have degenerated to (Think Chen Kaige’s utterly befuddling The Promise, which was a low point for period wuxia films).
Ultimately, while it won’t exactly be remembered as a masterpiece, The Banquet is a fine adaptation of Hamlet, although it has more in common with Macbeth and borrows themes from Othello. Watch it for its sheer beauty, and because it’s pretty good.
