Temptress Moon

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Temptress Moon a 1996 film from Chen Kaige, starring Leslie Cheung and Gong Li.

I’m sure you saw it, right? So here’s just a capsule storyline: in 1911 young Zhongliang is a student, and a minor relative of the powerful house of Pang. As a special ‘honor’ he is allowed to enter the Pang palace and serve to prepare the Young Master’s opium pipe (Young Master is married to Z’s sister). Meanwhile young Ruyi, the Young Master’s sister, is a hellion, a wild kid who’s been raised from the cradle smoking dope by the Old Master, her father. One fateful night, Young Master, crazy doped up, forces little Z to sleep with his own sister. The result of this is that little Z hates Pang and the whole lot of them, and runs away. He tries to go to Beijing to study, but is set upon by thieves at the railyard.

Ten years pass. Z is now living in Shanghai. He’s been raised by the triad gangs, and loves the Boss as a father; in turn the Boss loves Z like a son. Z’s ‘job’ involves making married women fall in love with him; then the gang blackmail the married woman.

He doesn’t seem too happy about his life, though.

Meanwhile the Old Master of the Pangs dies, and Young Master succeeds; but for ten years Young Master has been a vegetable. So Ruyi is chosen to be head of the house, but since she’s only a woman, a distant cousin is her ‘helper’ – really the old guys intend to go on ruling. What they don’t know yet is that Duanwon, the ‘helper’ has always been in love with Ruyi, so he backs whatever she says – she turns out to be the real head of the house.

In Shanghai, the Boss hears of this, and sends Z to seduce Ruyi and bring her back; the fortune of the Pangs is immense and he wants it. Z asks Boss not to send him back, but Z is sent all the same. He plays hot and cold with Ruyi, who is interested in him right away. Oddly enough, Ruyi as a woman is a totally different character from Ruyi as a child – not spoiled, not headstrong, never seen to smoke dope, and innocent. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, but this movie is about style, not logic.

But Z’s sister is crazy in love with him, too. She’s been so lonely without him, as her husband is only a vegetable, and in ten years Z hasn’t even written once. But he repulses her and tells her he hates her and everybody in the palace.

All the same, Z finds himself touched by Ruyi’s innocence, her frankness, her beauty. Who knows, maybe there is some trace of love for her from when they were kids? He gets her to agree to go away with him, but then he can’t go through with it. He goes to Shanghai and confesses his treachery to the Boss. The Boss turns out to love Z more than the loot, and forgives the betrayal. Instead he arranges for Ruyi to be brought to Shanghai so she can see Z in action; this will cure Z of his heartsickness when Ruyi scorns him, and everything can go back the way it was before.

It doesn’t quite work out the way the Boss intended though. Ruyi is still interested in Z despite how he’s been living, provided he does indeed love her. But he can’t say the phrase – Leslie Cheung is playing the cold bastard yet again just like in Days of Being Wild, the one all the women want, who doesn’t love women back. Sick at heart, Ruyi goes back home, and accepts another man’s marriage proposal. But Z goes back after her, breaking from the triads once and for all. He finally gains courage to tell Ruyi he loves her. But it’s too late. In despair Z determines to go to complete his studies in Beijing after all, but in a final act of madness, he prepares Ruyi’s opium pipe, just the way he did for Young Master on that fateful night ten years back – spiking the opium with arsenic.

Halfway out of the estate grounds, Z has a change of heart. He rushes back to save Ruyi, to warn her – too late again! She has smoked the fatal pipe. From now on Duanwon will be the head of the Pang house, speaking for the brain-dead Ruyi; the triads catch up to Z on the docks and shoot him, and there’s the end to our happy little love story.

Chen Kaige and DP Christopher Doyle try to splash color everywhere on the screen. This is Chen Kaige’s version of Wong Kar Wai, with the emotions always hyped and pushed and exaggerated, characters stylized, narrative stripped of connections and logic until it pushes up against the edge of incoherence. Every character is passionate to the extreme – you could call them crazy. Mirrors are everywhere for shooting things frontward then reversed. Steadicam shots follow people running through the mazes of the palace; wide angle lenses are used to distortion; diffusion filters over a lot of the shots, with frames allowed to go completely out of focus at times. Light is splashed across faces so one part blows out – it’s just that kind of movie.

I didn’t like it much, but I respected it, and I’m glad I watched it. It strikes me that Chinese film is now like Hollywood in the 30s or French films in early 60s. People aren’t afraid to try stunts like this, and can get huge budgets to shoot sweeping period epics like this one, anchored on major stars. It really makes Hollywood films of the past 20 years or so look like timid piles of steaming cliches. Temptress Moon is like a Jean Jacques Beineix film, just delirous, or crazy. I guess if you’re really into Leslie Cheung, you might go for this, and it’s a woman’s picture, so it’s not a knock on the film if I don’t like it much.

(26 March 2009)