Over the past year or two I’ve watched a number of films by Zhang Yimou, including Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, and Shanghai Triad. I saw Hero when it was in American theatrical release. I’m currently watching Not One Less (1999) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) an astonishing pair of films.
What’s astonishing is that they’re utterly different. Not One Less is a realist drama using non-professional actors and is about the students in a small school in contemporary rural China. Curse is an epic about the Imperial court in ancient China and employs lavish sets, grand spectacle, and top-tier professional actors. Curse hardly seems like it’s about people at all; the central characters seem more like minor deities being moved about on-stage by cosmic forces—either that, or grandly colored shadow puppets. By contrast Not One Less is awash in the simple humanity of its characters, especially the children, struggling with their lessons, working to help one of their classmates.
The two films also stand in thematic contrast. And it wasn’t until I’d watched Curse for a second time that I actually managed to understand the plot, while Not One was transparent, step by step, from the start.
Not One Less is about group solidarity. The teacher of a rural school must take a one-month leave to help his ailing mother. Thirteen year old Wei Minzhi is brought in as a substitute. She one a year or three older than her oldest students and has no experience teaching. Her first task, naturally, is simply to somehow BECOME the teacher. In this she is aided by the fact that one of the students, Zhang Huike, the trouble-making boy no less, has had to leave school and go to the city to earn money to pay of family debts. Wei and the class work together toward this end. They work to raise money to buy her a bus ticket to the city; which works, and it doesn’t. But she gets there, persists, manages to make a televised plea to her lost student. Zhang Huike sees her plea. He’s found. Everyone is happy.
Curse of the Golden Flower is about love and jealousy within a nuclear family that is, as well, cursed with being the ruling family. The Emperor is slowly poisoning his wife, who has been having an affair with the Crown Prince and is plotting rebellion. You see, his wife is not the love of his life; no, he had to pass over his love in order to marry a king’s daughter and thus ascend to the high throne. And so forth. And yet all this private intrigue is the engine behind martial arts daring-do and a massive concluding battle spectacle. The Empress loses; the Emperor foils her plans. But he too loses. His sons/her sons, all dead. Her last act is to knock her medicine—which she knows is poisonous—into the air where it lands on a chrysanthemum engraved in wood and eats it away.
All that grand spectacle in grand decoration of a dead world. It’s something of a Gotterdammerung Chinese-style. There are no willful godlings in Not One Less. Just people patiently making their way in a difficult world world. But it too ends with symbols. But not the rotting symbol of a corrupt imperial order. No, Chinese characters patiently written on a chalk board by the students.
By the same artist, Zhang Yimou. The great ones are like that. Range.
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