Word: flower
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...alchemic mixture of influences might produce an opera to span the globe: real world music. The Met promised the largest production since its War and Peace, suggesting that Zhang would take the visual splendor of Hero and House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower and duplicate it, expand and perfect it, on the giant stage. Might we also have some swordplay and wire work...
...CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER...
...that young Hannibal Lecter doesn't have his kinks. That last image of Mischa not only haunts him, it nourishes his derangement, like broth for a sick child. It encourages him to raise sadism to an art, his murders as elegant as Japanese flower arrangements, as dramatic as the flourish of a Z from Zorro's blade. Hannibal the swordsman-calligrapher slashes X's on his first victim. Later he inscribes the letter M, for Mischa, all over one of the men who had killed and consumed...
CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER The knives are out at the palace, and Gong Li is staring daggers. Chinese cinema's haughtiest diva plays a 10th century Empress who is having an affair with her stepson while, she suspects, her husband (Chow Yun Fat) is slowly poisoning her. That's just for appetizers in a menu of long-lost parents, eloping lovers and the minor distraction of a civil war out in the grand courtyard...
This is high, and high-wire, melodrama. It's less soap opera than grand opera, where matters of love and death are played at a perfect fever pitch. And grand this Golden Flower...