Word: shadowing
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...Emperor's Shadow covers some 30 years in the lives of two boys: a sturdy kid who will become the Emperor and his sensitive friend who will become the musician Gao Jianli ? think Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien in Angels With Dirty Faces. Both are suckled by Jianli's mother and raised as brothers. When they're 10, they're separated for pursue their different and colliding destinies. In maturity, the warlord (played with a bull-headed majesty by Jiang Wen, China's leading movie actor) hears than Jianli (Ge You, a stalwart of several Zhang Yimou films...
...material demands. This is a movie headed for tragedy (the warlord orders Jianli blinded by the fumes of horse urine!), and by the end two of the three are dead. The lieutenant, driven mad with jealousy on hearing of Yueyang's affair with Jianli, murders and mutilates her. Shadow nearly becomes a Sino splatter movie when a courtier tells the warlord of the murder: "He cut her head off. Then her feet, her hands and her breasts. Finally, he cut out her vagina...
...takes a frail swipe at his exalted friend-foe. Few people notice. "History will record that when you were installed, I attacked you," Jianli says, and the now-Emperor replies, Wrong. I write the history books. And they will say I kept you alive, because you are my eternal shadow." Jianli has poisoned himself, so as not to be anyone's shadow, and gasps out his last word: "Brother." To put the musician out of his misery, the Emperor ritually stabs him. Then we hear the anthem Jianli has composed. "Everlasting! Immortal!" An end title informs us that the Emperor...
...score for The Emperor's Shadow was composed by Zhao Jiping. From the mid-80s to 2000, while Tan Dun was in the U.S., Zhao was the PRC's preeminent movie composer, working with most of the A-list directors. For Zhang Yimou he scored Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, Story of Qiu Ju and To Live. For Chen Kaige: Yellow Earth, The Big Parade, Farewell My Concubine, Temptress Moon and The Emperor and the Assassin. For Zhou Xiaowen: No Regrets and The Emperor's Shadow. For Sun Zhou: Heartstrings and Breaking the Silence. Of these...
...libretto, by Tan Dun and Chinese-American novelist Ha Jin, adheres to the contours of The Emperor's Shadow, but with a different ending: Jianli cuts out his own tongue, and the anthem he leaves to be sung is a slave song we heard at the beginning of Act 2. The writers have trouble marshalling the movie's dramatic pull; their lyrics don't put the personal conflicts across with the same clarity and intensity. Domingo, a trouper at 64, has the notes down but struggles with his enunciation. (Even though he's singing in English, we needed the subtitles...