Tempting Moon

It's Chen Kaige versus the censors again

by Gary Susman

Directed by Chen Kaige. Written by Shu Kei, from a story by Chen Kaige and Wang Anyi. With Leslie Cheung, Gong Li, and Kevin Lin. A Miramax Films release. Opens Friday at the Avon.

In Farewell My Concubine, Chen Kaige presented a lush tragedy of the tumults of 20th-century Chinese history, a ripe melodrama in the guise of a historical epic. In his latest film, Temptress Moon, he takes the reverse approach, presenting a historical drama in the guise of a personal soap opera, achieving subtler but similarly devastating results.

Chen's story is of a Chinese country estate whose residents are caught between a decadent past and a mercenary modernity. The Pang estate is the isolated fortress of ritual, custom, and privilege we're used to seeing in recent Chinese films. But this one is slowly being destroyed by opium. Old master Pang is an addict, and he has introduced his children -- son and heir Zhengda and daughter Ruyi -- to the pipe. Ruyi seems doomed to spinsterhood, since her addiction serves as a pretext for her presumptive groom's family to call off the arranged marriage. Meanwhile opium leads Zhengda and his wife, Xiuyi, to rarefied varieties of perversion.

The film begins on the last night of the imperial regime in 1911, with the news of the overthrow of Pu Yi and the establishment of a republic. It is also the night Xiuyi's younger brother, Zhongliang, comes to the estate. An idealistic aspiring student, Zhongliang finds himself instead condemned to servitude. His sister and brother-in-law force him to prepare their opium pipes and degrade himself unspeakably (the film hints very obliquely of incest). Zhongliang plots revenge, flees the estate for the campuses of Beijing, and leaves behind Zhengda, now mysteriously brain-addled and paralyzed, and Xiuyi, now effectively widowed.

Zhongliang never makes it to Beijing. At the train station, he is taken under the wing of a Shanghai gangster known as Boss who grooms him for a life of crime. The adult Zhongliang (played by Concubine star Leslie Cheung) is a gigolo who specializes in seducing and blackmailing wealthy women. Meanwhile, with her father dead and her brother incapacitated, the grown Ruyi (Chinese cinema's sine qua non, Gong Li) runs the estate, though the Pang elders insist she share her duties with a male cousin, Duanwu (Kevin Lin), who harbors a secret crush on her.

The stage is set for a cataclysmic confrontation when Boss orders Zhongliang to seduce Ruyi. The vengeful, sophisticated gangster is all but torn apart by his return to the country home of his youth, where he encounters his bitter sister, the ambitious Duanwu, and the naive, headstrong, spirited Ruyi. For her part, Ruyi learns all too well Zhongliang's lessons of sexual conquest, manipulation, and betrayal. Tragedy seems inevitable -- it's been foreshadowed from the earliest scenes of the film, when Zhongliang, Ruyi, and Duanwu play together as children.

The pattern of the story seems ageless and mythic, even as the vivid, psychologically complex performances (particularly those of Cheung and Gong) root the characters in idiosyncratic specifics. Still, given the settings Chen has chosen, it's hard not to read the film as a historical allegory, not just of its own time but of today. As on the Pang estate, both the inflexibility of tradition and the foreign influence imposed by the opium trade contributed to the downfall of the Chinese empire. Like the corrupted jazz-age Shanghai, the post-imperial republic proved equally susceptible to greed and power-mongering. Moreover, it's easy to see in the decadent, moribund rigidity of the Pang estate a swipe at China's current geriatric, dogmatic leaders; meanwhile the film's Shanghai anticipates the free-market rapacity that threatens to fill the void left by the passing of those leaders. It's no wonder the Chinese government banned the film, just as it did the more overtly critical Concubine.

Temptress Moon has a luxuriant, lurid look, thanks to Australian-born cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who's done such visually arresting work for Wong Kar-Wai. The images fit the opium haze of the story, though often the movie threatens to drop off into a narcotic languor. Still, Chen remains clearheaded about the links between the personal and the political, and his story's brutal power and elegiac wistfulness linger on long after the last wisp of sweet smoke dissipates from the screen.

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Banned in Beijing

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