Temptress Moon
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Movie Reviews of Temptress Moon
Movie Review: Love on the (Opium) Rocks
Summary: 5 Stars
Chen Kaige creates another period masterpiece with TEMPTRESS MOON, the story of a wealthy family struggling to maintain their history on the outskirts of Shanghai.
Due to her brother's condition resulting from an addiction to opium (or so we're lead to believe), Ruyi (the ever glowing Gong Li) is granted leadership over the family fortune at a time when women were relegated to secondary roles. However, Zhongliang -- a close relation now grown up and playing a con man to perfection in Shanghai -- returns home to bilk her out of the family fortune at the demand of his boss. When Zhongliang discovers he has fallen in love with her, he chooses to alter her fate ... but his choice only secures his own fate in the eyes of the triad he serves.
MOON is wonderfully photographed, though this image transfer is a bit grainy at times. It is a contemporary 'Romeo & Juliet,' with gangland influences and wonderful period photography. The lovemaking -- while pushing the boundaries in a mainstream foreign release -- is relatively tame but beautiful captured with powerful emotion and vivid lighting. At points, the film feels almost like a narrative valentine to the family and the viewer; but don't look for any happy ending here.
The ending poses a small handful of tight flashbacks that gives new meaning to some of the events depicted in the film, defining more greatly the motivations of the main characters, once again demonstrating how meaningful small decisions are in the pursuit of daily life and how tragic their consequences may inevitably be in the day, months, and years ahead.
While it arguably may be a bit hard to follow at times, TEMPTRESS MOON nonetheless delivers as a truly spectacular, moving experience that should not be missed.
Movie Review: Total Eclipse!
Summary: 5 Stars
Definitely worth pining for! I decided to purchase Temptress Moon after viewing the breathtaking, and devastating, Farewell My Concubine. Both movies feature the amazing talents of Gong Li and Leslie Cheung. So total is their transformation between the two films, it's difficult to believe that these are the same actors. While Concubine served as a historical epic, Temptress Moon seemed more along the lines of Shakespearean tragedy. Like Kaige's previous work, the characters' frustrations signify larger themes: domestic turmoil; gender repression; family conflict; etc. Although these themes concern the private sphere of life and are not as overtly political as those addressed in Concubine, they are just as much about power, its abuse and the resulting disfigurement of the human spirit.
Temptress Moon is by no means a romance. The movie succeeds in being lyrical and melancholy - more engrossing than entertaining. Despite the requisite tragic ending, I found the plot to be oddly satisfying! The waxing and waning fates of Zhongliang, Ruyi, and Duanwu intertwined to create a luminous study of the heart and its insatiable hunger. Overall, Temptress Moon was a clear reflection of the obsessions that ruthlessly dictate interpersonal affairs. Leslie Cheung, Gong Li and Kevin Lin give mesmerizing performances, while supporting portrayals like that of Caifei He as Zhongliang's sister and Yin Tse as Zhongliang's Boss are equally flawless. (Among the movie's many moral messages: "Don't Do Drugs!" :)
Movie Review: Chen Kaige's most subtle work
Summary: 5 Stars
I think this film is in some ways an improvement over Chen Kaiges breakthrough film Farewell my Concubine. In the earlier film Kaige waters down a very good story with too many references to history. In Temptress Moon Kaige remains focused on his characters and keeps the tone of the film an intimate one. In fact the film rarely leaves the intimate corridors of the Pang family estate. It is within those mossy walls that Kaige tells this tale of three childhood cousins/friends/lovers whose intimate bonds to each other become poisoned by their changing roles within the family structure. History does play a part in this film but it is interwoven only very subtly. The family estate is isolated from the big cities but the corruption finds its way into the estate. In fact Chen Kaiges suggests by the nature and course of this story that corruption is built into the very nature of the old ways as well as the new. And this, in the end, becomes the theme of the picture. But this theme is so quietly fleshed out with such nice performances that by pictures end you find yourself amazed at what Chen Kaige has conveyed with his very intimate story. This is a much better crafted piece of filmmaking than Farewell My Concubine or the later Emperor & The Assassin.Movie Review: The Great Wall
Summary: 5 Stars
Gorgeous, decadent, sensual, at times psychologically incoherent, Kaige Chen's "Temptress Moon" is nothing if not always fascinating to watch because at the very center of this film, at it's core, is a story about family, desire and the things we do to each other in the name of love.Set mostly in Shanghai in the 1920's when China was opening up to the world outside of it's borders, it is reminiscent of Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor," in it's surface beauty and rich, idle, beautiful characters: Zhonglaing (Leslie Cheung), a gigolo and his cousin Ruyi (the incandescent Gong-Li) a recent heiress. Chen is a director who is more interested in showing than telling and his images are so dynamic and surprising that they smack you in the gut.
"Temptress Moon" is a film of uncommon grace and beauty, more of a tone poem than a symphony perhaps but always deserving of your time and attention.
Movie Review: Amazon reviewer missed the message
Summary: 5 Stars
Without repeating other comments here, Kaige's Temptress Moon offers much more than merely a meditation. It serves as an allegory of society in flux. Early in the 20th century China was buffeted by economic and social forces that are represented well here. The street scenes of Shanghai where automobiles, streetcars, and rickshaws jostle can be seen as representing the strains of an emerging modernity on China, while the Pang family's wrenching over the loss of the family's head, followed by Ruyi's angst over her role and place in the family and society at large, represent the strains of change. The opium is real and allegorical, and Kaige's message regarding the supposed advantages of western influences is plain to anyone who wishes to see them. Finally, Temptress Moon clearly the equal to if not superior to Farewell My Concubine.