Temptress Moon is a basic melodrama about passion, betrayal, jealousy, and loyalty set against a backdrop of Chinese political history of the early part of the twentieth century. It’s beautiful to look at, like color refracting in soap bubbles, but not much of substance after you prick the surface.

Historical Background: Chen Kaige, born August 12th, 1952, is one of China’s most accomplished directors since the Cultural Revolution. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, he had to discontinue his education and engage in various kinds of manual labor on a rubber plantation, in a factory, on a farm, and in military service. He was able to enter the Film Academy in Beijing in 1978 and began making films in 1986. His first three films, Yellow Earth (1986), The Big Parade (1987), and King of Children (1986) were all set in China in the recent past. He saw a lot of Hollywood films while growing up and especially during a three year period (1987-1990) during which he lived in New York City. Returning to China, Chen’s work entered a new phase with Life on a String (1992), which was a fable set in Mongolia. Chen’s international reputation was provided a sharp boost when his next film, Farewell My Concubine (1993) shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes. That was followed by the present film, Temptress Moon (1996) and then the period epic, The Emperor and the Assassin (1999).

The Story: Much of this family epic transpires on the traditional Pang family estate, with its sumptuous gardens, opulent palatial residence, and countless members of the clan and their servants. The rest takes place in the cities of Shanghai and Beijing. The head of the Pang clan, called the Old Master, is an opium addict and even introduces his two young children, his son Zhengda (Zhou Yiemang) and his daughter Ruyi (Ying Wang), to the pipe, claiming that opium is the source of all inspiration. The film opens in 1911 on the last night of the Imperial regime just before the establishment of the brief republic. That same night, a young boy, Yu Zhongliang (Lei Ren), comes to live with the Pang family. He is the younger brother of Zhengda’s wife, Yu Xiuyi (He Saifei). (It helps to keep the characters straight if you remember that surnames precede the given name in the Chinese naming tradition.) Zhongliang, an idealistic young student, has been orphaned and is now in his elder sister’s care. She and her husband, however, reduce him to a status of servitude, demanding, among other things, that he prepare their opium pipes. Worse, in their opium-intoxicated state, Zhengda takes perverse pleasure in demanding that the youthful Zhongliang kiss his sister in her bed chamber, which we are led to believe to have incestuous connotations.

Zhongliang exacts a profound revenge by lacing Zhengda’s pipe with arsenic (revealed late in the film via flashback), informing his sister, and then fleeing the estate. The poison doesn’t kill Zhengda, but causes such severe neurological damage that he is reduced to a permanent vegetative state, the cause of which remains mysterious to all but Xiuyi, who protects her little brother to the extent of hiding the cause. At the train station, the disoriented Zhongliang is taken under the wing of a gangster, known as Boss (Xie Tian).

The story now skips forward to 1920 when we find the adult Zhongliang (played by Chinese star Leslie Cheung) living a sordid life in Shanghai and earning his livelihood as a gigolo, seducing wealthy women so that his criminal associates, under the tutelage of the Boss, can blackmail them for jewelry and cash. Back at the Pang estate, meanwhile, the Old Master passes away and the clan must select a new leader. Since the heir-apparent, Zhengda, is virtually brain dead the elders reluctantly break with the strongly chauvinist tradition and select Ruyi (now played by the leading Chinese actress, Gong Li) as head of the clan. To hedge their bets, however, and protect against “feminine weakness”, they select a distant male cousin, Pang Duanwu (Kevin Lin), to be Ruyi’s loyal aide and servant, on the grounds that he is not closely enough related to dare to attempt to seize undue power. One of the elders, Elder Qi (Ko Hsiang-ting), is not pleased with this arrangement, especially when Ruyi’s first major decision, with Duanwu’s support, is to dismiss the numerous concubines that had served her father and brother.

When the Boss in Shanghai learns of Ruyi’s ascent to leadership of the wealthy Pang family, he orders Zhongliang to return to the estate with the intent of seducing Ruyi and luring her to Shanghai, where the gangsters hope to use her to gain control of the Pang family fortune. Zhongliang is reluctant, but more from his painful memories of being exploited as a child by his sister and brother-in-law than out of any compunction about betraying his friend of childhood, Ruyi. Nevertheless, the Boss is also his father figure and he ultimately agrees.

Ruyi turns out to be an easy target for the handsome Zhongliang, as she is thunderstruck the first time she lays eyes on him, even without knowing that he is her old childhood chum and sister-in-law’s brother. Soon, she can thing of nothing else but giving herself to Zhongliang. So intent is she on pleasing the young man, she undertakes to first lose her virginity and “practice” on her cousin Duanwu. This opportunity is a mixed blessing for Duanwu, who has fallen secretly in love with Ruyi and is totally devoted to her. He is, quite naturally, delighted to be her first but not with being the mere warm-up for his rival Ruyi. Ruyi’s first experience with sex is very tastefully filmed, especially when her impassioned face at the moment of orgasm gives way to a colorful burst of pure light. Even so, it’s still Zhongliang that she desires.

Zhongliang skillfully exploits Ruyi’s lust for him to lure her to the city. Zhongliang’s cynical lack of compassion, however, is beginning to exhibit a couple of cracks that have not gone unnoticed by the Boss. Ruyi’s passion and love is a bit more than he can coldly dismiss. Worse, from the Boss’s viewpoint, Zhongliang had failed to complete the extortion of his last mark back in Shanghai – a mysterious woman who lives at an address called “Heavenly Gate.” For some reason (not fully explained), this mystery woman is of such rare beauty and/or substance, that Zhongliang has delayed completing the usual extortion. The Boss is concerned that Zhongliang is developing pangs of conscience that will render him useless to the organization. The mystery woman and Ruyi both pose risks, in the Boss’s view, to Zhongliang’s continued usefulness to the gang. The Boss decides to eliminate both risks in one maneuver, demanding that Zhongliang complete the assignment with the mystery lady and arranging for Ruyi to have a front row view, so to speak, of the transaction. This will ensure, the Boss believes, that both women will fall out of love with Zhongliang instantly and fully.

I’ll leave for readers to discover from the film how that scene plays out. I’ll add just one more bit of subplot, however. As a teen, Ruyi had been betrothed to a young suitor, though they had never met, but the suitor’s family had broken off the engagement upon learning that Ruyi was addicted to opium. The suitor had later broken with his traditional family and had established himself as a modern and independent businessman. Having never married, he decides that he will check out the woman to whom he was once betrothed and decide for himself if she would be a suitable bride. He thus enters the picture near the film’s end as another competitor for Ruyi’s heart and hand.

Themes: The main theme, I think, is how bitterness in relation to second-class status in childhood fuels antisocial behavior in adulthood. Zhongliang tells his sister, at one point, that he will never love again because of the way that she and her husband treated him as a child. Ruyi later concludes that Zhongliang’s “heart is dead” – that he cannot love. Ruyi has her own lesser degree of bitterness in relation to the sexist treatment she received in childhood, being excluded from the ancestral hall. A related second theme is how power shifts in relation to who wants whom more. Zhongliang has power over Ruyi as long as her desire for him is greater than his for her; when the equation shifts, Zhongliang once again becomes powerless – as he was in childhood.

I think that it is also clear that Temptress Moon can be see as political allegory to an extent, but, overall, Chen plays no favorites. The tradition laden elders of the Pang clan can be seen as the elderly, inflexible Communist leadership of the 1990’s in China while the gangsters in Shanghai can be see as the incursion of Western capitalistic influences run amok.

Production Values: The weakness of this film is its script; the strengths lie in the lush cinematography and outstanding performances. Although Chen frames his story with significant historical events from Chinese history of the early twentieth century, the plot is basic melodrama, dealing in such staples as passion, jealousy, and revenge. Many critics, American and Asian alike, complain that the story in this film is very difficult to follow, both because the chronology is jarring and the number of characters too many. The opening sequences involving the characters as children are especially difficult to incorporate fully the first time through the film and that leaves viewers playing catch-up as the film proceeds. Personally, I found that I was able to follow the story by concentrating carefully. The bigger problem for me was that the principal characters were not well-developed, had few dimensions, and were not especially likable individuals. One can’t really get worked up about what is essentially a tragic love story when one of the two main parties is, by his own assessment, incapable of love and the other is an impulsive opium addict who misuses others insensitively. Another problem with the script is that viewers are never given sufficient reason to understand or care about the mystery woman or the associated subplot, which could have been a significant element considering that she was the first to break through Zhongliang’s wall of cynicism. Another problem, I think, is that Chen seems to be attempting to maintain a high level of emotional charge in virtually every scene. There are countless scenes that involve emotional outbursts, objects being knocked over, doors being slammed, characters spinning abruptly to confront another. It’s all too much. Just as opiate users develop tolerance to their drug, viewers develop tolerance to high-pitched emotion when it recurs in virtually every scene.

On the other hand, all who write about this film agree that this film, like many of Chen’s others, is visually sumptuous. Australian cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, has provided one frame after another that is beautiful to behold. Many of the scenes have a surreal quality that is suggestive of opioid intoxication. His camera techniques are varied, including graceful tracking shots, steadicams, and crane shots.

Gong Li is always effective as an actress, never less than very good and sometimes spectacular. Her character here is not as interesting as in such films as Raise the Red Lantern and Red Sorghum, but she does what she can with it. Leslie Cheung is the member of the cast most linked to my concern about excessive and unrelenting melodramatic tension, but I assume this was what the director requested. Kevin Lin as Duanwu gave the most nuanced and interesting performance.

Bottom-Line: One gets the feeling that Chen and his team were so invested in the appearance of the film and the exotic mystique of opium intoxication that they forgot about the kind of plot progression and significant thematic content that made Farewell My Concubine such a success. One indication that a film is in trouble is when the marketing people resort to misrepresentation of the content to lure viewers. The DVD from Miramax for this features claims that the film is “Sensuous!”, “Ravishing!”, and “Steamy Passion!” – none of which describe this film particularly well. The scenes of passion are far from explicit; nor do I recall any unusual body parts on the loose. Temptress Moon is in Chinese with English subtitles and has a running time of 127 minutes. I’d like to give this film 3.5 stars – 2 stars for plot and script but 5 for cinematography. Lacking that option, I’ll reluctantly give it four.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan:

Chungking Express
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Eat Drink Man Woman
The Emperor and the Assassin
Fallen Angels
Farewell My Concubine
Hero
In the Mood for Love
Raise the Red Lantern
Red Sorghum
Road Home
Shanghai Triad
The Story of Qiu Ju
Together
To Live
What Time is it There?
The Women From the Lake of Scented Souls
Yi Yi

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age