I find most of NYT's articles passably ok, but sometimes, they post thi8s great stuff, and this article is one of them. Very insightful, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

I posted the best parts (imo), but do check out the whole thing here



Glamour Lives, in Chinese Films



ONCE upon a time in Hollywood, the stars shone with a radiant glamour; in Chinese film they still do. In movies from Beijing to Hong Kong, actresses like Zhang Ziyi and actors like Tony Leung Chiu-wai fill the screen with heart-skipping beauty and charm. In May at the Cannes Film Festival, audiences swooned for Wong Kar-wai's romantic drama "2046" and Zhang Yimou's latest swordsman epic, "House of Flying Daggers." Although they couldn't be more different in story, sensibility and visual pleasures, what the films share in addition to Ms. Zhang is an extraordinary glamour born from the tension between release and repression.

These days no one does glamour better than Chinese filmmakers. [break] Meanwhile, in the major Chinese cinemas - those of mainland China, Hong Kong and, to an extent, Taiwan - glamour is serious business. Much as it was in old Hollywood, glamour in contemporary Chinese film is a device and a disguise, but it's also a luminous end in itself.

[break]

There are images of Ms. Zhang in "Flying Daggers" that look as if they could have been shot by Hurrell. With her alabaster skin and dark pooling eyes, her body adorned in rich brocades, and bathing alfresco while discreetly veiled by green woodland, Ms. Zhang doesn't just look bewitchingly lovely; she looks like an MGM pinup.

If she were still on watch, Madame Mao would have had a fit and then probably had someone executed. The future Gang of Four member known as Jiang Qing was a Shanghai movie actress during the 1930's, when she was called Lan Ping. From 1966 to 1976, the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, Madame Mao denounced films that didn't conform to her vision of the Communist ideal, including movies that, like so many recent mainland features, explore individualism and personal longing.

Film production in China was put on hold for several years during the Cultural Revolution, and the Beijing Film Academy ceased normal operations. Two years after the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, the academy began accepting undergraduates again. Among the students in that first class were Mr. Zhang, Chen Kaige ("Farewell My Concubine") and Mr. Kaige's childhood friend, Tian Zhuangzhuang ("The Blue Kite"). Among the first films made by this group, known as the Fifth Generation because it was the academy's fifth graduating class, were social-issue stories set in the countryside where all three filmmakers were sent as teenagers during the Cultural Revolution. Following the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and facing tough restrictions at home, the filmmakers ventured into more commercial terrain with stories that could travel around the world and often did.

Since he began directing, much of the appeal of Mr. Zhang's films has rested in their bold visuals and his equally bold women. Mr. Zhang helped return sex, or at least its suggestion, to mainland cinema and, greatly aided by his longtime star and lover, Gong Li, a burgeoning glamour. In early 90's films like "Ju Dou" and "Raise the Red Lantern," the color red is inexorably connected with the central female characters. It is a crimson that announces a radically different world - that of pleasure, individual freedom and beauty for beauty's sake - from that represented by Mao's Little Red Book. Given this, it's no wonder that "Ju Dou" and "Red Lantern" were initially banned. (Mainland audiences, meanwhile, would catch banned films on pirated video copies.)

The Chinese censors who nixed "Ju Dou" were, post-Tiananmen, clearly sensitive about the implications of a story about a young couple's rebellion against a decrepit tyrant. But the sight of Ms. Gong's character bound, gagged and violently sobbing in a flimsy top during a prelude to ravishment didn't go unnoticed. The film's relatively tame sex scenes, one censor said, were "a bad influence on the physical and spiritual health of young people." Mr. Zhang, who would have studied 1930's and 1940's Hollywood movies while at the Beijing academy, has always understood the advantages of gorgeous stars. Ms. Gong did more than play Mr. Zhang's muse; she helped establish his brand and, by extension, that of the emerging movie industry. She was a glamorous ambassador for the new China, even if the new China was sometimes uneasy with what she was selling.

Just as Mr. Zhang and Ms. Gong were becoming the toast of international film festivals, Wong Kar-wai began putting his own glamorous stamp on Hong Kong cinema. Working with the cinematographer Christopher Doyle and the production designer William Chang, Mr. Wong has created a sumptuous and much-imitated aesthetics of desire. In films like "Days of Being Wild" and "Fallen Angels," the characters are at once glamorous and isolated, trapped in their gleaming casings like flies in amber. To watch Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung circle each other with adulterous longing in Mr. Wong's 2000 romance, "In the Mood for Love," is to be reminded of a 1930's conversation between the MGM photographer Laszlo Willinger and an MGM publicist, Howard Strickling. "What's glamour?" Willinger asked. "You know," Strickling answered, "a sort of suffering look."

Like Hollywood filmmakers of days gone by and like many contemporary Chinese directors, Mr. Wong tends to express erotic sublimation rather than outright sex in his films. And like Mr. Zhang, Mr. Wong is also somewhat of a fetishist. In several features, including "2046," Mr. Wong lingers on the image of a woman in a tight dress leaning away from the camera, her derrière gently shimmying. In his exacting attention to the appearance of his characters, in how hair can curtain the face, clothes silhouette the body and bodies align inside a film frame, Mr. Wong brings to mind Josef von Sternberg, who created Marlene Dietrich's scorching look. "Her appearance was ideal," the director said of his famous creation. "What she did with it was something else again. That would be my concern."

Mr. Wong's influence has reached around the world, inspiring imitators from Sofia Coppola to Lou Ye, the Shanghai-born director of the visually lush "Suzhou River" and "Purple Butterfly." Even the brilliant Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien seemed to temporarily fall under Mr. Wong's spell a few years ago when he made "Millennium Mambo," about an emotionally adrift young woman. The Wong influence could be detected in that film's techno beats and slow-motion interludes, along with the desultory allure of the star, Shu Qi, a Taiwanese actress who started out by making soft-core movies. Like his fellow Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang ("What Time Is It There?"), Mr. Hou strips the veneer off of beauty, something he does to devastating effect in "Flowers of Shanghai," a masterpiece about a late 19th-century brothel.

Mr. Hou, Mr. Wong and Mr. Zhang could not be more different visionaries, but each in his way reveals glamour to be as much a construction as a movie set is. In Mr. Hou's "Flowers of Shanghai," the glamour of the brothel is a hypnotic lie, a facade hiding a decadent, doomed world. In Mr. Wong's films, especially those set in the 1960's, glamour exalts the characters; it's what makes their everyday reality transcendent. Yet while glamour is a construction for these filmmakers, it's also sincere; there's nothing ironic about the downcast eyes and yearning mouths they immortalize. "There wasn't much laughing in those photos," Willinger said of the photographs he shot at MGM. "You couldn't have happy sex. Sex and earnestness - together those spelled glamour." He could have been talking about "House of Flying Daggers."

The slow sexing up of mainland cinema in the past decade and a half has occurred during what headline writers are fond of calling China's sexual revolution. In 1981, the Communist Party took aim at this nascent revolution, stating that young men and women should control the "sluice gates of passion" until marriage. Twelve years later, the first state-sponsored sex shop opened in Beijing. Thousands of such shops have opened since and Kinsey-style sex reports have hit the country as have sex-related health epidemics, prostitution and Internet porn. And yet in moves that seem to speak to the country's contradictions, earlier this year officials canceled a production of "The Vagina Monologues" and censors deleted some sexually based scenes from the movie "Cold Mountain" for being too "spicy."

China's much-discussed sexual revolution raised the national temperature, but as in this country, it runs simultaneously hot and cold. By contrast, Deng Xiaoping's 1980's dictum that "getting rich is glorious" has taken solid root. One consequence of China's short march toward capitalism is that mainland directors now compete against foreign films, including those from Hollywood. The Chinese movie industry seems to be responding. Some previously banned directors, like Jia Zhang-ke ("The World"), are earning support. And just a few weeks ago the censors gave the thumbs up to "House of Flying Daggers," with its very mildly spiced scenes. That means the movie can now be seen in theaters, not just on pirated DVD's. It also suggests that officials may be more tolerant of sexual imagery if it serves the cause of sanctioned Chinese cinema.

That's good news for Mr. Zhang and mainland moviegoers alike. Still, it's hard not to entertain qualms about this apparently new relaxed attitude, if for no other reason that it might one day put an end to Mr. Zhang's and Mr. Wong's cinemas of longing. Conventional wisdom has had it that Hollywood killed art or at least put a stranglehold on it when the studios instituted self-censorship as a hedge against government interference. The glories of the old studio system tell a different story, as do the past few decades, when relaxed censorship has mainly led to increased graphic violence and a parallel descent into sexual puerility. There may be few movies as violent as those made in Hong Kong, but at least for now over there, the whiff of glamour still mingles with the smell of gunpowder.

OMG Boxie..I want to comment on every single paragraph of this article. Very interesting, and there is still much more of a classical esthetic coming out of China today. Perhaps part of it has to do with funding? Or filtering process for those movies that reach the U.S. we have certain expectations of what we want to see from China, and the rest doesn't make it here. Its the same with Italy, where trust me, most of the movies that come out there are terrible, and don't make it here. The ones that do (barring L'Ultimo Baccio which was terrible) tend to call back to the Golden Era as well. Its what we demand as a culture here to be brought over from there.

But, that being said, what does make its way here almost feels gothic or victorian to me. The comments on alabaster skin and hightened emotions, are very true. I will write much more on this very soon.

Thank you for posting in here. 1st post huh? Its all down hill from here...once you enter foreign/indie...you never come out again. :wink: