[转帖]Globle & Mails 评《黄金甲》

斯芬克斯

Staying behind the screen


Gong Li's career was built in the films of ex-husband Zhang Yimou. Now, 10 years after their breakup, the two reunited for a new movie, but the actress reveals little of the experience. Or of much else, writes SIMON HOUPT

SIMON HOUPT

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NEW YORK -- Gong Li doesn't give anything away unless she's sure she wants you to have it. There she sits, imperiously upright in a beige turtleneck and a brocaded vest trimmed in sable, gazing down her perfect nose and listening indulgently to an interviewer's questions. Though she understands almost everything she hears in English - you can tell by the slight smile here, a nod of the head there; and after all, she has shot three English-language films in the last couple of years - she still uses an interpreter.

Officially, this is because Li is not confident enough in her spoken English, but there's another apparent benefit that goes (no pun intended) unspoken: hearing questions twice gives her ample time to mull and then formulate answers. So, in its herky-jerky rhythms and sometimes Saharan wait for answers, the encounter is like a face-to-face version of Internet chat. Really, almost nothing emerging from this sort of dialogue could be considered real. Every question meets an intermediary's filter, every answer is shot back from behind a protective wall.

The imperious stance serves her well onscreen too. Watch her in Curse of the Golden Flower, the new soap opera of later Tang Dynasty royal intrigue from director Zhang Yimou. As the empress, she must remain steadfast in the face of manifold crises: Unbeknownst to her, the emperor (Chow Yun-Fat) has ordered a brain-shrivelling poison slipped into the medicinal potions she is obligated to consume every two hours; she is becoming increasingly aware of how emotionally attached the emperor remains to his long-gone first wife, whose portrait is given pride of place in the palace; and, most devastatingly, a clandestine affair she is conducting with her stepson is withering in the face of competition from another, younger woman.

Little by little, the empress is cracking. "She's in a kind of hermetically sealed environment," says Li, speaking of the empress, not herself. "There's really no contact with the outside world, so you can really imagine how that might be deeply affecting.

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"Something I really sympathize with in this character is the importance of love," continues Li, who turns 41 on New Year's Eve. "Her only other choice [other than her husband] is the first son - the stepson - so everything she does really has something to do with trying to somehow give expression to this love which is somehow repressed in her. So this is something that I feel - I really have sympathy for this, that love comes first."

Curse of the Golden Flower occasions a revisiting to Li's own great big love, marking as it does her long-awaited reunion with Yimou. Their careers were launched at the same time, when he cast her in his directorial debut, the sentimental Red Sorghum (1987), even before she'd graduated from Beijing's Central Drama Academy. For the next eight years, they were the premiere power couple of Chinese cinema, making another six films and a life together.

Li starred in the title role of Yimou's Ju Dou (1990) as a poor woman who conceives a son during an affair and convinces her bitter old husband that the illegitimate child is his own. In the director's Raise the Red Lantern, she played the tough-minded, assertive fourth wife of an aging patriarch in 1920s China. Self-confidence is one of her trademarks.

"I guess it might have something to do with the kind of education I got at home," she surmises. "I'm the youngest of five children, and usually in Chinese families, the youngest one is the one that gets the most attention -- for good and bad. Everybody says: 'You should do this, you should do that,' and you get spoiled, you get all the best of everything. But in my family that didn't happen at all. When they got to me they said to me, 'Well basically we can't really do anything extra for you, you really have to learn to fend for yourself and grow up on your own.' So for example, when I was little, I didn't get beautiful new clothes or anything, I just wore hand-me-downs from my older sisters. This kind of education, of growing up in my family, helped a lot, to help me become more independent and strong."

Speaking of strength: Go ahead, ask Li what changed between her and the director over the last 10 years, since their breakup and her marriage to an industrialist, that enabled them to work together again. Your query will be met with an innocent, almost bemused look and an insistence from Li that Yimou simply didn't have a script before now with a character that was a good enough fit for her.

As for their working relationship on Golden Flower, she will allow that, "it felt very good, it was very easy to communicate. You know, there's no other relation between us: We're there working together in a work relationship, we're very professional and we have this thing that we're doing, to make this film." Did she call her husband every night to reassure him that everything was just fine? Li laughs - titters, really - and says nothing.

But then, even on other subjects, less personal ones, she is circumspect, a stance reinforced by the habitual cautiousness of Chinese nationals who know an ill-considered phrase published abroad can get them into trouble at home. So a question about her films being censored or banned -- some steamy scenes were cut from Miami Vice, and Ju Dou and Memoirs of a Geisha failed entirely to meet the approval of Chinese censors -- is met not by criticism of Beijing but a measured articulation of one aspect of the problem: A lack of a rating system that, if implemented, says Li, would help the government keep spicy films from young audiences and allow adult audiences more choice.

Unlike, say, American actors pleased to leverage their celebrity to advance a political cause, Li will extend herself only this much: "There should be some kind of market reform. Because even if you don't let the film show in movie theatres, there's pirate DVDs everywhere and people just go buy those anyway. And the effect is a kind of negative publicity. If everyone hears that this film has been banned or this film has been cut, people want to see it even more, so that it's possible that even if the DVD originally cost let's say $5, suddenly it costs $10 because everyone wants to get a copy of it. So you really have to control this phenomenon as well."

There is one moment that Li lets herself go, when her enthusiasm for the subject is so strong that she ignores the interpreter and answers for herself. As the interview is winding down, she is asked about her outfit, in particular that elaborate vest. Smiling broadly, she exclaims: "Cavali!"