Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
It's a ghastly confession that will
bring on endless job discrimination, but I have to tell you I am old
enough to remember when the last big GREAT GATSBY came to
theater screens in 1974, the Robert Redford-Mia Farrow edition.
Critics generally disliked it. Yet to me, as a fifth-grader, that the
Jazz Age retro-fashions it created hung around for ages and ages (I
had a junior-high teacher who I swear must have patterned her look
after it; she was a quasi-flapper right out of the likes of "Miss
Crabtree" from Our Gang). The current GREAT GATSBY, with
Leonardo DiCaprio, has likewise made its mark on the zeitgeist; there
are Gatsby-themed weddings, dance parties, and who knows? Maybe even
a tie-in novel.
If I had more time and hard-drive space
and the right gear, I would do the first stop-motion Lego version of
Gatsby. Just a bunch of Lego figures standing around Lego mansions in
Lego ascots saying things like "Daisy, come with me! Leave Tom."
"No, Daisy, Gatsby is not what he seems! Stay with Tom!"
Then a Lego woman gets run over by a Lego limo, and it's over. I
think I'd get quite a few hits with that. When some 9-year-old
rockets to stardom with it, remember you read the idea for Lego
Gatsby here first.
What is left, then, but the Asian
version: the "Gleat Glatsby," anyone? Oh, was that racist?
I humbly plead cultural throwback-displacement, immersed as I am
immersed in the revived ambiance and Anglo-dominance insensitivity of
America in the 1920s/30s (which, in Cleveland, comes with a bonus
Great Depression).
But it is a fact that the Asian
visually sumptuous Jazz-Age tragedy has already been made, and is now
on video, to enthrall us foreign-devil barbarians. It is Jin-ho Hur's
excellent DANGEROUS LIASONS.
Yes, the oft-filmed 18th-century French
novel of seduction, Les Liasons dangereuses, by Pierre
Choderios de Laclos, famously developed for the stage by Christopher
Hampton, most recently done in Hollywood as a teenage update CRUEL
INTENTIONS, has gotten a Far East treatment. And you know
something? The material adapts astoundingly well to between-the-wars
China in this atmospheric Sino-Korean co-production.
The setting is a gilded-era 1931
Shanghai, with a westernized upper class dwelling in splendor, while
storms of war and revolution gather in the distance. Playboy Yifan
Xie is a notorious rake and ladykiller. But he never stops thinking
of glamorous Jieyu Mo, who wed into riches and inherited her
businessman-husband's corporation when he died. "Miss Mo"
has been Xie's on-off lover of longstanding and seemingly his
dragon-lady amoral match in every way.
She agrees to surrender to Xie sexually
if he succeeds in heartlessly wooing and bedding a chaste widow
(Zhang Ziyi). And, to give herself a comparable challenge, Miss Mo
takes an assignment to destroy the star-crossed love blossoming
between an artist from the Shanghai lower classes and a teenage
heiress already promised to wealth in an upcoming arranged marriage.
It all ends in tears, of course.
The property was long in gestation,
and, in fact, was once intended as a vehicle for the tragic Hong Kong
idol Leslie Cheung before his 2003 suicide. Remarkably, it went
before the cameras under the direction of a South Korean helmer -
filmmaker Jin-ho Hur is known for his romantic-lyrical stylings, much
as Baz Luhrman is renowned for his own filigree. A production of such
a scale handed over to a director who did not even speak Mandarin is,
I understand, quite a breakthrough for the Chinese movie industry.
Moreover, Jin-ho Hur brought with him for the male lead countryman
Jang Dong-Gun, who possesses the devilishly suave appeal of a Korean
Clark Gable (trust me on this) in the role of Xie.
Despite the themes and some flashes of
female curves, there is no serious nudity or sex. It's all done with
innuendo, smoldering glances, eye-bathing colors, elaborate sets and
glorious lights. No kung fu, of course.
What's left now? Only the Japanese
version of Les Liasons Dangereuses, probably set in
feudal-samurai era. If anyone can demonstrate even more cruelty in
relationships than the French and the Chinese, it's the Japanese. The
Lego people I haven't quite made up my mind yet. (3 3/4 out of 4
stars)
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