temptress moon (1996) is an incredible and terribly underrated chen kaige film that received mixed reception upon its release because i think everyone was expecting to see an epic sequel to farewell my concubine; instead, they were mostly confused (i'm not sure why though, i didn't find the film confusing at all. it was emotionally murky and addled, but not convoluted plot-wise). anyways i highly highly recommend temptress moon because i think in many ways it's a continuation of the ideas explored in fmc, and also it's just beautiful and haunting and paralyzing. leslie and gong li are in it, and christopher doyle did the cinematography.
i borrowed rey chow's sentimental fabulations, contemporary chinese films: attachment in the age of global visibility a few weeks ago because i saw that rey included an essay about temptress moon in it. i'm unsure about how i feel about rey's scholarship, mainly because we read her essay on yellow earth last semester for my chinese cinemas class and it was too reactionary for me. but on the other hand i feel like rey is my academia mom.
sentimentalism is present in sino film in a major way.. major enough for rey to write a whole book about it. rey's working definition of sentimentalism is that it is "the affective state triggered by a sense of loss"; "the apprehension of an irreversible temporal differentiation or the passing of time” (chow, 15). one way that sentimentalism manifests itself, therefore, is through nostalgia and the desire for homecoming.
chen kaige is a very interesting director to consider in this context because of his own "unresolved cultural complexes", as rey puts it. love it!
i read and parsed through rey's essay, "the seductions of homecoming: temptress moon and the question of origins"; i'm a little too tired to say anything more atm but i will copy some of the quotes i collected here.
(no spoilers ahead btw.. at least i don't think)
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“as an adopted home for zhongliang, the backward, decadent countryside of the pangs is significant as the site of a sexual primal scene that has shaped his character negatively: in order to be, zhongliang must leave. his existential autonomy, in other words, has to be established as a fight from the shock that is supposedly home" (32)
“etymologically, “seduction” refers to a leading astray, the opposite of going home [..] in temptress moon, importantly, this classic opposition between home and seduction has broken down. consciously, indeed, home is what zhongliang resists and rejects, and yet in his negative, flighty mode as a professional seducer, he seems nonetheless to keep turning back, to keep clinging to something he does not fully comprehend" (36)
"seductions of the former home involve the memory of and attachment to the entire scenario of zhongliang’s early years, a scenario composed by particular configurations of relationships in their enigmatic violence and intensity. such violence and intensity have remained unrecognized, we may say, until zhongliang sees them in the form of an other, an image presented by another person if this imaging of how “others do it” may be described as a visual guide to home, then homecoming itself is, strictly speaking, a second-order seduction, a seduction of the already seduced. working by the force of memory, which erupts at the sight/site of that which has already been experienced once before, this homecoming can be extraordinarily powerful. in fact, it is lethal" (36-37)
“in narratological terms, zhongliang is hence constituted - visually and aurally as well as through the plot — by patterns of departure that help convey all the questions of his identity — what is zhongliang running from? where is he going? whom will he meet on the way? and so forth. this negative pose of a male character on the run is a kind of fury or resistance that, ultimately, delivers him home against his will. at the same time, if such a male psyche is the legacy of a mainstream modernism that defines itself in opposition to the socius, what is revealed in the seductions of zhongliang’s homecoming is perhaps the fragility of this dissident masculinity as inscribed in the paradigm of fright and flight, a paradigm that is subverted by the network of characters and relationships that sprawl around zhongliang like a labyrinth” (39)
“once [the impossibility of being authentic or original] is understood, we will realize that, paradoxically, such impossibility is exactly the reason chen’s film can be so provocative. not being authentic or original here translates into a remarkable filmic self-consciousness, a reflexive visual coming-to-terms with the myriad ways modern china has already been looked at by others, chinese and non-chinese, for more than a century and a half” (43)
“precisely because they are unreachable, they are all the more to be longed for. what has become unraveled is the vicious circle of a cultural complex in which idealism leads as it always does, to homesickness and vice versa, ad infinitum" (45)
"ironically, the implications of chen’s concluding image put him much closer to the critics who like to accuse him and his fellow directors of forsaking the authentic china. in their obstinate adherence to fantasies of the origin as what has not been touched - be it in the form of a mythical chineseness, a pristine native tradition descending from beijing, female intactness, or childhood innocence — even as the vices and profanities of shanghai pose irresistible attraction, the director and his critics are finally united as sentimental perpetrators of a certain type of homecoming with its well-trodden seductive paths. as they probably know only too well, such paths lead nowhere, but that is probably also why their homesickness persists" (45)
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side note: i still want to fight chen kaige, perform psychoanalysis on him, ask him why he writes so many doomed women/girl characters who try to defy patriarchal norms but end up meeting a tragic end every time, and then give him a hug. because he needs it, because we all need it
