May. 03, 2006 - Issue #550: Why We Fight

The Promise of an epic thwarted by much videogame-esque CGI

In a film of extremes, The Promise evokes such conflicting—and polarized—thoughts and emotions, because the Chinese film is, at once, magical and campy.

On the one hand, director Kaige Chen (Farewell My Concubine) delivers such a scorchingly beautiful epic, where love and honour become inexorably intertwined to heartwrenching effect. On the other—and supremely disappointingly—we’re forced to sit through some horribly juvenile CGI, making it difficult to take any of the film’s characters or story seriously. And as the film volleys back and forth between these two extremes, so does its ability to woo and repel its audience.

The film opens with a Faustian choice. A young Qingcheng, orphaned and poor, confronts the Goddess Manshen (Hong Chen) and must choose either to remain needy or to be given a life of beauty and wealth. While the latter is ultimately more appealing, it comes with the caveat that she will lose every and any man she ever loves. Not fully understanding the gravity of her choice, the starving child, of course, chooses to be beautiful and wealthy. So far, so good.

Zooming ahead some 20 years, though, The Promise quickly derails: we’re introduced to General Guangming (Hirokuyi Sanada), who engages in a battle of epic proportions that consumes the screen with a stampede of cattle and warriors. What aspires to be magical soon devolves into laughable and over-esteemed digitalia. The slave Kunlun (Jang Dong-Kun) outruns both the stampede and arrows on all fours, hovering over the backdrop like a cutout, while the camera pans out to reveal a battle of hundreds of thousands of antlike, stick-figure warriors all moving in exactly the same way. It’s really too bad, because a good half of the story and imagery that follows are stunning. With a Shakespearean plot of mistaken identities and misplaced amour, Qingcheng (Cecilia Cheung) finds herself in a love triangle—only revealed to her quite near the film’s finale—between the somewhat buffoonish Guangming and his slave Kunlun. While not entirely original, the story is compelling because both Sanada and Dong-Kun manage to deliver layered and likeable performances—it’s nearly impossible to see the general as the back-stabbing liar that he is.

There’s also magic, here, when cameraman Peter Pau (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) captures the exquisite beauty of a landscape or enchanted interiors. In one achingly beautiful scene, Kunlun rescues Qingcheng from a giant birdcage, where she’s held captive wearing a sumptuous cloak of white feathers by the evil Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse). Here, the Goddess CGI—the same one that tempted much of the sense right out of director Chen—is employed, just this once, to wonderful effect. Kunlun scampers over rooftops with his beautiful bird in tow, helped to fly by her feathered cape.

Although stunning at points, ultimately what the audience is left with is a feeling of ambivalence. If you like sweeping epics, you’ll really want to like the film.

It’s just unfortunate that Chen can’t step back from his shiny new toy of CGI long enough to see that less is often more. V

Opens Fri, May 5
The Promise
Written & directed by Kaige Chen
Starring Jang Dong-Kun, Hiroyuki Sanada, Cecilia Cheung

New comments for this entry have been turned off and any existing ones are hidden. We apologize for any inconvenience.