Curse of the Golden Flower (2006)
Release: 21 December 2006
Genre: Adult, Drama
Staring:
- Chow Yun-fat
- Gong Li
- Jay Chou
- Qin Junjie
On the eve of the Chong Yang Festival, golden chrysanthemum flowers fill the Imperial Palace. The Emperor (Chow Yun-fat) returns from his various military campaigns with his second son and general, Prince Jai (Jay Chou). The emperor has returned to celebrate the holiday with his family. For three years, the Empress (Gong Li) and Crown Prince Wan (Liu Ye), her stepson, have had an illicit affair. Prince Wan secretly dreams of escaping the palace with his secret lover Jiang Chan (Li Man), the daughter of the palace doctor Jiang Yiru. Meanwhile, Prince Jai, the faithful son, grows curious and then worried over the empress's health and her abnormal obsession with golden chrysanthemums.
The empress summons Prince Jai, revealing to him her plot of rebellion. She asks for his participation but Jai hesitates, saying that it would be difficult for him to take up arms against his own father. After seeing his mother take a poisoned dose, he relents and agrees to participate. For ten days, the Emperor had secretly ordered the imperial doctor to add tiny amounts of a poisonous fungus into the medicine that the Empress takes several times a day; the doctor uses his daughter, Jiang Chan, to administer the medicine under his close watch.
Meanwhile the empress, suspicious of the poison's presence in her medicine, had hired a woman-in-black to discover the identity and origin of the fungus, a mission that was successful and reveals the poison as the Persian black fungus. After rejecting the empress's reward, the woman-in-black is abruptly captured by Prince Wan and taken to the emperor, and it is revealed that she is Jiang Shi (Chen Jin), the doctor Jiang Yiru's wife, and Jiang Chan's mother- the emperor's previous lover. After being branded and left for dead, she has since put her life into tearing down the emperor's regime. The emperor decides to allow the woman to reconcile with her husband, promoting the doctor and sending him and his re-united family from the palace to serve as governor of a remote Region. Prince Wan runs after them to see Chan; from the information that Chan provides him with, he senses that the Empress is indeed plotting something, and hurries back to the palace. Confronting the Empress, already losing her mind, she admits her intentions and bluntly adds that she wants Wan to die and continue with her plan. Wan, deeply hurt by her remarks, stabs himself and is put under care.
The doctor's family are attacked by mysterious assassins, who kill Jiang Yiru. Chan and her mother flee back to the palace on horseback, unknowingly protected by troops sent by the empress. As they interrupt the ceremony and demanding in the emperor and his family's presence why he wants them killed, the empress reveals that Jiang Shi was actually the mother of Prince Wan, meaning his secret lover, Chan, is in fact his half-sister. Realizing this, a shocked and crazed Chan flees the palace screaming in horror with her mother chasing behind. Chan is cut down by the assassins and her enraged mother, despite her injuries, kills them before she was also slain herself. The youngest son, Prince Yu abruptly kills Prince Wan as they watch Chan and her mother flee, and attempts to oblige the emperor to abdicate the throne to him. He confesses that he also learned of the plot and his brother's affair with the empress and acted in advance to gain the throne. The emperor's assassins quickly eliminate Prince Yu's handful of soldiers easily, and the emperor flogs Yu to death. Meanwhile, thousands of warriors clad in gold and led by Prince Jai, wearing the embroidered flowers the empress had been making, suddenly charge the palace, overpowering the emperor's remaining assassins and advance into the palace's gargantuan inner square, but are boxed in by a clever trap; the emperor had full knowledge of the plot from Wan and had positioned his own forces to repel the assault. After a bloody battle the warriors are all killed, except Prince Jai who stubbornly kept fighting on until he was also overwhelmed himself. While his followers are bound and executed at the Emperor's orders, Prince Jai is brought before the remaining family. The courtyard is swiftly cleaned up in mechanical efficiency, as if the evening's event had never transpired and the Festival begins at midnight as scheduled.
The Emperor offers to spare Jai on the condition that he henceforth personally administer the poisoned medicine to the Empress. Prince Jai refused his father's order, apologized to his mother for his failure and then committed suicide, his blood spilling on the Empress's medicine. The Empress lets out a furious shriek and slaps the plate out of the servant's hands. The film then ends with an image of the poisonous medicine landing on an engraved wooden chrysanthemum and eating away at it.
Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) Full Movie
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