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The Empress as the Prince: The Banquet as a retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet
Last night Devon and I watched the 2006 Chinese film The Banquet (directed by Feng Xiaogang, released in America as Legend of the Black Scorpion). We have a shared love for Chinese wuxia films ("a broad genre of Chinese fiction concerning the adventures of martial artists set in ancient China"), so it had been on our Netflix queue for a while. Wonderful serendipity that we watched it last night, because the play is a loose retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet. This is wonderful synchronicity not just because I recently saw Hamlet at OSF (and so had a refresher course in the play), but also because I just finished reading Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked, which not only provides commentary on traditional Red Riding Hood tales—it looks at how that well-known story is reinvented and retold. Speaking on Freeway, a 1996 film retelling, Orenstein writes:
And:
The Banquet is a loose interpretation of Shakespeare's play in that principle characters (Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude; Polonius, Laertes, Ophelia) and key events and aspects (Claudius's fratricide, Gertrude's wedding to Claudius, Ophelia's love for Hamlet, the play within a play, Claudius's exile and attempted assassination of Hamlet, the deaths of almost all the key players) reoccur, but others are omitted and all aspects are open to rearrangement or reinvention. That is to say, the film takes a story which is an established part of literary canon and, as such, carries "a legacy of messages"; it references characters and aspects of the play (sometimes comparably inconsequential ones, such as Hamlet's studies prior to the start of the play and the singing which accompanies Ophelia's tragic decent) enough to trigger and refresh the viewer's awareness of the connection between play and film, but it alters a number of these aspects, omitting plot points and characters, but more tellingly changing the story.
The Banquet stands alone as a competent but ultimately unmemorable film. It's quieter than some of its cousins from the genre, not half as visually striking; the story is intriguing, Ziyi Zhang's acting in particular is wonderful, but the martial arts sequences feel gratuitous and lack polish. In short a good film to watch but perhaps not necessary to own: beautiful but not extraordinary, it never quite becomes a standout performance.
Where the film shines (in my admittedly biased eyes) is in its meta-commentary on Hamlet—what it keeps, but more importantly what it changes. Hamlet is as classic a part of literary canon as any fairy tale: everyone knows what it is and how it's supposed to go. The film coasts along on that cultural knowledge at the beginning, and at the beginning Prince Wu Luan (Prince Hamlet) seems to be the main character: he learns of his father's death, discovers that his uncle is to blame, and struggles with the complications of his anger and grief. But as the film continues, small aspects that seem like inconsequential alterations to the source material turn out to be more meaningful than than that—in particular, details about Empress Wan (Gertrude) whose background is more complex than that of her play equivalent. The film deviates even more from the source material as it reaches a conclusion: in the final banquet scene (the film's equivalent to the fencing bout between Hamlet and Laertes), it is not the Emperor but the Empress who poisons the chalice, an act that in short order causes the death of the Ophelia-character, the Emperor, and as fallout the Prince and the Laertes-character. The Emperor's death scene reveals that, although the Emperor was the one that murdered his brother, it was the Empress's scheming—not the Prince's—that lead to the play's ultimate tragedy: the death of nearly the entire cast.
Concurrently, Ziyi Zhang gives the film's standout performance, and the Empress (Gertrude) is the film's true protagonist. This is remarkable mostly in the film's greater context as a reinterpretation of Shakespeare's famous source material. Knowing Hamlet, the viewer expects certain things from Gertrude's character in The Banquet: her unwitting infidelity to her first husband, her unwitting incest with her husband's brother, and the fact that her familial love for her son will awaken her to these unintentional sins. But in The Banquet, the Empress does not go blindly into sin: instead, she is painfully aware of the conflict between her desires and her moral sense. Her incestuous affair with the former Emperor's brother begins while he is still alive, and it is her inability to resolve the conflict between her desire for the usurper and her knowledge of his sin (and her involvement in it) that stalls the play's resolution until it has built into a wave of unavoidable tragedy. In Shakespeare's original version of the story, this is Hamlet's role.
"[T]he fairy tale's functions are defined independently of the characters who are 'supposed' to fulfill them," Orenstein writes, and the same is true here: Both the basic outline of and specific events within the play persist, even if their details and functions change—Polonius's death, for example, is represented by the execution of one of the Emperor's other advisors; the event is brought on by the Empress, representing the deadly effects not of Hamlet's (loss of) control of the situation, but hers. More importantly, the play's greater functions, or purposes, persist: primarily, the protagonist's inability to resolve thought and desire into action, which causes a final, grand fallout of tragic action. In the freedom of a retelling "the characters can swap places, playing against readers' (or viewers') expectations," and here they do: The Empress takes over Hamlet's role; her action and lack of action bring about the play's progress and conclusion.
What the viewer expects is a receptive, unwitting Gertrude who sins unintentionally and is horrified to realize the truth about her behavior. Less a character in herself, she function more as a motivator and complicator for Hamlet. What the viewer gets is a conflicted, conniving Empress who plays one role (the consort) while preparing for another (the murderer)—although both roles are played with a certain level of authenticity. (In the source material this is also Hamlet's role as he plays at madness while applying a scholar's logic to his predicament.) She is not passive, nor receptive; she is the film's lead.
Many Red Riding Hood retellings keep iconic aspects (red clothing, the forest path, devouring by wolf, etc.) and key characters (girl, old woman, wolf, sometimes a man), but in retelling they rearrange and reinterpret these parts of the story in order to give the familiar story a new meaning—instead of obedience, the retelling may teach willfulness; instead of a lesson to be caste, it may be a sexual awakening. The Banquet, meanwhile, retains ironic aspects, key characters, and the play's meaning. What it reinvents is the origin of that meaning. The film is a constant reminder of who Gertrude is not—and therefore a message about who the Empress is: intelligent, conflicted, emotionally unstable, a lover and a murderer. It raises doubts about the source material, where Gertrude is passive rather than active, a symptom of Denmark's rotten disease but neither its cause nor its potential cure. It gives her agency, but it is agency she does not use well. Is this because she (because she is a woman, or because she was originally Gertrude) has never had it before, and therefore does not know how to use it? Or is it because in Hamlet, the protagonist's inability to capitalize on his/her agency always results in his/her loss of control of the situation? The film's setting within the larger context of Shakespeare's famous play opens the door to both interpretations. Either way, the Empress's agency becomes a double-bladed weapon that strikes down those she hates and loves (sometimes concurrently), that strikes down others—and herself.
In the film's final scene the Empress, newly-crowned Emperor (Empress Regent), soliloquizes over a bolt of red fabric (which reappears throughout the film), which has just slipped, uncontrolled, through her hands.
She is then impaled from behind by a blade and, turning, she looks at her murderer with horror. Her gaze is fixed on the camera, and her murderer is never show. The film ends.
As it begins, The Banquet seems faithful to its source material's characters and overall plot; the Prince is the protagonist. But as it continues, the Empress rises from the shadow of her inspiration, Queen Gertrude. Breaking out of her assumed identities, she takes over the role of the play's protagonist. But to lead in such a tragedy as Hamlet cannot end well. The various desires that propel the Empress into infidelity and incest, to irrational anger against the prince, to power, to revenge, conflict with each other and with her reason. Her struggles to resolve them (complicated by the deadly desires of other characters) lead to the tragic fallout of the banquet, but like Hamlet in Shakespeare's play, the Empress is too tightly wrapped in the play's tragedy to escape from it unscathed. She did not begin it, but she turned it into the monster it became. She cannot control the fabric any more than she was able to control her desire or the film's desire-filled, tragic conclusion; and she is consumed by the same fire as all the others: she dies.
The Banquet is hardly the best in its genre, either as a Chinese historical martial arts film or as a retelling of a Shakespearean play. On its own I recommend it only moderately, but it's worth a watch. But the timing, as I think and read about what it is to retell a classic story, and as I have Hamlet fresh on my mind, is exceptional. I know that this post is too long and the subject matter is too specific (and, given the film, obscure) for many of you to care or, if you care, to follow, but I had to write it down in order to get it out of my head. And for fun. Because I'm strange. The end.
Unlike the oral tradition of long ago, Freeway is viewed (or read) not only in contemporary context but also against the fairy tale's long history. It plays off the literary canon and its legacy of messages, cleverly manipulating audience expectation and generating a virtual meta-plot. In its irreverent treatment of fairy-tale conventions, Freeway provides a chance to recap the tale's stock characters and themes and to reexamine the laws by which they survive and adapt.
—Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked, Catherine Orenstein, page 227
And:
...Freeway exposes and explores the fairy tale's underpinnings in sophisticated ways, and in particular plays with the conventions that shape the fairy tale's stock cast. Since, from a structural perspective, the fairy tale's functions are defined independently of the characters who are "supposed" to fulfill them, the characters can swap places, playing against readers' (or viewers') expectations of both fairy tale and of real life. In this sense, they resonate not only with our internalized sense of who they are but also against our constant awareness of who they are not.
—Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked, Catherine Orenstein, pages 234-5
The Banquet is a loose interpretation of Shakespeare's play in that principle characters (Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude; Polonius, Laertes, Ophelia) and key events and aspects (Claudius's fratricide, Gertrude's wedding to Claudius, Ophelia's love for Hamlet, the play within a play, Claudius's exile and attempted assassination of Hamlet, the deaths of almost all the key players) reoccur, but others are omitted and all aspects are open to rearrangement or reinvention. That is to say, the film takes a story which is an established part of literary canon and, as such, carries "a legacy of messages"; it references characters and aspects of the play (sometimes comparably inconsequential ones, such as Hamlet's studies prior to the start of the play and the singing which accompanies Ophelia's tragic decent) enough to trigger and refresh the viewer's awareness of the connection between play and film, but it alters a number of these aspects, omitting plot points and characters, but more tellingly changing the story.
The Banquet stands alone as a competent but ultimately unmemorable film. It's quieter than some of its cousins from the genre, not half as visually striking; the story is intriguing, Ziyi Zhang's acting in particular is wonderful, but the martial arts sequences feel gratuitous and lack polish. In short a good film to watch but perhaps not necessary to own: beautiful but not extraordinary, it never quite becomes a standout performance.
Where the film shines (in my admittedly biased eyes) is in its meta-commentary on Hamlet—what it keeps, but more importantly what it changes. Hamlet is as classic a part of literary canon as any fairy tale: everyone knows what it is and how it's supposed to go. The film coasts along on that cultural knowledge at the beginning, and at the beginning Prince Wu Luan (Prince Hamlet) seems to be the main character: he learns of his father's death, discovers that his uncle is to blame, and struggles with the complications of his anger and grief. But as the film continues, small aspects that seem like inconsequential alterations to the source material turn out to be more meaningful than than that—in particular, details about Empress Wan (Gertrude) whose background is more complex than that of her play equivalent. The film deviates even more from the source material as it reaches a conclusion: in the final banquet scene (the film's equivalent to the fencing bout between Hamlet and Laertes), it is not the Emperor but the Empress who poisons the chalice, an act that in short order causes the death of the Ophelia-character, the Emperor, and as fallout the Prince and the Laertes-character. The Emperor's death scene reveals that, although the Emperor was the one that murdered his brother, it was the Empress's scheming—not the Prince's—that lead to the play's ultimate tragedy: the death of nearly the entire cast.
Concurrently, Ziyi Zhang gives the film's standout performance, and the Empress (Gertrude) is the film's true protagonist. This is remarkable mostly in the film's greater context as a reinterpretation of Shakespeare's famous source material. Knowing Hamlet, the viewer expects certain things from Gertrude's character in The Banquet: her unwitting infidelity to her first husband, her unwitting incest with her husband's brother, and the fact that her familial love for her son will awaken her to these unintentional sins. But in The Banquet, the Empress does not go blindly into sin: instead, she is painfully aware of the conflict between her desires and her moral sense. Her incestuous affair with the former Emperor's brother begins while he is still alive, and it is her inability to resolve the conflict between her desire for the usurper and her knowledge of his sin (and her involvement in it) that stalls the play's resolution until it has built into a wave of unavoidable tragedy. In Shakespeare's original version of the story, this is Hamlet's role.
"[T]he fairy tale's functions are defined independently of the characters who are 'supposed' to fulfill them," Orenstein writes, and the same is true here: Both the basic outline of and specific events within the play persist, even if their details and functions change—Polonius's death, for example, is represented by the execution of one of the Emperor's other advisors; the event is brought on by the Empress, representing the deadly effects not of Hamlet's (loss of) control of the situation, but hers. More importantly, the play's greater functions, or purposes, persist: primarily, the protagonist's inability to resolve thought and desire into action, which causes a final, grand fallout of tragic action. In the freedom of a retelling "the characters can swap places, playing against readers' (or viewers') expectations," and here they do: The Empress takes over Hamlet's role; her action and lack of action bring about the play's progress and conclusion.
What the viewer expects is a receptive, unwitting Gertrude who sins unintentionally and is horrified to realize the truth about her behavior. Less a character in herself, she function more as a motivator and complicator for Hamlet. What the viewer gets is a conflicted, conniving Empress who plays one role (the consort) while preparing for another (the murderer)—although both roles are played with a certain level of authenticity. (In the source material this is also Hamlet's role as he plays at madness while applying a scholar's logic to his predicament.) She is not passive, nor receptive; she is the film's lead.
Many Red Riding Hood retellings keep iconic aspects (red clothing, the forest path, devouring by wolf, etc.) and key characters (girl, old woman, wolf, sometimes a man), but in retelling they rearrange and reinterpret these parts of the story in order to give the familiar story a new meaning—instead of obedience, the retelling may teach willfulness; instead of a lesson to be caste, it may be a sexual awakening. The Banquet, meanwhile, retains ironic aspects, key characters, and the play's meaning. What it reinvents is the origin of that meaning. The film is a constant reminder of who Gertrude is not—and therefore a message about who the Empress is: intelligent, conflicted, emotionally unstable, a lover and a murderer. It raises doubts about the source material, where Gertrude is passive rather than active, a symptom of Denmark's rotten disease but neither its cause nor its potential cure. It gives her agency, but it is agency she does not use well. Is this because she (because she is a woman, or because she was originally Gertrude) has never had it before, and therefore does not know how to use it? Or is it because in Hamlet, the protagonist's inability to capitalize on his/her agency always results in his/her loss of control of the situation? The film's setting within the larger context of Shakespeare's famous play opens the door to both interpretations. Either way, the Empress's agency becomes a double-bladed weapon that strikes down those she hates and loves (sometimes concurrently), that strikes down others—and herself.
In the film's final scene the Empress, newly-crowned Emperor (Empress Regent), soliloquizes over a bolt of red fabric (which reappears throughout the film), which has just slipped, uncontrolled, through her hands.
Little Wan. When was it that I started to forget my name? Perhaps it was the day your father married me. You left and nobody used my name anymore. Gradually even I forgot who I was. Then your uncle married me, and again I was called the Empress. But from now on, nobody will call me Empress anymore. Instead, they will call me Her Majesty, the Emperor.
Do you know why I like this particular red? Because it is the color of the flames of desire. Yes... Desire. How many lives have been consumed by this flame? Only I shall rise out of it like a phoenix.
—The Banquet
She is then impaled from behind by a blade and, turning, she looks at her murderer with horror. Her gaze is fixed on the camera, and her murderer is never show. The film ends.
As it begins, The Banquet seems faithful to its source material's characters and overall plot; the Prince is the protagonist. But as it continues, the Empress rises from the shadow of her inspiration, Queen Gertrude. Breaking out of her assumed identities, she takes over the role of the play's protagonist. But to lead in such a tragedy as Hamlet cannot end well. The various desires that propel the Empress into infidelity and incest, to irrational anger against the prince, to power, to revenge, conflict with each other and with her reason. Her struggles to resolve them (complicated by the deadly desires of other characters) lead to the tragic fallout of the banquet, but like Hamlet in Shakespeare's play, the Empress is too tightly wrapped in the play's tragedy to escape from it unscathed. She did not begin it, but she turned it into the monster it became. She cannot control the fabric any more than she was able to control her desire or the film's desire-filled, tragic conclusion; and she is consumed by the same fire as all the others: she dies.
The Banquet is hardly the best in its genre, either as a Chinese historical martial arts film or as a retelling of a Shakespearean play. On its own I recommend it only moderately, but it's worth a watch. But the timing, as I think and read about what it is to retell a classic story, and as I have Hamlet fresh on my mind, is exceptional. I know that this post is too long and the subject matter is too specific (and, given the film, obscure) for many of you to care or, if you care, to follow, but I had to write it down in order to get it out of my head. And for fun. Because I'm strange. The end.