The script (with drawings) for Peter Greenaway's film tells of a 19th century Chinese love affair and its consequences, based apparently upon a real historical situation taking liberties with history to make an extravagant fantasy.
It is documented that the Chinese Empress Cixi, who lived from 1838 to 1908 fell in love with a eunuch in the Forbidden Palace in Peking. A very unlikely event indeed. This eunuch who excessively catered to the Empress!s fantasies with poetic scenarios, then metaphysical fantasies that excited and stimulated her intelligence and temporarily distracted her from her very active political life, resulted in a mutual love affair. Due to their enormous differences in status and the rigid conservatism of Chinese society this relationship was considered impossible, unlawful and subversive.
In Peter Greenaway's film the complex real-life story of the tragic love affair that really happened has been reduced to its essential elements, consolidating several historical figures into single characters, and treating the events somewhat as a 19th century violent tragic fairy tale with many of the characteristics you might find in the stories of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grim. There are poisoned apples here, exploited children, human remains buried in plant pots, appalling violence, excessive love, luxuriant landscapes backed by the enigmas of the Natural World that is entirely indifferent to the whims of mankind whose existence in the world is ephemeral and no doubt will soon be passing away.
Peter Greenaway (born, 1942 in Newport, Wales, lives and works in Amsterdam) trained as a painter for four years, and started making his own films in 1966. He has continued to make cinema in a great variety of ways, which has also informed his curatorial work and the making of exhibitions and installations in Europe from the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice and the Joan Miro Gallery in Barcelona to the Boijmans van Beuningen Gallery in Rotterdam and the Louvre in Paris. He has made 12 feature films and some 50 short-films and documentaries, been regularly nominated for the Film Festival Competitions of Cannes, Venice and Berlin, published books, written opera librettos, and collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Glen Branca, Wim Mertens, Jean-Baptiste Barriere, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Borut Krzisnik and David Lang. His first narrative feature film, The Draughtsman's Contract, completed in 1982, received great critical acclaim and established him internationally as an original film maker, a reputation consolidated by the films, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover, The Pillow Book, and The Tulse Luper Suitcases.
