ANNA AND THE KING

"Life is a mixture of fact and fantasy: Anna and the King is a visually breathtaking combination of the two. Roads are for journeys, not destinations and this ambitious production told in epic style, delves deep into issues beyond those canvassed in the classic Yul Brynner/Deborah Kerr musical version. The genre is drama; the storyline involves us in the culture, politics and blood-shed as well as cultural and feminist issues of an outspoken woman in a world where man is king and king is god. Glorious to look, we are engulfed in a world whose customs are as exotic as its traditions. The atmosphere is beautifully created – we prickle with the heat in the bustle of the noisy markets as the elephants plod through the dust and discover the serenity of Shangri-La in the magnificent palatial settings. Here the pace is leisurely; the wives, concubines and offspring (all 68 of them) revel in subservience. Exquisite cinematography showcases a rich, ornate production design and Luciana Arrighi's splendid costumes while the big orchestrated score encompasses the grandeur of the setting and tale. But for me, the best part about Anna and the King is the inspired casting of Chow Yun-Fat, whose gentle charisma is mesmerising. His charm is hard to define, but he imbues a gentle giant with great complexities within. His chemistry with Jodie Foster is undeniable – they are opposites in every way and it is easy to be drawn into their world. Foster is excellent as Anna, her performance slightly mannered especially with the delivery of her English accent. The film is a little long, and the script tries too hard to tell too much, but it is relatively easy to forgive the flaws. There are even some gems of wisdom to chew over: if love was a choice, who would choose such exquisite pain."
Louise Keller

"Formidable in their different ways, Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat are certainly one of the more interesting (and unlikely) cinematic couples you could imagine. The main attraction of this non-musical remake of The King And I, is watching these two play off each other, though it's clearly Jodie Foster's film. Working carefully within Anna's brisk, repressed manner (and English accent), she floods the role with personal emotion: the character's high-minded idealism is also her own. For his part, Chow Yun-Fat's style is much cooler: in most scenes he keeps regally still, not wasting a gesture. For a Hollywood film, theirs is an unusual relationship. Since no actual romance is possible, the characters can only tease and admire each other, each taking pleasure in the other's intelligence, strength, and radically different worldview. Aside from this intellectual tango, played at best for gentle comedy, the film is nice enough but very slow and bland. There's a lot of conventional spectacle (palaces, crowd scenes, elephants) but the episodic plot never builds to anything that impressive or intense. It's hard to make a film of this kind without drawing on racist mythologies about the East and West; striving not to offend anyone, the script tries to rethink these premises but doesn't quite succeed. The dialogue is filled with painful anachronisms: in the middle of the Victorian era, Anna is a proto-feminist single parent who stands up for democracy, freedom, and the right of all cultures to be valued equally. Even so, the King's desire to modernise and Westernise his country is presented as unarguably a good thing - an appropriate moral for the age of globalisation.
Jake Wilson