Gong Li's latest role mirrors China's increased confidence and status in the world, and reunites her with director Zhang Yimou, writes Jonathan Watts.
The peasant girl who became empress is holding court in a very modern Chinese setting.
Gong Li is in a bar in a Beijing hotel lobby, where a quartet of young female musicians - dressed in black miniskirts, lowcut tops and stilettoes - play light music to a ceaseless flow of guests and customers from around the world. Their recital is almost drowned out by the noisy chirruping of dozens of live chicks, part of an Easter display in which two rabbits are also hopping around.
The outside world has arguably never been more fascinated by China than it is now. And Gong is not only the country's most famous face, her life is a mirror of its progress. She first hit the world's consciousness in 1987 in the role of a poor peasant girl in Red Sorghum. In that film's unforgettable opening scene, she is inside a palanquin on her way to a marriage with a man she has never met. Without saying a word, Gong conveys a powerful mix of curiousity, sensuality, fear and excitement as she takes her shaky journey into a new future.
In hindsight, it is hard to imagine a better image for what was then a poor country embarking on a course of dramatic but uncertain change.
Twenty years on, she is once again a figure for her age, though this time in the vastly different role of a Tang dynasty empress in her latest film, Curse of the Golden Flower. Though powerful and rich, her character is slowly being poisoned inside the opulent, decadent and morally bankrupt Tang dynasty court.
For Gong, the transition between the two is personal. "The change of roles reflects the way I have grown up, the way my career has developed. My life has been that of someone who has moved from the countryside to the society. To make that transition, I have had to learn a lot."
But there is another more personal reason why Curseis important: "For me, the significance of this film is that I was able to work again with director Zhang Yimou for the first time in more than 10 years. That was very exciting." Zhang discovered her, propelled her to international stardom and became her lover.
There has been intense speculation in China that their reunion may bemore than creative. Is she still his muse? "I would like to be, but I don't know if that is really the case," she says. "We have a pleasant, easygoing working relationship.
It is easier to talk with each other than it was before and it is easier than it is with other directors.
Wehave a mutual understanding. We have known each other a long time. We have lived together. We know each other's characters very well. That is very important." No film has ever generated such expectations in China. As well as marking the creative reunion of the country's two most famous lovers and celebrities, Cursehas the biggest budget - $45 million - in the nation's history. The tale from the golden age of Chinese civilisation is written for an actor and a nation in their prime.
When it opened in China last year, it broke box-office records.
But the critical response was disappointing. The film got mixed reviews. Most thought it was long on style and short on substance. Most of the attention from domestic critics was on the amount of decolletage on show from women characters in the film. The result is eye-poppingly lavish - a feast of flesh as well as colour.
WHILE LOCAL CRITICS may be loath to admit it, China came rather late to the Gong Li phenomenon.
But after taking the actress to its heart, it has held on with a sometimes savage ferocity.
The past few months have seen a string of stories about Gong, nearly all of them negative. When she made a public plea for greater environmental protection at this year's parliamentary consultative committee, she was accused of hypocrisy, because she wore animal fur, and childishness, because she used ordinary language rather than convoluted bureaucratic terminology.
"Fans in China are very different from those overseas. In China, many people really love me and care about my life. But there is always some jealousy mixed up in this feeling of love. I think that is the big difference. Overseas, there is none of that," she says. "Chinese people become jealous about status more easily. Foreigners are more inclined to look up to successful people. I don't understand why there is a difference. If two people start at the same point and then one person gets ahead, the other should work hard to catch up. But instead, they just curse. They are jealous."
Gong was born to an academic family in north-east China in 1965, and became famous abroad long before she was a big name at home, largely as a result of domestic censorship of several of her early films. Nowadays, she sees herself as a pioneer, challenging the idea that women should be passive and subservient.
"I guess my personality is that of a modern, strong Chinese woman. I don't believe in destiny. There are many things that can be changed. I don't like to be defeated by difficulties.
"I love freedom so when I am shaping a character, I usually do it the way I want. I always find some part of my own character in a role." So what part of Gong is revealed in the scheming, incestuous and defiant figure she plays in Curse? The plot revolved around the empress's struggle against her husband, who is slowly poisoning his unfaithful wife with a concoction he insists she take as medicine. "To me, this film is about a woman's struggle against masculine society. Nowadays, there is a lot of discussion about sexual equality, but men are still dominant," she says. "I think the director's message is that the means are more important than the ends. It doesn't matter if you win or lose, the main thing is that you must try."
The film also features a massacre - orchestrated by an emperor determined to cling on to power and a cover-up, which prompted more than one critic to draw comparisons with the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989. Gong has mixed feelings about 1989, when she was one of the students on the square. "I wasn't really clear about why people did what they did, but my classmates went to the square so I did too," she says. "It was a very powerful experience. We felt we were doing something meaningful. But after a while, I started to have doubts. If the students were granted the rights they demanded, I wondered what kind of government we would have. What kind of leaders would they be? Would I like to live under their rule? I lost confidence in them." Instead, she says, she strove for greater personal independence.
"I felt that I should havemy own opinion, not just follow blindly. That is what 1989 taught me."
OFF SCREEN, GONG and Zhang are undoubtedly closer to the establishment than they were in their early days, when they were considered cinematic dissidents.
But today, Zhang is being paid by the authorities to choreograph the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, while Gong serves as a delegate to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body for the country's rubberstamp parliament. Ten years ago, that would have been unthinkable.
Has the system changed, or have they? "Time has passed. We have grown up. We feel a stronger sense of social responsibility. What we say and what we do influences people. We think more about what we can do for our country. It is not a case of being inside or outside the system," she says.
"I don't think I have changed a lot. I just pay more attention to what is going on around me and try to find something to do for myfamily, my friends and all Chinese people."
But she is also looking overseas like never before. In the past two years, she has made a string of films in Hollywood, such as Miami Vice, Young Hannibaland Memoirs of a Geisha.
"Due to China's heightened status in the world, it is no longer the case that I go to Hollywood. Instead, Hollywood approaches China," she says. "They have started to write screenplays that include interesting roles for Chinese and other Asian women.
This was not the case 20 years ago. At that time, Asian women were needed only to decorate a film or to spice it up with kung fu. That held no interest for me. But now there are good opportunities for Chinese actresses in Hollywood. I can be in a film as an artist, not as a decoration."
In China, Gong's move from arthouse classics to Hollywood remakes has not gone down well, with a nationalist overtone in much of the criticism. That was particularly evident last year, when Gong and Zhang Ziyi were accused of betraying their country after playing Japanese courtesans in Memoirs of a Geisha.
Gong is unrepentant, saying she identified with her role. "She fights against her situation and old-fashioned Asian culture. She does not just accept her fate. She struggles. I don't think she is typically Asian. She is quite westernised. I like her and agree with what she does."
AND WHAT OF the future? She will always work, she says, if what she is offered is good enough. But what she wants for the future, she says, is the choice to decide her own fate. Like refusing to drink poison, I ask. And she laughs that glorious laugh and violently re-enacts her empress role, smashing an invisible cup of toxic medicine into smithereens.
Curse of the Golden Floweris on general release