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A Frozen Flower: Spoilers Abound
Dec. 17th, 2021 01:47 pmSeen recently on Tubi: A Frozen Flower (2008, wr./dir. Yoo Ha), a beautiful, tragic, relentlessly horny historical fantasy that reads somewhat like Guy Gavriel Kay switching to soft-core. During the Goryeo Dynasty, Korea is under the fist of what I can only assume is the Manchu version of the Chinese Empire; the king is married to a Manchu princess with whom he has completely failed to breed a biological heir to the throne, for the simple reason that he's super-gay, as one might have already figured out by noting that he's not only surrounded himself with a cadre of hot bodyguards literally raised from boyhood to worship and protect him, but is also currently sleeping with their leader. (Part of what I like about this scenario is that it reveals the king as less a femme-y dude fainting over a bunch of himbos than as a guy-ly guy who just really likes guy stuff, including hunting, fencing, and--well--guys.) This relationship between the kind and his chief bodyguard is more than a bit squicky when you add in the grooming element, but still romantic in a very sad way, because a large part of the film spins around the utter inability of the king to ever believe that anyone really loves him for him, per se...I mean, let's face it; the power dynamic is always going to be slanted in his favour.
This becomes particularly obvious once the Manchu Emperor sends a pair of envoys to set a deadline for the king to either damn well finally get the queen pregnant or face someone from another clan being randomly selected as his official heir, and the only plan the king can think of under this sort of pressure is to order his boyfriend to sleep with the queen instead. At first, the chief bodyguard doesn't even know if he can function with a woman at all; one assumes he lost his virginity with the king, and he certainly hasn't slept with anybody else since then. Luckily (or unluckily, as it turns out), he soon discovers he must be essentially bi, and he and the queen quickly move from mutual dub-con embarrassment to surprising amounts of physical enjoyment mixed with deepening emotional bonding. This may well be helped along by the fact that neither of them can initially refuse the king's orders, which later allows them to fall back on that fact when the king starts to get jealous despite himself. ("So, lad," the king asks his chief bodyguard the morning after, for example; "how does it feel to finally become a man?" "I merely followed your commands, sire," the chief replies, face completely unreadable.)
And where does this go? Nowhere good, unsurprisingly: Even when the queen conceives, it's obvious the king is probably going to have to end up slaughtering everybody who's aware of how it happened, and by that time he's already not only clapped his former boyfriend in jail for "seducing" his wife but also had him castrated, to boot. What really gets the king's goat is not just that his queen's affections have gone walkabout, but that the person they left town with is the same person he still loves, thus making him doubt that the chief bodyguard's love for him was ever anything but a polite show of submission. "Did you ever really love me?" the king demands, during their final duel, after he's broken the chief bodyguard's sword; "No, never," the chief bodyguard lies, obviously, just so the king will stab him deeply enough to pull himself within throat-cutting range. And when the queen, who the chief bodyguard thought was dead, runs in screaming with grief over her dying lover, the last thing he does is to turn his gaze back onto the king's dead face.
So yeah, it's great: Operatic and pornographic, by turns. Just the thing I would have obsessed over when I was younger, and desperately wanted to see people fuck onscreen--well, not people, so much, as characters I cared about. To see a movie where, for once, the proverbial lamp DIDN'T suddenly go out when guys started making out with guys.
This becomes particularly obvious once the Manchu Emperor sends a pair of envoys to set a deadline for the king to either damn well finally get the queen pregnant or face someone from another clan being randomly selected as his official heir, and the only plan the king can think of under this sort of pressure is to order his boyfriend to sleep with the queen instead. At first, the chief bodyguard doesn't even know if he can function with a woman at all; one assumes he lost his virginity with the king, and he certainly hasn't slept with anybody else since then. Luckily (or unluckily, as it turns out), he soon discovers he must be essentially bi, and he and the queen quickly move from mutual dub-con embarrassment to surprising amounts of physical enjoyment mixed with deepening emotional bonding. This may well be helped along by the fact that neither of them can initially refuse the king's orders, which later allows them to fall back on that fact when the king starts to get jealous despite himself. ("So, lad," the king asks his chief bodyguard the morning after, for example; "how does it feel to finally become a man?" "I merely followed your commands, sire," the chief replies, face completely unreadable.)
And where does this go? Nowhere good, unsurprisingly: Even when the queen conceives, it's obvious the king is probably going to have to end up slaughtering everybody who's aware of how it happened, and by that time he's already not only clapped his former boyfriend in jail for "seducing" his wife but also had him castrated, to boot. What really gets the king's goat is not just that his queen's affections have gone walkabout, but that the person they left town with is the same person he still loves, thus making him doubt that the chief bodyguard's love for him was ever anything but a polite show of submission. "Did you ever really love me?" the king demands, during their final duel, after he's broken the chief bodyguard's sword; "No, never," the chief bodyguard lies, obviously, just so the king will stab him deeply enough to pull himself within throat-cutting range. And when the queen, who the chief bodyguard thought was dead, runs in screaming with grief over her dying lover, the last thing he does is to turn his gaze back onto the king's dead face.
So yeah, it's great: Operatic and pornographic, by turns. Just the thing I would have obsessed over when I was younger, and desperately wanted to see people fuck onscreen--well, not people, so much, as characters I cared about. To see a movie where, for once, the proverbial lamp DIDN'T suddenly go out when guys started making out with guys.
