Heroic Quality
HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS
IT'S UNWISE TO predict the future. But I'll go out on a limb for Chinese master Zhang Yimou, who has, by fluke of studio timing, released two astonishing films in America this year: the action epic Hero, which was finished in 2002 and inexplicably held by Miramax, and House of Flying Daggers, which opens Friday. I suspect that decades hence, after more prosaic awards-baiting pictures like Closer, Kinsey and Sideways have become pop-culture footnotes, Hero and Flying Daggers will still be watched, discussed and treasured, and considered among the great works of popular art released to American theaters in 2004-and that if critics fail to recognize this fact today, future generations will wonder what the hell was wrong with us.
Ignore, if you can, the inevitable arguments about whether Hero or Flying Daggers is a better movie, a fool's conversation that presumes two genre movies from a particular filmmaker can be compared point by point like two toasters from the same assembly line. Hero and Flying Daggers are more different than similar; directly comparing them is as wrongheaded as comparing Sam Peckinpah's mammoth bloody masterwork The Wild Bunch with his follow-up, the sweet, tiny The Ballad of Cable Hogue. With its color-coded setpieces, polyrhythmic editing, teeming panoramas and flashback architecture, Hero is the Citizen Kane of wu xia-a monumental work that gathers and refines lessons learned over decades, then purifies and reinvents them: a thunderous visual symphony about the birth of a nation's myths.
In contrast, House of Flying Daggers is a chamber piece-a dazzling but intimate action picture whose strands of mayhem are wrapped (lightly) around a love triangle. Rather than being damned for what it's not, it should be appreciated for what it is: a seductive dream of desire and betrayal, a fusion of design and feeling, and a melodrama so symbolically charged and willfully naive that it recalls not another martial arts picture, but a late-period silent movie like F.W. Murnau's Sunrise.
House of Flying Daggers is set in AD 859, a period of decline for the once-influential Tang dynasty. The title refers to a Robin Hood-like rebel group that redistributes wealth from rich to poor and fights with local deputies. One such showdown resulted in the death of the leader of the House of Flying Daggers. Yet the organization continues to operate with impunity, a fact that vexes the government. Local captains Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Leo (Andy Lau) become convinced that a dancer at a local pavilion, Mei (Zhang Ziyi of Hero) is actually the daughter of the old, slain rebel leader, and hatch a plan to arrest and question her. Jin poses as a drunken soldier named Wind, visits the pavilion where Mei works and is surprised to learn she is blind. He paws her during her dance, giving Leo a pretext to burst in and arrest both the dancer and her client for "indecent" behavior. The pavilion's madam asks Leo to withhold punishment until he has a chance to see Mei do the Echo Game, the first of the movie's great action setpieces. Mei stands inside a circle of drums mounted atop posts, their skins turned inward, while Leo sits at a nearby table, watching. Leo tosses a bean, striking a certain drum skin; Mei, hearing the impact, lashes out with the overlong sleeves of her gown, hitting the same drum. It's a call-and-response ritual that grows increasingly frenzied and elaborate.
Likening fight scenes to musical numbers is one of film criticism's go-to clichés, but Zhang sanctifies it with this sequence, which treats its actors like percussionists in a drum battle. It's also instructive because it reminds us that the more abstract an action scene is, the more metaphorical (rhetorical, allusive, not "real") it is. Even when Mei and Leo stop "playing" (in every sense) and start fighting, they still seem less like dancing killers than killer dancers. The sequence's motivating equations-action equals metaphor, choreography equals grammar; equations also displayed in Hero and The Incredibles-power the rest of the picture's fight scenes, which stylize violence into artistic gesture. Zhang's heroes are sculptors carving the air with hands, feet and weapons.
After the Echo Game, Mei survives torture and escapes with help from Jin, aka Wind. Jin hopes to expose Mei as the daughter of the rebels' slain leader, then infiltrate and smash the House of Flying Daggers. The movie still has plenty of other tricks up its silk sleeve. None is particularly mind-boggling in retrospect, and none interests Yimou as much as the play of sunlight and firelight against his actors' lovely faces, or the sound of arrows and knives whistling through the air, or the chance to link Mei with nature's purity and fecundity by garbing her in a green dress that matches the super-saturated pastel green of the forest through which she flees (and flirts) with Jin.
Yimou reimagines and purifies recent-vintage action-movie gimmicks, including sudden film-speed changes and the CGI-liberated camera that whirls around combatants like a mad bird. There are at least five fight scenes so playful and gorgeous (including a showdown in a bamboo forest, paying tribute to King Hu's A Touch of Zen, with enemy soldiers scampering along treetops like evil monkeys) that they belong on a short list with the best ever filmed. Working with cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding and production designer Huo Tingxiao, Zhang gives his widely praised color palette a workout, segueing from the parched ivory-and-tan interiors of the pavilion to the primeval blue-green of the forest to the blatantly metaphorical snowscape of the film's climax, which externalizes the characters' emotional desolation (and literalizes the notion that nature and human destiny are linked).
Zhang demonstrates equal mastery of sound. Every line and effect sounds as if it were created (or recreated) in the studio, which lends the whole movie a clean, exact, dreamy quality that complements the abstract purity of the characters and situations. (If Oscars rewarded artistry rather than best-picture buzz, sound designer Tao Jing would win one.) Flying Daggers illustrates the rarely recognized partnership between picture and sound. Properly used, one can reinforce, even deepen the other, as in the scene where Jin and Mei are in a meadow, and Mei tenses up as if expecting an attack. Jin doesn't know why she's reacting this way, but we do, because we heard distant hoofbeats buried deep in the sound mix. By this point, Zhang and Tao have trained us to hear the world as Mei hears it, as in the early scenes where Leo stalks Mei, taunting her by dragging his blade along strands of hanging beads.
Flying Daggers is a film of feelings, symbols, colors and patterns, more a poem than a classically shaped narrative. As such, the proper comparison point isn't Hero or Crouching Tiger (apparently the only two wu xia films most American critics have seen) but Ronny Yu's The Bride with White Hair (a violent love poem, packed with wire stunts, boldly theatrical backdrops, silhouettes and miniatures), or perhaps a quasi-experimental journey movie like 2001, Apocalypse Now or O Brother, Where Art Thou? Flying Daggers subordinates traditional three-act narrative to symbolism, rhythm and design. It's not an overproduced contraptionist trifle like A Very Long Engagement, but a directorial performance. Zhang directs like a musician or dancer. His artistry sharpens your senses; watching this film is like going outside on a brisk winter day, when you feel as if you can see and hear for miles.
WHILE REREADING KURT VONNEGUT'S 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five, I encounterd the following passage, in which time-tripping hero Billy Pilgrim describes Tralfamadorians, aliens that can see in four dimensions.
"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore," Billy tells us, "was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."
This paragraph doesn't just explain Billy's psychedelic, Marcel Proust-by-way-of-W.S. Burroughs predicament. It also summarizes the kinship between dreams, memories and movies. And it inadvertently anticipates the relationship between movies and movie lovers in the age of DVDs, videotapes and TiVo-formats that allow us to experience (and remember) movies as an assortment of impressions or moments. The paragraph also made me want to watch Primer again.
Maybe I already am.