Aging Disgracefully

Nameless knew meddle of his foes, and so developed a strategy of divide and conquer that would exploit the tension between erstwhile lovers Broken Sword and Flying Snow. Through flashbacks we watch as the plot evolves. At the conclusion of each phase of the adventure, he is invited to move closer to the Emperor. When he is within 10 paces, the Emperor finally grows suspicious of Nameless, and suggests an alternative theory regarding the fate of Broken Sword, Flying Snow and Sky. The movie thus has a Rashomon-type setup: a mystery within a mystery. Or, as people have said of me, a question wrapped within an enigma wrapped within a blimp.

I am told that 'Hero' is the most expensive film ever made in China and was intended in part to outdo 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.' To be sure, it does contain spectacular fight scenes and beautiful cinematography. Two scenes in particular stand out in my mind. Early in the film we find Sky playing Go in a courtyard in the midst of a gentle rain. He is confronted by Nameless, presenting himself as a minor Qin official determined to arrest him. Thus begins a fight scene that achieves genuine elegance, as Sky and Nameless fly through raindrops which burst on contact with them as if forming jewels. Moreover, the game of Go sets the backdrop for the fascinating unfolding of the combat within Nameless and Sky's minds, as with master chess players anticipating the course of the game. The entire scene is, with great effect, set to the mournful tunes of an old musician.

The other is a flight scene between Flying Snow and Moon (Zhang Ziyi), a student of Broken Sword, among falling fall leaves. Both women wear flowing garments with bright autumnal colors that, with their flowing hair, mesh perfectly with the peaceful beauty of the falling leaves. That's no small accomplishment: achieving such a sense of peace and grace in the midst of a fight scene. One other such example that readily comes to mind is the fight scene across the peaks of gently swaying bamboo in 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.' The color transition as one of the combatants finally falls is gorgeous.

Unfortunately, the film, while well worth seeing (I'll even probably go so far as to add it to my DVD library), falls short of 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' for at least two reasons. First, the Rashomon-type setup somehow prevents any sort of emotional genuineness to the story or the characters. 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' may have involved an equally silly premise, and yet the relationships within, particularly between Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun Fat's characters, were emotionally convincing and interesting in ways that those in 'Hero' were not, at least to me. We cared about Fat and Yeoh's characters, and that allowed us to buy into the ludicrous plot. This is the key to all great martial arts films: they may be superficially absurd in terms of plot premise and the physical possibilities of life that they allow, but they are usually actually quite genuine in terms of their emotional core. In this sense they are sort of akin to the myths of old.* The lack of emotional traction in 'Hero' is then compounded by its very heavy handed political message. I'm really surprised that critics in the US largely have not picked up on this. The ultimate point of the film seems to be that Chinese unity is an end that justifies virtually any means, which would seem to me in the context to actually have more to do with the situation between the contemporary mainland and Taiwan than any serious historical assessment of the Qin Emperor's dreams of unification. As a result, the film ultimately develops more as a story about the varied conclusions of its characters regarding the geopolitical circumstances (remember that to 3rd century BC Chinese the 6 Kingdoms were, effectively, the whole world in the same sense that, to the Greeks, the Peloponnesian war was a world war) within which they found themselve than the potentially far more interesting relationships between the characters themselves. I would have preferred if art had not been sullied by crude propaganda.

*An important other category of martial arts films is the deliberate satire. "Brotherhood of the Wolf" is a brilliant example of this strain of the genre.