“The Road Home” - Zhang Yimou (1999)

Although deceptively simple, Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home (Wo de Fùqin Muqin –  literally: My Father and Mother, 1999) is one of the great filmmaker’s outstanding works. Zhang, who has worked successfully in a variety of cinema styles and genres, including social dramas, comedies, film noir, and Chinese wuxia martial arts, here seems to have just crafted a simple love story.  But across all the wide spectrum of Zhang’s work, he has always retained a certain common signature focus on an individual’s heartfelt struggles for authentic engagement.  As I remarked when once comparing Zhang to the equally great Michelangelo Antonioni,

“although the films of both of them [Antonioni and Zhang] may touch on the social sphere somewhat, they ultimately reach a more profound level that suggests the universal struggles of the individual soul in a heartless and uncaring cosmos.” [1]

And this is an underlying theme of The Road Home, too. 

The time of production (1999) seems to have been a particularly fertile period for Zhang.  The Road Home was the second of three relatively lighthearted films – the others being Not One Less (1999) and Happy Times (2000) – that he made in quick succession at this time, all in collaboration with cinematographer Yong Hou and music composer San Bao.  Coming after his breakup with favored actress Gong Li, these films featured new performers, and The Road Home was notable for introducing 20-year-old actress Zhang Ziyi in her first starring role.  All three films, concerned as they were with the lives or ordinary people, were, to my mind, superior to Zhang’s big-budget wuxia extravaganzas that immediately followed, Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004), which were both enormous hits at the box-office.

Zhang’s focus at this time on the lives of ordinary people and his sometimes use of amateur actor’s from the film settings’ locales, has led to comparison’s of his films with the Iranian so-called “neo-realist” renaissance during the 1990s.  In fact Zhang was an admirer of Iranian filmmakers and the way they were able to work under constraining circumstances [2]:

“Look, we think we have it hard here in China, but the pressures of Islamic Orthodoxy in Iran are far worse than anything we have to contend with here. But despite the pressures, Iranian directors succeed in making great films.”

But I wouldn’t characterize Zhang’s’ work as in any way neo-realistic.  His expressive mise-en-scene, including the music, is very carefully crafted to convey deep emotional feelings.  This is what makes The Road Home particularly moving – the naturally expressive cinematic conveyance of a person immersed in love.

The Road Home’s story concerns a young country girl’s falling in love with a new schoolteacher in a remote peasant village back in the 1950s, and it is based on the novel Remembrance by Shi Bao, who also wrote the screenplay.  It is told as a modern-day recollection of events that had happened some forty years earlier. 

In fact the film’s narrative structure is, itself, an interesting element.  The story begins in the “present” time with the schoolteacher’s son learning of his father’s recent death and returning from the city to visit his remote home village and attend to the funeral arrangements and to his grieving mother.  He then begins narrating in voiceover the locally famous story of how his parents met and fell in love.  The account then moves into a dramatized flashback, which makes up the bulk of the film.  Of course these couldn’t be the son’s memories; they could only be the mother’s recollections.  And accordingly the flashback focalization is entirely on the young woman’s experiences.  So what we see must either be a visualization of

• the woman’s (remembered) experiences and feelings associated with that story or
• the son’s imagination of the mother’s story that he heard her tell. 

And of course we viewers are, ourselves, imaginatively reconstructing the woman’s feelings based on the emotive visualization presented to us.  Nevertheless and given the son’s evident reserved demeanor, my inclination is to take what is presented in this film as a direct visualization of the woman’s experiences and not so much as the son’s imagined reconstruction of them.

The presentation of The Road Home comprises (a) an outer story set in the present and making up the beginning and closing portions of the film and (b) an inner story set some 40 years in the past and making up the middle portion of the film. The outer story is in matter-of-fact black-and-white and is essentially dry and mournful.  The inner story is in vivid colors (a Zhang Yimou specialty) and is full of vibrant, emotive feelings and expectation.

1.  The Son Comes Home (B/W)

Luo Yusheng (played by Sun Honglei) returns after a long absence to his home town, Sanhetun, in the snow-covered mountains in order to make arrangements for his father’s funeral.  His grieving mother, Zhao Di (played as the old woman by Zhao Yulian) insists that her husband’s burial be carried out in the bygone traditional way: his coffin is to be hand-carried down the long road to Sanhetun, with the pallbearers shouting along the way that this is the road home.  That way his departed soul will not get lost and remember its way home.   This demand presents a serious problem, because there are not enough young people in Sanhetun to serve as pallbearers.

While mulling over this difficulty, Yusheng comes across a 40-year-old picture of his mother and father when they were newlweds, and he lapses into a visual retelling of the famous story of their  falling in love.

2.  Di in Love (Color)

The remembered story, which makes up a little less than one hour of the film, recounts how 18-year-old Zhao Di (played as a young woman by Zhang Ziyi) met the town’s new, 20-year-old schoolteacher, Luo Changyu (Zheng Hao), in 1958.  This is told in a series of cinematically lyrical passages that convey the growing ardor of Di for Changyu.  Indeed, it is these lyrical vignettes that make up the heart and soul of the film [3].

In Zhang Yimou’s films love is often  blocked by two powerful forces: the coercive control of the authoritarian Communist state and the restrictive constraints of China’s conservative “no touch” indigenous culture.  In this film those two forces are present as well, but they are only in the background on this occasion.  The focus instead is on the two young people’s tentative romantic gestures within that traditional social context.  

This section of the film begins with the exciting arrival of the handsome young man who will be the village’s first schoolteacher.  Following the tradition that the prettiest girl in the village is to weave a banner that will be mounted in the schoolhouse’s ceiling, Di is designated to perform that task.  While the men are busy working on the construction of the new schoolhouse that will be used, the village women prepare their lunches, which are served buffet style.  This occasions the first (V1) of, by my count, six visual vignettes that are featured in this section.  These visual  vignettes are flowing montages featuring multiple slow-dissolves set to music which capture the feelings of the principals involved.  In the case of V1, we see Di carefully preparing her best dishes packed in what she feels is her signature bowl in the hopes that her offerings will be selected by the new teacher, Changyu.

Di also starts fetching her water from the village’s older and more distant from her home water well located near the new schoolhouse just so she can have a chance to catch an occasional glimpse of Changyu.  And even though she is illiterate and not interested in school lessons, she is so enthralled by the teacher’s voice that she stands every day outside the schoolhouse so she can listen to him.  (And she continued doing this over the entire forty-year course of their subsequent marriage.)

Every day after school, Changyu walks some of his students home.  So Di sits along the path, but in hiding, and watches them pass by.  This pattern of hopeful watching is shown in visual vignette #2 (V2).

Since Changyu has no family, the pattern is set up to have each household in the village take turns feeding him his dinner.  Finally it is the turn of Di, who lives at home with just her blind mother, to host him.  This gives Di and Changyu the opportunity to finally go beyond fleeting glances and actually exchange some words.  She invites him for some mushroom dumplings that evening, but  suddenly Changyu is peremptorily summoned back to the city for questioning by the government . Before his departure, though, he gives the infatuated Di a pretty red hair clip.  Changyu promises to stop by before leaving for a quick bite of her dumplings, but he is prevented from doing so and has to depart immediately in a horse-drawn carriage.  Di chases after them with her bowl of dumplings in a mad dash across the meadow (V3).  She eventually stumbles and falls, breaking  her special bowl and sadly discovering that she has somewhere lost her cherished hair clip, too.  She spends days retracing her steps across the meadow in a desperate attempt to find the clip, and eventually she does run on to it.  She also engages a pottery repairman who meticulously employs traditional  techniques to screw the pieces of her shattered bowl back together.  This is shown in an extended sequence of closeups giving the viewer a feel for the old ways of the village (V4). But Di is still morose about Changyu’s absence.

While waiting for the hoped-for return of Changyu, Di goes to the empty schoolhouse and lovingly spends time refurbishing the windows, as well as cleaning and beautifying the schoolroom (V5).  Then she stations herself out on the road in the middle of a snowstorm, desperately waiting for Changyu’s promised return (V6).  The whole village is now aware of her mad love for Changyu.  Di gets a fever from being out so long in the cold, but she stubbornly runs off down the road again anyway, hoping to find her beloved.  She is eventually found fainted along the side of the road and is carried back to the village, where she remains unconscious for two days. 

When Di finally awakens, she is informed that Changyu did manage to break out from custody in the city and sneak back to Sanhetun to see her briefly while she was still asleep.  However, as punishment for his insubordination, Changyu is forcibly returned to the city and kept from joining Di for another two years.  But after this he is finally able to return and marry his beloved.

3.  Changyu’s Funeral (B/W)
The story now returns to the present, and Yusheng, after his (and our) extended contemplation of his parents’ fabled courtship, decides to do whatever he can to fulfill his mother’s wishes for his father’s funeral.  In the event 100 people from miles around come to participate in the traditional transport of Changyu’s coffin and ensuing ceremony.  They want to ensure that the greatly respected teacher’s spirit can remember its road home.

The next day, Yusheng fulfills his mother’s request to teach a class to the village schoolchildren using his father’s original notebook.  Like the old days, Di stands outside the schoolhouse listening to her son’s delivery of the lesson.  This last scene is shot in vivid color, signifying a world reinvigorated by loving passion and commitment.


To most young people their parents are stolid representatives of authority and stability.  They have difficulty imagining how their parents could once have been in the throes of romantic love.  In Yusheng’s case, the famous story of his mother’s waiting for her beloved on the “road home”, which his mother evoked in his mind when she insisted on her “road home” funeral requirements, helped him imagine his mother’s passion.  And these thoughts may have opened up his own heart to the world around him, too.

Although set in a remote and traditional Chinese village, The Road Home evokes universal feelings of how romantic love can bloom in the heart.  In Sanhetun, as in many parts of the world, marriages were all arranged by the parents, and romantic couplings were unheard of.  The shy courtship of Changyu and Di lasted only about a month and did not involve any physical embraces of even touching.  They only exchanged meaningful gazes that struck chords in their hearts.  But love is a universal feeling and indeed an experience that involves the quintessential essence of who we are.  So it can arise anywhere there are pure hearts open to its call.  Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home, featuring Zhang Ziyi’s beautiful and astonishingly moving performance as Zhao Di, eloquently reminds us of that.

★★★★

Notes:

1. The Film Sufi, “‘Raise the Red Lantern’ - Zhang Yimou (1991)”, The Film Sufi, (5 November 2009).   
2. I don’t have a direct source for this quotation, but it was quoted in:
• Dimitri Tsahuridis, “The Road Home”, Senses of Cinema, (July 2000).   
3. Andrew L. Urban, Louise Keller, David Thomas, “Road Home, The”, Urban Cinefile, (5 October 2017).   

“2046” - Wong Kar Wai (2004)

“Love is all a matter of timing. It’s no good meeting the right person too soon or too late. . . . If I'd lived in another time or place, my story might have had a very different ending.”

– Chow Mo-wan in 2046

The films of writer-director Wong Kar Wai (Wáng Jia-wèi) always seem to be laden with a romantic expressionism that is not just a background mood but the very substance of what is being told.  It is as if the viewer is presented not so much with a story, but with a visually orchestrated “tone poem” [1].  This was particularly true of the string of films Wong made from 1990 to 2004, which culminated with his magisterial 2046.

Throughout his career, Wong has employed an off-the-cuff production style whereby he has begun shooting his films without a script in hand and has more or less made things up as he has gone along.  This has invariably led to massive cost and shooting-schedule overruns, as Wong has continued to reshoot, cut out, and re-edit major aspects of his works in progress.  And these improvisational production habits seem to have expanded over the years.  Wong’s preceding film, In the Mood for Love (2000) took 15 months to shoot, and 2046 was five years in the making [2,3,4].  Although those two films were originally conceived as two separate and unconnected works, their overlapping and evolving production led to 2046 being a direct sequel to In the Mood for Love.

The story of 2046, like the earlier Days of Being Wild (1990) and In the Mood for Love, is set in Hong Kong during the 1960s, which was a turbulent period of rapid growth for the city that perhaps may be an historically mythic image for today’s Hong Kongers in the same way as the “Roaring Twenties” has been for Americans.  The title “2046" has several references, the futuristic one of which led some people to assume (partly encouraged by some misleading pre-release publicity) that 2046 would essentially be a sci-fi film.  There is indeed a sci-fi narrative fantasy thread in the film, but the film is very much situated in the 60s.

Since those three Wong films occupy successive periods of the 60s and have some common personages in their stories, they are sometimes referred to as a trilogy.  However, the linkage with Days of Being Wild is rather weak, and familiarity with that story is not necessary for appreciating 2046.  On the other hand, I would say you really need to have seen In the Mood for Love first in order to fully appreciate what is going on in 2046. (Note that Wong once commented that it would be best to see 2046 first [2], but I disagree.)  One might argue this close dependence on another film for narrative background is a flaw (one of several) in 2046, but the film has enough virtues to overcome such weaknesses.

The story of “In the Mood for Love” is set in the mid-1960s and concerns the growing but tantalizing affection between a man and woman, Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen,  who are already married to separate spouses.  They discover that their two spouses are having an affair with each other, which brings Chow and Su together in sympathy but places moral inhibitions in the way of their own mutual ardor. The entire film is a moody rendition of romantic longing and missed opportunities to express deep feelings.  Eventually Chow and Su abandon their tacit hopes of getting together and go their own ways unfulfilled.

The story of 2046 picks things up where they were left off in the preceding film, with Chow Mo-wan (played again by Tony Chiu Wai Leung) now back in Hong Kong in 1966 after working some time in Singapore. He still moons over Su Li-zhen, but he now seems to be a changed man.  For one thing, there is no mention of his unfaithful wife, so he is evidently disconnected from her.  And whereas in In the Mood for Love Chow was a sensitive and upright individual, in 2046 he is seen to be a more callous, role-playing ladies’ man.  Over the course of 2046, the viewer sees his relationships with several woman with whom he becomes involved. Each of these relationships give Wong Kar Wai the opportunity to explore different sides of time and memory. Part of this cinematic narration involves sequences that are out of time order, suggesting that they are memories that spontaneously emerge in Chow’s mind as he proceeds with life.

There are some stylistic commonalities between the two films of course.

• There is again the moody music of Shigeru Umebayashi, who also composed the music for House of Flying Daggers (2004).  He fills the air with smooth, melancholy rumbas and other dances.
   
• The cinematography again bears the signature of Christopher Doyle (due to the film’s lengthy production period, Doyle once again had to depart at some point, and so the cinematography was also performed by Kwan Pun-leung and Lai Yiu-fai).
   
• The production design and editing was again supervised by William Chang.

But there were also some significant differences in the way the two stories were told.

• The focalization in In the Mood for Love” was balanced between Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen, but here in 2046, the focalization is almost exclusively from Chow’s perspective.  Nevertheless, as with other Wong films, though the focalization is from the male perspective, the focus is squarely on the visages of the women yearning and aching for love that is out of reach.
   
• There is much more dialogue and voiceover in 2046.
   
• Amorous fulfillment and physical eroticism, which were basically absent in In the Mood for Love, are prominently featured in 2046.
   
• And as already mentioned, Chow Mo-wan is less innocent and more selfish in 2046.  But to a certain extent we can understand him a bit more here than, for example, we could understand Yuddy in Days of Being Wild, because we know more about Chow’s past.

The number 2046 in this story has several references and meanings, all of which relate to time and memory.

• 2046 was the apartment room number in In the Mood for Love, where Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen sequestered themselves in order to help Chow write his wuxia (Chinese martial arts) serial novel.  Those were the happiest times for Chow, and 2046 represents a state-of-mind that he would like to return to.
   
• 2046 is also the hotel room number in 2046 that Chow finds when he returns to Hong Kong in 1966.  It turns out to be successively occupied by several different women of interest in this story.
   
• 2046 is the final year of the 50-year agreement (“One Country, Two Systems”) that the Chinese government made with the UK on 1July 1997 to allow Hong Kong to retain its self-governing status for fifty more years.  For many Hong Kongers that suggests that the year 2046 has no perceived future for them.  Thus 2046 symbolizes timelessness.
   
• The sci-fi portion of the film seems to have been directly inspired by a 1959 Twilight Zone episode, “The Lonely” [6]. In it a man in the year 2046 has been condemned to be imprisoned alone on an asteroid for fifty years.  A sympathetic supply-spaceship captain gives the lonely prisoner a feminine android robot to keep him company, and the recipient prisoner gradually falls in love with “her”.

When Chow-wan engages in writing a sci-fi story in the film, he calls it “2046" to suggest a mystical time and place one can go to retrieve lost memories.  Later when he tries to write a more optimistic story about undying love, he calls it “2047".  Although both stories are set in the future, they are, of course, all about Chow’s present state of mind.

The principal women characters with whom Chow has relationships are performed in this film by an all-star lineup of astonishingly beautiful and emotive actresses: Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi, Faye Wong, Maggie Cheung, and Carina Lau. They each embody different perspectives on lost love:

• Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), who was Chow’s out-of-reach love in In the Mood for Love, only appears in a few brief flashback shots in this film, but she still haunts his memories.
   
• “Black Spider” (Gong Li) is a mysterious professional woman gambler that Chow met in Singapore after the end of his relationship with Su Li-zhen.  Chow is attracted to her because she reminds him of his lost love, and he is later surprised to learn that Black Spider’s real name happens also to be Su Li-zhen (but she is a different woman).  Black Spider is romantically attracted to Chow, too, but she seems to have her own painful romantic memories that she is trying to flee, and to a certain extent she mirrors Chow.  That fact seems to dissuade her from advancing their relationship.  Chow recalls how he invited her to come with him back to Hong Kong, to which she said she would agree  only if he could beat her in an unwinnable (because she is a skilled cardsharp) card draw.
   
• Lulu (Carina Lau), who now uses her stage name, Mimi, was a major figure in Days of Being Wild.  In that film she was in love with the narcissistic and doomed Yuddy, and here in 2046 she is shown trying to bury her memories by dissolving herself in a string of jealousy-laden affairs. For this desperate woman there are now no memories, only the present. When she meets Chow after having known him (perhaps intimately) earlier, she cannot even remember him. She is the first occupant of room 2046, which is next door to Chow’s.  Her relationship with Chow is only briefly covered in the film, and I wonder if more material concerning the two of them was the victim of Wong’s late-in-the-day editing cuts.
   
• Wang Jing-wen (Faye Wong) is the beautiful daughter of Chow’s landlord and is the second (and later the fourth) occupant of room 2046.  She is passionately in love with a young Japanese man (Takuya Kimura), whose marriage proposal to her is blocked by her father’s angry memories of the Japanese War.  Chow develops a platonic relationship with Jing-wen, and during her later occupancy of room 2046, the two of them collaborate on Chow’s sci-fi novel writing.  This innocent authorial teamwork together echoes Chow’s earlier collaboration with Su Li-zhen in In the Mood for Love, and similar to that occasion, a growing affection for Jing-wen creeps up on Chow.  And as was also the case in that earlier film, Chow is hesitant to express his true feelings for the woman;  eventually he even facilitates the re-engagement and marriage of Wang Jing-wen with her Japanese lover.
   
• Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi) is a beautiful nightclub hostess who is the third occupant of room 2046.  The name ‘Bai Ling’, incidentally but probably not accidentally, happens to match that of another famous and voluptuous Hong Kong movie actress who has had a tempestuous personal life.  Here in 2046 our Bai Ling is a lascivious coquette who attracts men with her kittenish and seductive ways. Like the Su Li-zhen in In the Mood for Love, she wears body-hugging cheongsam outfits that show of her slender and curvaceous figure. Chow Mo-wan cannot help noticing this, and soon he is making all his moves on the woman.  They start off as “drinking buddies”, but their mutual sexual attraction has only one destination: the bed.  Because Bai Ling works as a taxi dancer and has a number of male customers, her relationship with Chow has the appearance of a game, and he carelessly insults her by paying her for her “services”.  But despite appearances, Bai Ling is not truly toying with Chow in this relationship and is not so self-seeking.  Soon she falls deeply in love with Chow and struggles to elevate their relationship above its artificial role-playing. Their relationship occupies a major portion of the film, and it is highlighted by their several extremely erotic sexual encounters.  Eventually the frustrated Bai Ling demands to be Chow’s exclusive woman, and when he flippantly refuses, she terminates their relationship out of frustration.

The nonlinear storytelling of 2046 covers all of these relationships, as well as dramatizations of Chow’s sci-fi tale, which feature a futuristic version of Wang Jing-wen’s Japanese boyfriend, Tak (but actually representing Chow’s persona), traveling on a train to and from the mysterious destination of 2046, where lost memories can be regained and dwelled upon.  While traveling on the train, Tak encounters a beautiful android (Faye Wong again) with whom he falls in love, just like the earlier-mentioned Twilight Zone episode.  Tak invites the android to leave with him, but for various hypothesized reasons (mechanical wear and tear, emotional indifference, . . .), she only passively receives but never responds affirmatively to his caresses and proposal.  Tak sadly retells to her Chow’s story from In the Mood for Love about how one buries a secret forever:

“Before, when people had secrets they didn’t want to share, they’d climb a mountain.  They’d find a tree and carve a hole in it and whisper the secret into the hole.  Then cover it with mud.  That way, noone else would ever discover it.”

But his android only makes a game of the sad story’s carved hole by imitating it with her fingers.  Tak also invites another android (Carina Lau) to leave with him, but again he gets only acquiescence and no positive uptake.  Again the problem is memories.  In Tak's case the problem is that the androids he encounters don't seem to have much in the way of memories.

If we think about things on a more general level, we can say that all human relationships entail memories, which provide the very basis for future hopes and dreams. Indeed our primordial understanding of time, itself, is based on the way we construct narratives out of remembered incidents and expectations [7,8].  However, the problem with revisiting a treasured memory is that the past wonderful experience necessarily included expectations and dreams which later either materialized in some definite way or did not. Either way, they no longer retain the magical nature of the accompanying dreams.  Even so, we tend to dwell on our fond memories because of the beautiful dreams that they still invoke.  As film critic Stephen Teo has remarked [3],

“Desire is better felt than satisfied.  It lasts longer. . .”

So our pasts, i.e. all of our memories, are actually narratives that we have constructed.  When we want to physically return to a memory, we cannot really go back there, because its at-the-time accompanying future component has now vanished.  In this way a remembered time is like the year 2046 for Hong Kongers: it has no real future, no dreams that may come true. In 2046 Chow Mo-wan is struggling to come to grips with this realization.

Wong Kar Wai and his production team go over these feelings with sublime elegance in 2046. Because we are dealing with evaporating memories – rather than sitting on the knife-edge of anticipation as in In the Mood for Love – this film is much faster paced. Note also that 2046 was Wong’s first to be shot in cinemascope, and he employed many interesting framings and figure compositions with that format.  For example there are numerous wide-screen closeups with the figure off to one side and facing the short side of the frame.  This runs counter to the convention of balancing the frame “weight” by having an off-centered figure facing into the frame’s open space.  But these closeup frames in 2046 were artfully composed so that the imagery behind the closeup figure’s head was  shadowy and in soft-focus and so did not distract the viewer’s attention.  The overall effect was to enhance, without distraction, the feeling of cramped confinement, which is always a feature of Wong’s crowded but lonely urban environments.  Further contributing to these effects and feelings were

• the artful short depth-of-focus shots taken in comparatively deep visual fields such that only a part of the subject matter of interest is in focus;
   
• the occasional closeups focusing on moving feet or hands of a principal woman, which mysteriously blends well with the moody dance-theme music that pervades the background throughout the film;
   
• the numerous well-composed shots with mirrors such that the subject figures are seen from multiple perspectives.

All of these effects and more pull the viewer into Chow Mo-wan’s dreamlike reveries of past memories, most of which recall and evoke past feelings of loneliness and some of which resonate in the mind long after the film finishes.  There are moments of passion, too.  For example just before Chow and Black Spider part for the final time (at her behest, not his), they engage in a passionate 35-second kiss that embodies all his fervor for wanting to be with her.  And there are the intensely erotic scenes with Bai Ling that convey her romantic zeal for Chow.

Like many people with no family, Chow was particularly lonely on Christmas Eve, and the film focuses on his memories of successive Christmas Eves throughout the late 1960s, when he was particularly in need of feminine company.  His 1967 Christmas Eve was spent with Bai Ling.  His 1968 Christmas Eve was with Wang Jing-win.  And he spent his 1969 Christmas Eve in Singapore looking for Black Spider, who, he was only told, had either died or had returned to her original home in Phnom Penh.

For Chow, these women of interest are occasionally conflated in his memories, and he sometimes mixes them up.  Indeed all five of the key women wear their hair in roughly similar ways, as stylish “updos”.  On this topic I can recall being instructed in film school that if your film project scenario is to have a man involved with two women, you should make sure that one of the women is a blonde and the other a brunette.  This would ensure visual distinctiveness.  Here Wong Kar Wai does just the opposite, but it is more realistic.  Men are often attracted to women who unconsciously evoke past memories in their minds, and so there may be physical similarities to the women they seek.  So it apparently was with Chow.

But despite some fashion similarities, Chow’s women in 2046 are very different with respect to their own memories.  Some of those memories are closed off by past events and are only obstructive for future engagement. Lulu wants to forget her memories and wallow in present-moment sensuality.  Black Spider cannot escape her own sad memories.  Wang Jing-wen’s memories of her Japanese boyfriend were for a time thought to have been closed off, too.  But Chow selflessly helped her resurrect those dreams, even though they didn’t involve him.

However, It is Bai Ling’s memories that offer the truly fertile ground of an open future for Chow.  She remembers the joy the two of them had experienced together and wants to continue the engagement.  “Why can’t it be like it was before?”, she begs him.  

There it is, staring him in the face – a romantic future with someone who lovingly offers him her body and soul.  Indeed it is this unnecessarily shortened relationship that is the key to the film and elevates it to greatness.  Without Zhang Ziyi’s soulful depiction of Bai Ling’s passionate ardor, the film would not have ascended into this sublime sphere of Wong Kar Wai artistry.  This is the most moving and effective screen performance I have seen from her.
 
But Chow cannot extricate himself from both his own self-centered memories and his now customary Casanova-style role-playing. So he coldly lets her go.  At the end a hitherto unheard external voiceover comments:

“It was if he had boarded a very long train, heading for a drowsy future through the unfathomable night.”

★★★★

Notes:

1. Acquarello, “08-28-04: Editions Dis Voir: Wong Kar Wai by Jean-Marc Lalanne, David Martinez, Ackbar Abbas, and Jimmy Ngai”, Journal Notes, Strictly Film School, (28 August 2004).
2. Chale Nafus, “2046", Austin Film Society, (n.d.).
3. Stephen Teo, “2046: A Matter of Time, A Labour of Love”, Senses of Cinema, (April 2005). 
4. Nathan Lee, “Elusive Objects of Desire”, Film Comment, (July/August 2005). 
5. Ian Johnston, “Unhappy Together: Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046", The Bright lights Film Journal, (31 January  2005).  
6. "The Lonely”, The Twilight Zone, (13 November 1959), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_(The_Twilight_Zone)    
7. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, (1984, 1985, 1988), The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1962), Harper & Row.

“House of Flying Daggers” - Zhang Yimou (2004)

Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (Shí Miàn Mái Fú, 2004) was his second successive foray, following Hero (Yi-ng Xióng, 2002), into the Chinese wuxia martial arts genre popularized by Hong Kong filmmakers. This turn to wuxia was a dramatic shift from Zhang’s earlier, highly artistic and dramatic work, and though it brought him greater exposure and commercial success (as did a similar turn undertaken by Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee), it represented a considerable compromise of Zhang Yimou’s artistic virtues.

Although the wuxia films, with their absurd wire-fu action, are mostly seen as escapist fantasies, Zhang’s preceding epic, Hero (which is set some 2200 years ago during the reign of King Ying Zheng, later Emperor Qin Shi Huang), carried with it an additional social and political undercurrent that actually argued against heroic acts of defiance: it is better to put up with a tyrant than to overthrow him and risk sowing the seeds of disunity. Though this message was blissfully overlooked by many viewers, it was rejected by some reviewers, including this one. House of Flying Daggers steers clear of such political commentary and, even with less than half of Hero's budget, focuses more on the action. It, too, is set in historical times, but the tone is lighter (although bloodier), and the emphasis is more on romantic relationships involving the big box-office stars who appear in the film: Andy Lau, Takeshi Kaneshiro, and Zhang Ziyi.

The story is set in 859 AD at the close of the Tang dynasty, when government control had largely collapsed and rebel groups had risen in various quarters of China. The image of Robin-Hood-like rebel gangs has long been popular in Chinese – since at least as far back as the 14th century novel Water Margin (Shuĭhŭ Zhuàn, aka Outlaws of the Marsh and All Men Are Brothers). In this film the rebel gang is the Flying Daggers, which has set itself in opposition to the local government. The story has four main sections:

1. The Peony Pavilion.
   At the outset, two local region police captains, Leo (Andy Lau) and Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who had recently killed the leader of the Flying Daggers, have now been assigned to kill the new leader within ten days. They decide to investigate a blind woman, Mei (Zhang Ziyi), who is working at a local brothel, the Peony Pavilion, but who they believe is actually the daughter of the late leader of the Flying Daggers and is now a spy. After getting permission from the house matron Yee to watching the blind girl dance, they arrest Mei and take her into custody.
2. On the Road.
   Jin and Leo then arrange a phony jail breakout for Mei in hopes of following her and finding the hideout of the Flying Daggers. Mei escapes to the forest, and Jin, pretending to be a rebel sympathizer, joins her company in the hopes that he can seduce her and learn secrets about the group. Leo and government troops follow the pair at a distance, and they even arrange a phony attack that is beaten back by Jin in order to make things look more authentic to Mei. But after an ensuing attack turns out to be almost deadly, Jin learns from Leo that a ruthless government general has taken over the pursuit from Leo, and this general is willing to sacrifice Jin and Mei, as long as he can find the rebel hideout. Meanwhile Jin and Mei seem to be falling in love, which was not according to plan. When a third ferocious government attack appears to doom Jin and Mei, the Flying Daggers, themselves, show up and rescue them in the nick of time.
3. In the House of the Flying Daggers.
   At this point many previous deceptions are revealed. Mei is not really blind and is not the daughter of the old leader, but is instead a skilled Flying Dagger warrior. The Peony Pavilion house matron, Yee, turns out to be the local Flying Dagger commander. And Leo turns out to have been a spy for the Flying Daggers all along and has been Mei’s lover. Thus we now see a jealous love triangle between Jin and Leo, both competing for Mei. Yee orders Mei to take Jin away and kill him, but she cannot do it. Alone in the forest, they make love. Jin beseeches her to run away with him to freedom, but her loyalties to Leo and to the Flying Daggers’ cause hold her back. She tells him to go without her, and he rides away.
4. The Long Good-bye.
   After Jin’s departure, Mei has second thoughts and decides to follow him. Seeing her betrayal from a distance, Leo slings a pair of flying daggers at Mei, who is able to fend off one of them, but is apparently mortally wounded by the other. Jim decides to come back for Mei, and seeing her dying, he fights with Leo. Mei, still alive, stands up and tries to prevent Leo from finishing off Jin. If she pulls the dagger out of her chest to defend Jin, her wound will gush blood and she will die immediately. So the three of them, with life and death hanging in the balance, face each other in an open field, physically mirroring their tortured love triangle. The final act of the tragedy then plays itself out.

Like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, even with a much smaller budget, excels in the area of cinematography. And as with many of Zhang Yimou’s films, the use of color as a motif and as an expressionistic element is stunning. Xiaoding Zhao, who had been the camera operator behind cinematographer Christopher Doyle in Hero, takes over the reins and is the cinematographer on this occasion, and the resulting work was nominated for an Oscar in 2004. Zhao continued on to be Zhang Yimou’s cinematographer for his next two films, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (2005) and Curse of the Golden Flower (Mănchéng Jìndài Huángjīnjiă, 2006).

Certainly the cinematographic talents of the Zhang and Zhao are the principal crowd-pleasing resources here, and they are on full display over five elaborate scenes that take up fully one-third of the screen time of the film:

• There is a spectacular dance in Section 1 involving Zhang Ziyi playing the “echo game”, which involves her magically flinging her veil at a circular set of drums.
• There are three elaborate fight scenes in Section 2, each of which is creatively presented. The most spectacular is the third one, involving an “aerial” attack from government commandos swinging about in the trees.
• The final fight in Section 4 between Jin and Leo is punctuated by a violent snow storm that appears during the course of the action (the snow storm on the shooting location was unexpected, but Zhang Yimou decided to incorporate it into the scene).

One aspect of the cinematography that represents an improvement over Hero is in the area of the wuxia sword fights, where the “wire-fu” acrobatics have been reined in somewhat. Of course there are still inhumanly impossible dagger-throwing feats accomplished by the main characters. But at least these actions, as improbable as they are, do not so obviously violate the fundamental laws of physics, as they do in Hero and other Hong Kong wire-fu films. There is a payoff even to this modicum of directorial restraint, because though the fight scenes here are still unbelievable, they are at least not so ludicrously physically impossible as to distance the viewer from any possible vicarious involvement.

But outside the scope of the superb cinematography, other aspects of House of Flying Daggers have not fared so well. One problematic area is the narrative, itself. This film features the typical combination of an action-oriented thread and a relationship-oriented thread to the plot. The action-oriented thread ostensibly concerns the cause of the Flying Dagger rebels against a presumed corrupt government. But this thread gradually fades away to nothing and seems to have been almost forgotten by the story’s end. At the close of the film, the government troops are supposed to be advancing on to the Flying Daggers hideout. Although, Yee has suggested that the Flying Daggers have organized to trap them, we never find out. The whole storyline on this front has simply been abandoned.

A further narrative drawback is the operatic extravagance of Section 4 of the film. Dramatically, this unbearably long scene almost kills the film and ultimately evokes more ennui than tragedy. It should have been something of a coda, at best, but it goes on for twenty minutes and seems interminable. And the display of Leo’s enraged jealousy and willingness to kill Mei has not been properly motivated, which renders his character repugnant.

So this leaves us only with the relationship thread. Zhang Yimou has admitted that the main theme of this film centered around people who were willing to abandon everything for love [1]. Unfortunately, there is no romantic chemistry developed along this line. The film features four separate dramatic lovemaking attempts involving Mei (only the last one of which goes to completion), but none of them is really convincing, despite good performing by Zhang Ziyi in these scenes. In addition the rapidity with which Mei falls for Jin is hard to believe and is not well motivated. The main problem, though, boils down essentially to the performance of Takeshi Kaneshiro, who was likeable in Red Cliff (Chi Bi, 2008), but doesn’t match up well with what is needed in this film. His portrayal of a lusty vagabond lover lacks even remote credibility, and the same could be said for the sincerity of his passions for Mei. Kaneshiro’s overall performance may actually reflect some ambivalence on Zhang Yimou’s part concerning the degree to which he wanted this film to be essentially a cartoon, with ludicrous, over-the-top performances, as opposed to one with more straight-up roles. Actually, within the narrow narrative confines available to them, both Andy Lau and Zhang Ziyi give good and reasonably believable portrayals of their characters (and Zhang Ziyi has the opportunity to display her dance background and to sing the principal song in the film). But Takeshi Kaneshiro is just a bit too unbelievable, even for this fantasy. Samurai Jack he is not.

Further considering the relationship angle, it is worth noting that a key subtext to this theme is the idea of personal deception, or perhaps we should say, human authenticity. All of the principal characters, Jim, Leo, Mei, and Yee, are constantly dissembling and pretending to be people they are not:

• Yee is variously presented as a brothel matron, the leader of the Flying Daggers, and then merely a commander of the Flying Daggers.
• Mei is variously a blind dancer, the daughter of Flying Daggers leader, and a warrior of the Flying Daggers.
• Jin is variously a police captain, a renegade recruit for the Flying Daggers, and a carefree wanderer beholden to noone.
• Leo is variously a police captain and a spy for the Flying Daggers.

Since the focalization of the film is primarily that of Jin, the viewer is not fooled by Jin’s deceptions, but is successively fooled by all the others. Normally, the viewer’s sympathies would tend to be aligned with the principally focalized character in a film, i.e. Jin. But in this film our empathy and sympathies turn away from him and go to Mei, thanks to Zhang Ziyi’s sympathetic portrayal of that character. In any case the film reminds us that however convenient they can be in the short run, deceptions can also prove to be fatal, and that is what happens in the final stroke of the film..

On balance we have to say the House of Flying Daggers is pretty lightweight fare for Zhang Yimou. He admitted so, himself, when he remarked [2]

“To me they’re [his two wuxia films] just pure entertainment. I expected more discussions of my previous work, most of which is artistic and has a deeper subject matter, a lot of humanity – whereas these two are just commercial.”

Taken on it’s own escapist terms, House of Flying Daggers has its moments, mostly when Zhang Ziyi is on screen, and it is indeed superior to Hero. But this kind of film, profitable though it may be, is not best suited for displaying Zhang Yimou’s great artistic strengths. To see how wonderfully he engages all aspects of the film medium to portray profound human experiences, you need to look elsewhere in his cinematic oeuvre.
★★½

Notes:

1. In fact this theme contrasts so strikingly with “Hero”, which advocated the sacrifice of all personal values for the sake of social unity, that one might suspect Zhang was reacting to the critical reception of that film. But he has claimed (see [2]) that the scenarios of both Hero and House of Flying Daggers were written at the same time. In any case, the abandonment of the action plot is evidently intentional.
2. Nick Bradshaw, “Zhang Yimou on House of Flying Daggers”, Timeout Film Guide, Fourteenth Edition (2006), p. 526.

“Hero” - Zhang Yimou (2002)

The wind blows.

The river is cold.
The hero sets forth.
He may never return.

So, famously wrote the legendary Chinese hero Jīng Kē some 2200 years ago, prior to setting out on his mission to assassinate the ruthless King Ying Zheng of Qin (later the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang). Throughout Chinese cultural history Jing Ke has been an inspirational symbol of individual heroism, just as King Zheng has been the iconic representative of Chinese totalitarian collectivism. Ever since then, their confrontation has offered an ideal artistic metaphor for China’s writers and artists to examine the nature of Chinese social organization. Zhang Yimou, the preeminent filmmaker of China, was one of the more recent artists to seize this opportunity when he made Hero (Yīng Xióng, 2002). Though his film was an immediate commercial and critical success as an action/adventure wuxia thriller, what is of interest here is Zhang’s rather problematic perspective on the issues raised by Jing Ke’s story.

Zhang Yimou began his film career by entering the cinematography section of the Beijing Film Institute when it was reopened in 1978 after the depredations of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (1966-1976). He was graduated in 1982, along with fellow classmate Chen Kaige, who was in the director section, and Zhang then worked as the cinematographer on two of Chen’s first films, Yellow Earth (Huang Tu Di, 1984) and The Big Parade (Da Yue Bing, 1986), before launching his own directorial career that led to a string of artistic successes in the 1990s. All of Zhang’s film productions during this period evinced an exquisite existentialist vision of the struggle to find fulfilment in a changing world, and the effect was invariably accentuated by Zhang’s technical virtuosity of visual expression. A common theme to these films was the notion of an individual protagonist, usually a woman, struggling to make her way in turbulent social circumstances. Within this broad scheme there were basically two stylistic categories:

1. Carefully staged and orchestrated historical dramas situated in richly colored, atmospheric environments. These explicitly expressionistic films feature professional casts, and they include Jú Dòu (1990), Raise the Red Lantern, (Dà Hóng Dēnglóng Gāo Gāo Guà, 1991), To Live (Huózhe, 1994), and Shanghai Triad (Yáo A Yáo, Yáo Dào Wàipó Qiáo, 1995).
2. More open, naturalistic dramas mostly set in the present day, often featuring a largely nonprofessional cast. These include The Story of Qiu Ju (Qiū Jú Da Guān Sī, 1992), The Road Home (Wŏ De Fù Qīn Mŭ Qīn, 1999), Not One Less (Yí Ge Dōu Bù Néng Shāo, 1999), and Happy Times (Xìngfú Shíguāng, 2000).

With Hero, however, Zhang departed from his previous style by fashioning a grandiose martial arts film in the Hong Kong wuxia filmmaking tradition, featuring an unprecedented budget ($31 million) and a string of Asian films stars including Jet Li, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk, Donnie Yen, and Zhang Ziyi. To some extent this radical move in style could be seen as a natural step for Zhang, who having already demonstrated a mastery of film technique encompassing drama, comedy, and film noir genres, could now be seen as demonstrating his mastery of yet another genre. And the new style could also be seen in the context of and response to his contemporary Asian film director, the Taiwanese Ang Lee, who had made a similar move from artistic dramas to Hong Kong martial-arts films with his 2000 epic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wòhŭ Cánglóng). After all, Lee’s step up to big-budget wuxia adventure (although only half of Hero's budget) had been an enormous worldwide commercial success that established a wider recognition of his work.

But there seems to have been something more to this change of direction than simply seizing the opportunity to make big-budget epics. Zhang Yimou’s Hero displays a striking, even disturbing, shift in his thematic perspective. And I would speculate that this shift on the part of Zhang may have been influenced less by general interests in expanding his repertoire and more by the felt need to respond to the work of his former partner (and perhaps now rival), Chen Kaige. It must be noted that Chen had quickly started working with Gong Li, Zhang’s former romantic partner and leading lady, as soon as they had split up in 1995. She had been Chen’s female lead in Temptress Moon (Fēng Yuè, 1995) and in The Emperor and the Assassin (Jīng Kē Cì Qín Wáng, 1999). We should also note that The Emperor and the Assassin was based on the very same theme of Jīng Kē’s historic assassination attempt that appears (in somewhat altered form) in Hero. Before discussing these general issues, though, it is appropriate to take a closer look at Zhang’s Hero. First, I will review Zhang Yimou’s basic story as presented, and then look at the film along the four dimensions of (1) cinematography and mise-en-scène, (2) narrative structure, (3) wuxia action, and (4) thematic content. In my opinion, Hero, despite its enormous financial success ($180 million in gross revenues) and the critical accolades that it has received, suffers from fundamental failures along three of these dimensions.

Before considering the Hero narrative, it is worth referencing the original quasi-mythic story of Jing Ke (which is fairly closely adhered to in Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin). In that original story Jing Ke managed to persuade an out-of-favor Qin army general whose head was up for ransom to commit suicide so that Jing could get permission to closely approach the Qin king with his severed head. Jing Ke then did indeed get his fateful audience with the brutal king, but when he thrust his dagger at the king, he missed, and after a violent struggle, he was killed.

In Hero, the story is elaborated with a number of additional characters on the assassin’s side:

• Nameless (played by Jet Li) is the Jing Ke character from the Zhao kingdom, but he is only known as “Nameless”, and the name "Jing Ke" is never referenced.
• Broken Sword (played by Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) is an accomplished swordsman and student of calligraphy who has previously attacked the Qin king and is a wanted man. He is the lover of Flying Snow.
• Flying Snow (played by Maggie Cheung) is the daughter of a killed Zhao general, and she has sworn to avenge her father’s death and kill the king of Qin. She is also an accomplished swordsperson and is the lover of Broken Sword.
• Sky (played by Donnie Yen) is famous in both the use of swords and spears and has previously tried to kill the King of Qin.
• Moon (played by Zhang Ziyi) is Broken Sword’s loyal (and beautiful) attendant and apprentice.

The film narrative of Hero, which comprises five major “acts” or sections, encompasses four principal stories that are dramatically depicted as told (with corresponding color-codings) by Nameless, King Ying Zheng, and Broken Sword.

1. Nameless Comes to Qin (16 minutes). Nameless comes to the Qin palace with great fanfare, since he bears proof that he just killed King Zheng’s three most feared enemies: Sky, Broken Sword, and Flying Snow. Normally everyone must remain at least 100 paces distant from the king, but when the proof of Sky’s death is presented, Nameless is allowed to approach within 20 paces. He then begins telling his tale, which we could call Story #1. Nameless relates that Sky had spent an amorous night with Flyling Snow, which had caused a jealous rift between Broken Sword and Flying Snow. He says that he set about the task of killing Sky as a prelude to approaching the two sulking lovers. After a confrontation with Sky at a gaming parlor, they engage in an elaborate sword fight (call this “Flying Wuxia Sword Fight #1" – FWSF1), which results in Sky’s death. Upon hearing this, King Zheng allows Nameless to approach within 10 paces.
2. Story of Broken Sword and Flying Snow (25 minutes). Nameless now relates in Story #2 how he killed the other two. Since Broken Sword is a student of calligraphy (and believes that the art of swordsmanship is intrinsically linked to calligraphy), Nameless approaches Broken Sword at the calligraphy academy and requests instruction concerning a new secret way of writing the character for ‘sword’, for which there are already 19 conventional ways of writing it in various parts of China. Upon hearing this tale of such a multiplicity of ways of writing a single character, the king interrupts Nameless’s story and proclaims that he will someday establish a single written language for China in order to end this confusion. Thematically this is important, because it is one of the so-called contributions of the first emperor: he did indeed establish such a unified written language and thereby helped unify the land. Then Nameless continues his story. First an elaborate battle in defense of the calligraphy school from an attack by Qin army soldiers (FWSF2) is depicted, after which Nameless informs Broken Sword and Flying Snow of Sky’s death and of Sky’s wish for his lover and soulmate, Flying Snow, to avenge his death by engaging in a duel with Nameless. Jealous from hearing the news of Sky’s passion for his beloved Flying Snow, Broken Sword then rips the clothes off his maiden, Moon, and makes passionate love to her in front of Flying Snow. Although this love scene is brief, it is artistically suggestive and filled with passionate moans of lovemaking. Flying Snow then kills Broken Sword out of jealousy and is then physically, but unsuccessfully, attacked by Moon, in a swirling display of female swordplay (FWSF3). In the duel the next day, the still-grieving Flying Snow is no match for Nameless and she is quickly killed. So the outcomes of Nameless’s stories #1 and #2 are that Sky, Broken Sword, and Flying Snow are all dead.
3. King Zheng’s Version of the Events (16 minutes). King Zheng doesn’t buy for a minute Nameless’s two stories of what happened. He surmises that Nameless must have practiced and perfected some sort of invincible swordsmanship move so that he could kill the king from a distance of 10 paces, and that he needed to kill either Broken Sword or Flying Snow in order to provide him with permission to approach that closely to the king. Then the king’s version of what he thinks really happened is visualized (Story #3). Flying Snow first wounds Broken Sword so that she, alone, will be the one to sacrifice herself (so that with such evidence Nameless will be able to approach the king). Then Nameless and Flying Snow engage in some swordplay that is witnessed by Qin army troops (FWSF4), which ends in Snow’s death. Then Nameless and Broken Sword engage in another flight (FWSF5) that involves flying picturesquely over a lake. The king’s story comes to an end, and he concedes that with all other armed personnel kept more than 100 paces away from him, Nameless is now too close to be thwarted by the king's guards and is in perfect position to carry out his assassination. So the outcome of this story #3 is that Sky and Flying Snow are dead.
4. Nameless Gives Another Account (19 minutes). Nameless concedes that the king’s version of events is partially correct and that he has perfected a move that can kill the king at a distance of 10 paces. But now that he is position to kill the king, he hesitates, and the king asks why. Nameless now says he will explain what really happened, and so he launches into Story #4. First Nameless points out that earlier he had, after long practice, acquired the skill of being able to stab someone with his sword with such accuracy that it would miss all the vital organs and not kill his victim. Thus when he had bested Sky, he had injured him, but had not killed him. Subsequently, when Nameless approached Broken Sword and Flying Snow with his plan to kill the king, Broken Sword did agree that Nameless’s plan could work, but, paradoxically, he insisted that the king of Qin must not be killed. After some more random, showy violence involving Flying Snow, Broken Sword, Nameless, and Moon, Broken Sword is moved to explain why the king must not be killed. He relates (in what we could call Story #5, within Story #4) how, three years earlier, he and Flying Snow had attacked the king’s palace (FWSF6) and had been in the position of finishing off the king. But just then Broken Sword had an insight, based on his training in calligraphy, and realized that the king must not be killed. When Nameless asks for an explanation, Broken Sword writes the characters in the sand, “Tiān Xià”, which is usually understood to mean “all under heaven”, but which is translated in the subtitles as “Our Land”. The outcome of Story #4 is that Sky, Broken Sword, and Flying Snow are all still alive (thanks to Nameless’s uncannily accurate swordsmanship).
5. The Denouement (17 minutes). Nameless now asserts that he finally agrees with Broken Sword that the king must not be killed, and he says to the king, “only your majesty has the power to bring peace by uniting our land.” At the same time the king, who has turned his back on Nameless in a stoic posture of awaiting his execution, contemplates Broken Sword’s calligraphy and surmises that it symbolically signifies that the “sword” should be united with the “heart” and turned to good. The warrior should embrace all around him and ultimately lose his desire to kill. Meanwhile the scene shifts to the distance, where Flying Snow is signaled by a messenger that the assassination attempt has been unsuccessful. Accusing Broken Sword of having seduced Nameless onto the wrong path, Flying Snow challenges him to a duel, in the event of which (FWSF7) Broken Sword drops his sword and allows Flying Snow to kill him. Grief stricken, Flying Snow then kills herself in order to be with Broken Sword in the “after life”. Then, back at the palace, the guards exhort the king to kill Nameless: “if our land is to be united, then this person must be made an example of” (i.e. executed). The king, in his weakness, accepts this verdict and orders the execution, which ends Nameless’s life. The outcome here, finally, is that Broken Sword, Flying Snow, and Nameless are all dead.

Now let us examine the four dimensions of (1) cinematography and mise-en-scène, (2) narrative structure, (3) wuxia action, and (4) thematic content.

1. Cinematography and Mise-en-scène
The cinematography in Hero, credited to Christopher Doyle, although certainly Zhang Yimou had a serious hand in this area, is spectacular throughout. The Australian Doyle achieved fame as Wong Kar Wai’s customary cinematographer, and Wong’s open-ended narrative style has given Doyle the latitude to explore and display his enormous talents in cinematic expressiveness. In some ways, in fact, Doyle could be considered to be a co-creator of Wong’s fascinating and moody filmic creations. Doyle was also the cinematographer of some other noteworthy films, including Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon and Lau’s and Man’s Infernal Affairs (2002). Putting Doyle together with Zhang Yimou on a film is a dream combination.

There are many spectacularly composed presentations: the atmospheric shots of lone warriors riding across desolate landscapes, the shots of the famous Guilin area, the magnificently composed shots of imperial armies waving colored flags and marching in ominous processions. The stories of Nameless, King Zheng, and Broken Sword are presented with individual color motifs that convey a dreamlike feeling to the tales. Nameless’s first stories are told with yellow and red motifs, while King Zheng’s version of the events have a blue motif. Broken Sword’s final story has a green motif, and Nameless’s final encounter with King Zheng is essentially in white and black.

In short, the cinematography and mise-en-scène in the film are the most successful aspects and are probably primarily responsible for the popularity of the film. But given the deficiencies of the story, these pleasures are ephemeral. The dynamic nature of the cinematography means that it does offer more than just picture postcards, but narrative and thematic substance are the real core values of any truly successful film. The dynamic visual expression on display in Hero is diverting, but that is not enough.

2. Narrative Structure
As a narrative, there a number of things fundamentally wrong with Hero. The various stories presented do not fit together into a coherent whole. This problem is aggravated by the various interruptions that take place so that the numerous sword fights can be conducted. In particular, the sword fight between Nameless and Broken Sword that takes place over the lake after Flying Snow’s death is part of the king’s imaginings of what happened, and this is narratively implausible. Even granting poetic license characteristic of this genre, there is no justification for the king to fantasize about this confronation.

In addition, the roles of key players are inconsistent across the various stories, and they do not present believable characters.

• In the end, Broken Sword agrees to fight Flying Snow in a duel, but then lays down his sword at the last minute to prove his pacifism and thereby ensure his own death. Why be so suicidal?
• The king, who claims to be such a strong leader, weakly assents to his guards’ demands to have Nameless executed. Is this the kind of strength of character that can unite a nation?
• The only roles that show even the slightest degree of character depth are those of Nameless and Broken Sword. The others, particularly the women, seem to be artificial insertions only for the purpose of presenting women wielding swords (which seems to be especially popular with wuxia audiences these days). The Moon character is particularly gratuitous, and the Sky character, who is initially presented as a major operative, soon disappears and is not seen again.
• The acting performances seem indifferent. Only Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi show much commitment and passion. Maggie Cheung, whom I have appreciated in other roles, is not put to good effect here. And Jet Li, in the key role of Nameless, is not at all compelling, nor does he generate sympathy to whatever is his cause.

With respect to the overall narrative structure, we should remark that despite the trickiness of the Rashomon-like conflicting versions of what happened, the narrative structure of the story is ultimately awkward and inconsistent. The key motivations behind the passions underlying each element are not provided. As a consequence, the movement from one story to the next seems relatively arbitrary.

3. Wuxia Action
As I have remarked elsewhere in connection with John Woo’s Red Cliff, the Hong Kong martial arts chop fooey (also known as “wire fu”) style is inspired by computer gaming environments and greatly diminishes the sense of reality and immediacy to a film. With various characters able to fly about by merely pointing their fingers, we are talking about another reality, in which the meaningful interactions with which we are familiar are probably meaningless. These wuxia action interruptions, the "FWSFs" described above, are ultimately ludicrous to behold, although one must acknowledge that a considerable degree of effort must have gone into realizing these effects for the screen. My criticism in this respect applies, by the way, equally much to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. In that film there were actually some potentially interesting character relationships, but they were undermined by the excessive degree of wire-fu histrionics. These “magical” effects apparently please the adolescent audiences who spend so much time in vicarious experiences of electronic media that they have only a blurred ability to engage in real authentic interactions.

4. Thematic Content
My biggest concern and disappointment with Hero, however, is concerned with the thematic content. The message that Zhang Yimou delivers in this film is that totalitarian statism is necessary to ensure peace and “unity”. This kind of propaganda may square well with ego-driven Chinese chauvinists concerned about national pride, but it is more a reflection of insecurity than of confidence. The stridency of such a position does not fit with Zhang Yimou’s earlier films, which evoked compassionate sympathies for the everyday feelings, yearnings, and loves of ordinary people.

Ruthless totalitarian dictatorships invariably attempt to justify themselves by claiming that they are the only bulwark against an even worse condition: chaos and anarchy. It is true that given such exclusive either-or alternatives, one may accept the preferability of one unsavory option to the other – thus Saddam Hussein’s depredations in Iraq may well have been preferable to the brutal violence that has since ensued. But such evaluations render neither Hussein’s government nor that of Qin Shi Huang (Ying Zheng) as ultimately desirable, and the either-or proposition should not be accepted as the only possibility.

The controversial reign of Qin Shi Huang is always viewed in the context of the Chinese Warring States Period (476 BCE - 221 BCE), during which the original Zhou dynasty had broken up into separate states, which by the end of that period had coalesced into seven mutually contesting regional states. During that period many contemporary commentators bemoaned the disunity of China and were severely pessimistic about the future. They felt that China had fallen onto evil times. Even before this time, and ever since, Chinese writers have longed for national unity that could bring harmony “under heaven”. Thus apologists for Qin Shi Huang, such as Zhang Yimou in Hero, will argue that compromising with the demands of such a leader was (and apparently always is) necessary for the “national interests”.

But this is only one side of the story. In fact, the Warring States Period was one of the most fertile and productive eras in Chinese history [1]. There were major, in fact world-leading, scientific and technical innovations made. Intellectual ferment was at its highest and led to the emergence of the “100 Hundred Schools of Thought”, that included Daoism, Confucianism, and Legalism. The economy flourished, and as a consequence, the population greatly expanded during this period. Although there were inter-state wars, these were, until the latter stages of the era, mostly undertaken by professional armies and were not so devastating to the general population as later wars were. When Qin Shi Huang closed the period and established his police state, he put an end to all this creative development.

Examining at a 2200-year distance the balance sheet of the reign of Qin Shi Huang reveals some stark results. On the presumed positive side, his reign led to

• the standardization of written text
• the standardization of money
• a national road system
• improved waterways
• the Great Wall (at a reported cost of one million laborers)

But on the negative side there were several devastating occurrences:

• Massive Human Slaughters. There were enormous sacrifices of human life in order to carry out the public works projects, including military campaigns. In 260 BCE when the Qin army defeated the Zhao state, it slaughtered the whole surrendered Zhao army of 400,000 men, in one of the greatest acts of brutality in history. 
  
  
• Book Burning [2]:
  "Standardization of thought was an important goal in Legalist doctrine and in Qin policies. Philosophical thinking was considered detrimental to the efficient working and fighting that the state required of its subjects, and thinking could lead to treasonable questioning of state policies. The Qin state therefore prohibited philosophical disputation of the sort that had flourished in the Warring States era . . . In 213 BCE all writing other than official Qin historical chronologies and utilitarian treatises on divination, the practice of agriculture and medicine, and the like were collected for burning. . . . Because intellectuals found it hard to change their ways, the emperor in 212 B.C. reportedly executed 460 scholars and had them buried in a common grave as a warning against further defiance of his orders."
    
• Public Surveillance. The Qin emperor initiated the notorious institution (which still survives in China) of dividing up the whole country into a set of small mutual-surveillance units to maintain micromanaged control and intimidation. Even today, citizens are not allowed to gather without official sanction. The Olympic Ceremonies and the 60th Anniversary Celebrations of the Communist government (both orchestrated officially by Zhang Yimou) could not be attended by the public, but could only be watched on television [3].

In fact the greatest periods of Chinese fecundity and prosperity occurred when government was relatively weak and consensus-based – during the Warring States Era and during the Song Dynasty. Both of these eras were ultimately shut down by authoritarian regimes (Qin Shi Huang in the first instance and the Mongolian takeover in the second instance) that turned the country into a police state for more efficient plunder of the citizenry. The fact that the Chinese people ultimately recovered from these disasters is to their everlasting credit, but the grim consequences of totalitarian control should not be masqueraded as virtues today. The emergence of China in the last thirty years has not been due to the manipulations of an overly controlling government, but instead due to a partial relaxation of the control mentality that has had the effect of unleashing the creative brilliance of the people.

This brings us back to how we may interpret Zhang Yimou’s perspective on these issues. It is disappointing that almost all of my own Chinese friends and associates regard Hero as Zhang’s best film, and specifically because of its political message of sacrifice to the national cause above all other considerations of human compassion and fulfilment. They don’t like to see films that may show China in a "weak" light and thereby reduce its prestige. For them the semantic understanding of the prhase “Tiān Xià” seems to carry more of the national chauvinistic intent of “Our Land” (with an emphasis on "our", as opposed to "your") than the traditional Chinese understanding of simply “everything under heaven”. This concern for national pride on Zhang’s part may also be reflected in what happened in 1999 when he withdrew his submitted films to the Cannes Film Festival, The Road Home and Not One Less, because he reportedly felt that his films were invariably being judged on political grounds that suggested criticism of China [4,5].

Or maybe not – maybe the strident undertone of Zhang Yimou's Hero was only temporary, a hiccup. When he later produced the opera, “The First Emperor”, in 2006, which was also about Qin Shi Huang, the theme of the opera was highly critical with respect to its subject. And his Curse of the Golden Flower (Man Cheng Jin Dai Huang Jin Jia, 2006) was another artistic turn altogether at the grandiose historical epic – on that occasion Zhang Yimou gave us something that was darker and much deeper than his two preceding epics.
★★

Notes:

1. Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, Cambridge University Press (1996).
2. Charles O. Hucker, China’s Imperial Past, Stanford University Press (1975), p. 43.
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/30/china-60th-anniversary-communist-party
4. http://www.freemedialibrary.com/index.php/Zhang_Yimou_withdraws_from_Cannes
5. http://www.beijingscene.com/V05I007/inshort/inshort.htm