The revolution will not be televised, last I heard, but I swear you can catch a glimpse of it this week over at your local movie theater. It's easy on the eyes and goes down velvety smooth, but it's a revolution all the same. The revolution has a name, House of Flying Daggers, and the person responsible for it is the Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou. You may remember Zhang as the director of Red Sorghum, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern — thoughtful, politically charged masterpieces that brought China to the forefront of the international-cinema stage a decade or so ago, by displaying an artistry as sophisticated as that of any Western whippersnapper's. Now, with the immensely entertaining and hugely profitable House of Flying Daggers — already a box office monster in Asia, and poised to make a similar killing stateside — Zhang completes his conquest of the West by beating Hollywood at its own game. The director who once opened our minds with esoteric art is now seducing us with sheer, kickass spectacle and engaging in what might just be the most revolutionary act of all — opening up our pocketbooks.
With the one-two punch of Hero and, now, House of Flying Daggers, Zhang has successfully morphed from art house auteur to consummate craftsman and popular entertainer. His work remains elegant and visually stunning, but while his earlier films resembled a series of evocatively textured classical paintings, his new movies display all the outsized fizz and unnaturally vivid imagery of old Communist propaganda posters. It's as if Zhang were some later day De Kooning, an artist gripped by an Alzheimer's-like disease stripping his mind of "unnecessary" layers while paring his work down to an essence. In Zhang's case, that essence doesn't turn out to be the intellectual or metaphysical ideas propelling his earlier movies, but simply the films' pure, indomitable visual force. For better or worse, Zhang Yimou has become a quintessential maker of pretty pictures, and House of Flying Daggers is his prettiest yet.
At a glance, the film is the latest in that modern cycle of art-fu epics initiated by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and cross-fertilized by Kill Bill Volume One, movies that, at their best, turn swordfights and hand-to-hand combat into acts of transcendental poetry. House of Flying Daggers is a simpler, less demanding tale than any of its immediate predecessors, with less characters and fewer sub-plots to keep track of, and a central storyline that simply involves a man and a woman falling in love while making a dangerous journey together in 9th- century China.
The woman is Mei (Zhang Ziyi), a sightless but exceedingly skillful member of the Flying Daggers, an underground organization dedicated to overthrowing the country's unpopular and corrupt government. The handsome stranger at her side is Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a government deputy concealing his true identity from Mei in order to uncover the secrets of the Flying Daggers.
The movie is essentially one long, nearly unbroken string of astonishing battle sequences, beautifully filmed and imaginatively choreographed, with the star-crossed couple coming to terms with their growing affection for one another in between bouts of fending off various attackers. There are also some 11th- hour twists where the secrets fall so thick and fast it nearly spoils the movie's effect, but the film resolves itself in a grand finale that's operatic in the best sense of the word, leaving us satisfied and a little excited at having experienced something so breathtaking.
Despite all the extravagant visual poetry (and the somewhat dopey last act revelations), House of Flying Daggers is pretty straightforward stuff that works in a more intimate, emotionally direct way than Zhang's previous and somewhat similar Hero. Where Hero dabbled in history and some fairly complex, Rashomon-like rooting around in the nature of truth, Zhang's new movie is content to glide along in an eye-popping but more or less natural universe, dazzling us with state-of-the-art clashes while hammering away at that most universal of themes: the power of love. There's not much more to it than that, but the film is such a gorgeous entertainment that it's easy to forgive its lack of depth.
Zhang's images have always spoken louder than his words, anyway, and the imagery in House of Flying Daggers practically blows down walls. Everything about the film is designed to inspire oohs and aahs (although the CGI effects occasionally border on overkill), from the opulent interiors of a Chinese brothel to the exquisitely composed vistas of vast fields and forests of bamboo. There's an intriguing frisson, too, resulting from the movie's big battle scenes taking place mostly in sun-dappled meadows more suitable for a lovers' picnic than the massive spillings of blood that actually occur there.
You might think of House of Flying Daggers as an autumnal film, and not just because of the season in which it takes place. This is a tale tinged with just enough measured melancholy to keep things interesting, and, what with all those splendid, last-gasp-of-life colors of fall up on the screen, you can practically feel the warmth in the air turning crisp and chilly as the film unfolds. In a heartbeat and right before our eyes, the season ultimately does turn to winter during a final, cataclysmic battle between romantic rivals (the battle we know everything's been leading up to); a radical change of seasons far too instantaneous to be taken as anything but symbolic. What the film is showing us here is not a passage of time but nothing less than the eternal persistence of some very larger-than-life emotions.
Either that or Zhang just knew how cool all that red, red blood would look on all that pretty white snow. In any event, the message is loud and clear: Love is stronger than death, more powerful than even politics. That might seem old hat for Hollywood, but it remains a dangerous and very revolutionary thing for a Chinese filmmaker to say, even in these enlightened times.
lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2005.