Hero, again.

Hero.

The Rainbow revisited.

Zhang Yimou's 2002 film Hero is set 2300 years ago in China, when the tyrannical King of Qin (who later became China's first emperor) is bloodily conquering neighbouring provinces.      Three skilled assassins, two men and a woman, intend to kill this tyrant, but they are thwarted by a country Marshall, who claims to have killed all three.  He is presented to the King, who wants to know how he managed this remarkable feat.  

The Marshall tells him how love, betrayal, jealousy and revenge undid the assassin’s  conspiracy.     The King  does not believe him, and offers another explanation.  The Marshall admits that his story is not true, but only because he did not think the king would accept the truth.   So he tells him another version.   Each of these stories is filmed in a different dominant and emblematic colour.   This is perhaps the most beautiful film I have ever seen.  The bold use of colour to separate the different plot lines, and give each  of them a useful visual mnemonic, also  illustrates  the differing view of humanity implicit in each segment.  

Wuxia?

Hero  presents itself as a Chinese martial arts, or xuwia movie, building on the cinematic tradition of the Run-Run Shaw Studios in Hong Kong and ancient Chinese quasi-historical folk tales.  Hero found a world-wide audience thanks, in  part,  to the success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon  (2000).     But, unlike Crouching Tiger, Hero is not a homage to the genre,  but profoundly subverts it. 

Let me put this in context, firsty by saying that Chinese and Japanese martial arts movies are not at all the same.  The Japanese genre, exemplified by the Yojimbo and Zatoichi franchises,  are based round the Samurai codes, and are overtly influenced by the American Western. (Kurosawa idolized John Ford movies, and Hollywood repaid him by filming his Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven).   In Japanese and American films the lone hero sides arrives in town, with the victims of injustice and engages in explicitly bloody fights, lopping off limbs and heads with his sword or shooting them down.    He then moves on.   These films appeal to the Quentin Tarantino of  Kill Bill and Django Unchained.    The Chinese films also echo the themes of honour and vengeance that shape many classic Samurai and Western movies, but they are very different.  

Unlike the Japanese films, violence in classic  wuxia films is not bloody and explicit (in Hero there are many deadly duels, but hardly any blood)  though of course some recent directors have pandered profitably to the Western taste for gore.   In true wuxia the fights are choreographed like ballets, and the acrobatic wire-work that allows the actors to fly and complete complex aerial maneuvers illustrates the spiritual nature of the conflict.    This is good versus evil, part of an ongoing cosmic and supernatural battle.  Success in wuxia battle depends, therefore, less on muscle than on purity of intent.  That is why women can compete on equal terms.

Heroines

Most of Zimou’s films have women at their centre.    His original star and muse was the actress Gong Li.    Hero stars Maggie Cheung, and the dancer Zhang Ziyi, who later played the female lead in the House of Flying Daggers, Banquet and Memoirs of a Geisha.    Despite a recent Japanese remake of Zatoichi with a female protagonist (Ichi, the Blind Swordswoman),  women in Samurai movies are almost always victims, the equivalent of the helpless screaming blonde rescued by the granite jawed hero in (too) many European and American westerns and thrillers.  

The Chinese heroine, on the other hand,  is often the daughter of a dead General, betrayed by his Emperor or fellow officers.   The daughter then trains herself to wreak honourable and necessary revenge, often leading a faithful gang.   Sometimes the women are simply independent gang leaders.   Whatever, they do not whimper.

From Banned to Beijing.

Zimou’s films have always been subversive.  His early movies were banned by the Chinese Government for being critical of the patriarchal Confucian tradition (Raise the Red Lantern), the uncaring Communist state (Qiu Ju), or for portraying powerful female sexuality (Red Sorghum, and Shanghai Triad).       In Hero he takes on the tradition of vengeance being honourable, and turns it upside down.   I will not say how here, but only that this is a movie arguing for peace, not war, in a complex essay in light, love and morality.

Eventually the Chinese authorities recognized Zimou’s talent and invited him to direct the opening of the Beijing Olympics ceremony.    (Maybe the UK Olympic Committee learnt from that when they invited our leading film director Danny Boyle to direct ours.) 

Zhang Yimou originally trained as a cinematographer, and has always used colour with great bravura.     Hero is shot by the Hong Kong based Australian  Christopher Doyle, who also shot Ang Lee’s  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon  and the worked on the exquisite Wong Kar-Wai  film In The Mood For Love (see below).  

Much as I enjoyed Ang Lee's film, Hero impresses and moves me more profoundly.

This film is, in my opinion,  concerned with what it means to be human, and part of my deep enjoyment comes from finding within it values and themes close to my Christian heart.  

Hero also stars Jet Li, Tony Leung and Donnie Yen. 

 

*In The Mood For Love  also stars Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, but in radically different roles.   It is set in 1960’s Hong Kong, and tells of two people, Su and Chou,  who move into neighbouring flats.   Each has a spouse who works long hours.   Each of them nurses suspicions about their own spouse's fidelity, and when they meet they come to the conclusion that their partners have been seeing each other.   In their isolation they are drawn closer together.  

In November 2009 Time Out New York ranked this film as the fifth-best of the decade, calling it the "consummate unconsummated love story of the new millennium."    

In the 2012 British Film Institute’s  Sight and Sound critics poll,  In the Mood for Love appeared at number 24, making it the highest ranked film from the 2000s and one of only two films from the 2000s to be listed in the top 50 films of all time.  

It also competes with Hero for its visual beauty, a testament to Chris Doyle’s  ability to work with different emotional and narrative palates.