December 16-22, 2004

movies

The Good Fight

new kicks: Zhang Ziyi takes names in House of Flying Daggers.

House of Flying Daggers' old-style seduction is irresistible.

by Sam Adams

The second movie in a year to open with a Shaw Bros. logo, House of Flying Daggers is as fond a tribute to martial arts classics as the Kill Bills, if a significantly less frenetic one. Unlike the abstract backdrops of Zhang Yimou's belatedly released Hero, made two years previously but not released by sticky-fingered Miramax until August, House is set in familiar locations: two-tiered teahouses, bamboo forests, opulent palaces. But Zhang's vibrant lyricism, his operatic dynamics—it hasn't been so long since he mounted a Chinese production of Turandot—give the genre new aesthetic life, while the film's fluid, fantastic action sequences pay mind to its basic appeal (not a claim you can make for Tsai Ming-Liang's abstruse Goodbye Dragon Inn).

To anyone whose heart quickened at the intense Technicolors of early Zhang masterpieces like Raise the Red Lantern, the relative drabness of his forays into DV neorealism, The Road Home and Not One Less, couldn't help but occasion a twinge. But whether Zhang was cleansing his palette or merely saving his paints, his recent movies have again exploded with fantastic hues. Though House isn't as rigorously color-coded as Hero, the tone of scenes is what you remember as much as anything else: the underwater greens of a forest confrontation, or the golds and purples of an audience chamber. Next to that, the story, the characters, even the action, are secondary.

That's saying a lot, considering how extraordinary the movie's performances can be. Self-consciously classicist, the story of two police deputies trying to track down an anti-imperial secret society is shamelessly thin, merely thread strung between torrid, neck-up love scenes and awesome battles as unreal as they are captivating. It takes nothing away from Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro, who play the pursuing, identity-switching deputies, to say that the movie rests squarely on Zhang Ziyi's supple shoulders, and seems to take its cues from her combination of nimble grace and bubbling-under eroticism. The camera may be wielded by Zhao Xiaoding, but it seems to be a direct expression of Zhang Yimou's love affair with his (unrelated) leading lady's features. As Mei, a blind courtesan recruited to infiltrate the Flying Daggers, Zhang Ziyi manifests a faraway calm that shifts to a knife-edge acuity the moment she goes on the attack. In the already celebrated "echo game" sequence, Mei's pride quickly overcomes her sense of caution, and she reveals her not-so-hidden abilities by striking at stationary drums with the whip-like extensions of her flowing robe, a perfect metaphor of feminine grace distilled to a lethal force.

It's hard to know whether the American movie industry has lost the power of making stars, or whether it's the constant dragging through tabloid mud that dulls their luster before they've had a chance to shine. But whether it's because a star like Zhang Ziyi comes to us mainly unencumbered by sordid personal backstory, or because Chinese censorship forces Zhang Yimou into the same system of codes that Hollywood directors bore under the Hays Office, Zhang Ziyi's performance crackles with an energy spotted only fleetingly in past decades. Invoking Marlene Dietrich or Ingrid Bergman may seem hyperbolic, but then neither of them could kick worth a damn.

The complaint from some genre fans is that Zhang Yimou has done no more than give an underfunded tradition a glossy coat of paint, that House of Flying Daggers is just Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in new clothing. But Zhang's deeply felt relationship to the material is evident in the care with which he stages his scenes, which bespeaks soul rather than art direction. Unlike the swelling and occasionally swollen Hero, House leaves room to laugh at its own too-muchness; it may include some of Zhang's most intricate designs, but it also includes his first squirrel joke. There's a slight hollowness at its center, a vacuum where the pulp should be. The action sequences don't build so much as stack up, and the line between classic and cliche starts to blur. But when a movie gives such jolts, it seems miserly to complain. Hero took deserved heat for endorsing imperial repression, rationalizing the sacrifice of truth to national unity (even if it did underline the price of that sacrifice). House of Flying Daggers takes a different route towards unity: It doesn't force people to submit; it makes them want to. Coaxing rather than coercing, its seduction may be dangerous, but it's irresistible.

House of Flying Daggers Directed by Zhang Yimou A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse recommended