The finer aesthetics of ass-kicking.
Asian audiences evidently expect much more from their actors than pretty faces. Try asking Kirsten Dunst or Kate Hudson to sing an ancient Chinese folk song while performing a classical dance in full costume, and then to take down handily a dozen or so machete-wielding cops-just a small sample of the feats required of Zhang Ziyi in
House of Flying Daggers
. Despite being cast as yet another fierce swordswoman, Zhang (
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
and the forthcoming
Memoirs of a Geisha
) isn't really a trained martial artist but a dancer and singer, both skills on display here.
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And it helps to have such a physically talented lead actress when all that really matters are the film's almost excessively stunning visuals.
An ancient Chinese dynasty finds itself threatened by the eponymous underground resistance group
House of Flying Daggers
(hmm, wonder which weapon
they
prefer). When one government police officer casually remarks to another that a suspected member of the Flying Daggers works as a showgirl at the Peony Pavilion, they investigate. Of course she's the ravishingly lovely-and blind-Mei (Zhang Ziyi) and boy howdy can she stop the show. The two men (Andy Lau as baby-faced but sadistic Leo, and Takeshi Kaneshiro as the hunky, slightly clueless Jin) devise a plan to earn Mei's trust so that she'll lead them to the Daggers' secret headquarters-but who is leading whom, and where? The plot has more twists than licorice, and various startling revelations unfold in an increasingly violent accelerando.
Director Zhang Yimou (
Hero
,
Ju Dou
,
Raise the Red Lantern
,
Red Sorghum
-the man is practically an entire Chinese production company) sets up his fight-dance sequences deliberately, stalking each shot like a naturalist. The very first slow-paced set piece may be the best, an "Echo" in which Leo flings dried beans at massive drums arranged in a circle, while the blind Mei must listen for and copy his movements. As the beans ricochet and become a swarm of flying projectiles, Mei matches him defiantly blow for blow amid fabulous camera angles, throbbing sound and fava-bean POV shots. Mei's pink silk sleeves become her weapons, sleek and impossibly precise, for all the world like long recoiling frog tongues.
Martial-arts cinema of late seems to be all highly choreographed sharp pointy things and swaths of fabric, "balletic" being the staple term in critical parlance; perhaps we've lost
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our taste for fists of fury. Or perhaps plain old unvarnished hand-to-hand combat doesn't satisfy filmmakers' drive to aestheticize brutality to ever-greater degrees. Blood can't just flow onscreen anymore, but must be flung in graceful arcs and arabesques hither and thither, to land picturesquely in the snow-used here to fine effect, by the way, along with the now-obligatory bamboo grove.
Zhang Yimou originally conceived
House of Flying Daggers
as a companion piece for
Hero
, but the stories couldn't be more different. Here the theme plays out Greek-tragedy style, underpinned by a simple equation: Two boys plus one girl equals one big problem.
Flying Daggers
explores the skewed logic of love, loyalty and revenge, and becomes not about politics but the human drama of the three people before us, locked in their final anguished fight, a
Reservoir Dogs
-style troika stand-off. Either that, or commenting on the state of the tiger economies requires some very elaborate metaphors.
