Item 13 Annotated

A review of House of Flying Daggers

By Peter Bradshaw  

 

Zhang Yimou has only just finished seducing us with his gorgeous extravaganza Hero. Now, almost without missing a beat in his career, he has conjured another extraordinary, swoonworthy spectacle. This martial-arts romance delivers what I can only call a narco-exotic rush; it has the power of Hero and the reach of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - and might simply surpass them both with its unexpectedly painful and complex love story.

Hong Kong megastar Andy Lau plays Leo, a police captain in AD 859, the era of China's failing Tang dynasty. With his fellow officer Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) he is forced to battle a secret society, the Flying Daggers, dedicated to overthrowing the government. Neither man appears able to credit sensational new intelligence in their possession: that one of the Daggers' most dangerous agents is Mei, a beautiful blind dancing girl, exquisitely played by Zhang Ziyi, who is fast becoming the It Girl of Asia and probably the rest of the world as well. The two men close in on Mei, and their triangulated relationship is a fraught drama of double-cross and triple-cross, where nothing is as it seems, and whose impostures conceal a passionate, tragic love story.

When the truth about this love is revealed, it sheds a startling, retrospective light on the movie's opening scene - which heaven knows was jaw-dropping enough in the first place. The two agents turn up individually at a house of ill-repute, the Peony Palace, to watch Mei dance: a piece of choreography turning into a thrilling fight scene between Mei and Leo that had audiences gasping and cheering both times I've watched the film. The Peony Palace itself is one of the most remarkable movie sets I've ever seen: massive in scale, attended by hundreds of supporting artists in full costume, and sumptuously and intricately designed with ostentation that goes beyond vulgarity or absurdity. I just wanted to step through the screen and wander around this incredible, dream-like place. (Has this set now been demolished? Can it not be preserved for posterity? If so, it would be a real tribute to production designer Huo Tingxiao and art director Zhong Han.)

We are then treated to horseplay and swordplay in outdoor locations: a forest, a wheatfield and an open plain which with superbly achieved, painterly craft becomes a winter snow-scene. Bamboo canes are chopped down with stroboscopic brilliance to form palisade-cages and improvised spears. The Flying Daggers themselves are a dedicated band of men and women who are very handy with the airborne silverware. If I had any quarrel with the film, it is that these scenes in which we are given a dagger's eye-view as the weapon whizzes through the air, locked on to a hapless target, become a little bit repetitive. These reservations evaporate, however, with the emotional heat of the final moments and the sheer escapist enjoyment the film provides.

Entertainments like this have been criticised as Sino-American inventions, cumbersome magic-realist versions of martial arts, custom built for western audiences, which piously subtract the comedy that Asian audiences have traditionally enjoyed. Added to this criticism is the recent suggestion that Hero, with its bullish theme of Chinese unification, was in tune with a new reactionary patriotism. I can only say that if this Hollywood-ised wuxia is a new form of the genre, it's all the more exciting for that. As for its alleged chauvinism, this movie's content is much more ambiguous than that. The government is corrupt; the rebels are virtuous; we hardly know who is on whose side and the disguises and subterfuge are almost a reminder of Andy Lau's cynical Hong Kong cop thriller Infernal Affairs. House of Flying Daggers is hardly an uncritical piece of cheerleading for the Chinese state.

Zhang Ziyi, Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro are all outstanding - perhaps especially Lau for whom this film is another major career advance - and their humanly convincing characters give the film's extravagant fantasy an arrowhead of emotional power. It's the kind of gorgeous romantic adventure that makes going to the cinema so deeply worthwhile.