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At its best, The House of Flying Daggers is like no other movie. In this
respect, it is like Umbrellas of Cherbourg, An Actor's Revenge, Prospero's
Books, and Flowers of Shanghai, films that are in the category of no category.
These films are unique because they belong to genres that consist of single
movies. Daggers, for example, feels sweat-dappled, fleshy, and mud-flung
but also impossibly light, glamorously artificial-even more obviously
aestheticized than the already buoyantly ersatz Hero, Zhang Yimou's last
martial-arts movie. In Daggers, the film's supporting cast of green-robed
rebels and hack-and-slashing Chinese troops materializes and vanishes
as though out of a bloodless, virtualized video game world-a reflection,
we say to ourselves, of the film's own preference for game-like reversals
rather than earthy slug-outs. But the fight scenes are heaving, sweatily
realist, far more Kill Bill Vol. 2 than Kill Bill Vol. 1, and Daggers
feels far more visceral, bounding with real life-as opposed to tongue-in-cheek
or stagy life-than any real Hong Kong wuxia movie. Yet Daggers' physicality
is "about" nothing. Its wonderful, shallow details possess neither
plot nor radiance behind them to prop them up with meaning. The nearsighted
flight of arrows; the theatrical snowstorm that heaps the ending onscreen,
like the confetti that sprinkles onstage at the beginning of An Actor's
Revenge and slowly fades to snow; the unattainable softly almost New England
sunlight glancing through the bristling woods; the fashion model faces
of the film's two young stars, so perfect as to seem oddly fake (who in
1991 would have predicted that Andy Lau would have played the ugly guy
in a Zhang Yimou-directed mainland Chinese movie?)-all this lazy empiricism
leads nowhere. An opera on helium, House of Flying Daggers is a wondrously
weightless melodrama.
Daggers is not really a wuxia movie but a detective story that uses martial
arts conventions: Infernal Affairs with green robes and swords. Captains
Jin (Chungking Express' Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Leo (Andy Lau, possibly
the most famous HK celebrity yet to cross over) want to stop a rogue group
of dagger-throwers-called, in case you haven't guessed, the House of Flying
Daggers-from messing with the Tang Dynasty. What's their plan? Captain
Leo sends Jin to infiltrate and hit on Mei (Zhang Ziyi, who still lacks
Gong Li's iconic singularity but makes up for it by seeming shiningly,
exploitatively young), a blind brothel dancer who may or may not be the
daughter of the former Dagger House head honcho. This uncertainty converts
the film into a mystery, as Jin must figure out the location and identity
of the House of Flying Daggers, the mysterious identity of Mei, his own
ultimate loyalty and that of Captain Leo, as well as-hell, why not-the
fate of the Chinese empire! While the Chinese troops, prone to tossing
around sharpened bamboo poles, and the practically invisible, circular-hatted,
dagger-throwing rogues close in-what do Mei and Jin do? They fall in love,
silly! The film starts as a flirty wuxia epic, springy, floral, excited
with possibility, as alive as, say, Indiana Jones or Star Wars and more
startlingly beautiful than either, and ends up as Titanic-a silly, pompous
love story where the audience nods obligatorily and says to itself, "Yeah,
I get it, I'm supposed to feel sad now."
Daggers limps with flaws. As in Hero, the characters are still not really
free agents or people but couture furniture items gliding along Zhang
Yimou's pre-assigned tracks. The movie also lacks a sense of humor-a deficiency
we could previously just attribute to Zhang's spartan realism. (When one
criticizes a work for lacking a sense of humor, one is really criticizing
the non-humorous elements of the work for failing to distract you; no
one complains about the sober, non-jokiness of Bresson or Hou Hsiao Hsien.)
These faults arise because House of Flying Daggers is-like Hero-an aesthetically
self-conscious, surprisingly intellectual movie. These films are "intellectual"
not because they are especially intelligent or because they have a "message";
Daggers, like Hero, feels distant and aestheticized because it takes its
patterning, its dittoed motifs and color-coded robes, far more seriously
than the contents of those patterns-the people who would fill those robes.
This condescension towards the more impure, contingent elements of plot-like
place names and personal quirks-may change our view of Zhang Yimou more
than his implied conversion to Beijing authoritarianism in Hero. While
great works convince us that an artist has an oeuvre, atypical works are
often more interesting-they can rewrite our understanding of that oeuvre.
2046, for example, may make the words "Wong Kar-Wai" refer to
"the ambitious but incoherent, lush fantasist of Ashes of Time,"
rather than our current, more studio apartment definition ("lovesick
chronicler of urban anomie"). Hero and House of Flying Daggers similarly
suggest that Zhang's closest relative may not be Chen Kaige, the neorealists,
or Bergman, but Alain Resnais! Like Last Year at Marienbad, Daggers withholds
audience identification and all the lovably subtextual details of quotidian
life. We never know what the characters have for breakfast. In exchange,
like many Resnais movies, Daggers offers a purer, occasionally less satisfying,
aesthetic world of question and argument. It is pure the way Persona,
2001, Breathless, pure the way novels written by poets are pure: factless,
unironic, lyrical, unfunny. Thus, the film has a Turing machine's idea
of character, an idea too novelistic, rambunctious, and thorny for poetry.
In Daggers, Zhang Ziyi's Mei is blind or is not blind. Mei is the daughter
of the House of Flying Daggers's leader or she is not. Mei is Mei or someone
who calls herself Mei. Mei loves Jin or she does not. Jin and Leo are
Chinese soldiers or they are not. Jin and Leo are the protagonists or
they are not. Zhang Yimou toggles these facts back and forth, like those
children's books where by manipulating a series of horizontal flaps, we
can give an elephant's head to a giraffe or hooves to a dolphin. We sense
that these are not factual details of a fictitious world-they are variables.
Zhang's martial arts movies have had their own aesthetics as their real
subject matter-not empty formalism, but an almost metafictional suspicion
of genre. Americanized, lacking the conventions of Hong Kong martial arts
flicks, both Hero and Daggers are anti-martial arts films: Hero deconstructed
martial arts; House of Flying Daggers deconstructs film. In Hero, the
two greatest fighters in the world die, intentionally, after deciding
not to fight, both having decided that domination was the highest form
of peace; Hero is a martial arts movie skeptical about the ultimate efficacy
of fighting. Similarly, Daggers appears to be a film "about"
theatricality and the fakeness of acting. In the film's first half, Zhang
and Takeshi act almost ostentatiously badly, like goofy, dreamy-eyed cartoon
people, bouncing around, propagandizing their fairy tale emotions. But
as the secrets are revealed, we learn that they (as in their characters)
have been just acting all along: Takeshi's Jin is an imperial soldier
pretending to be a rebel and Zhang's Mei is a rebel pretending to be a
harem girl (itself already a theatrical occupation). Daggers thus resembles
movies about acting, undercover spies, and con men: in these genres, good
acting paradoxically means bad acting, for only bad acting would correctly
represent the flawed dramaturgy of normal people. Most of Daggers's events
thus seem girded to a double pattern-everything occurs first as playful
theatrics and second as a more ominous reality: Mei hits targets in the
Pleasure Pavilion and then does the same in the woods; she tells Jin to
leave twice with counter-intuitively injurious results and, most sentimentally,
sings a Han dynasty lyric about a kingdom-destroying beauty, first as
pop tune and then as autobiographical epitaph. In the most meaningful,
not merely rhyme-like echoes, the second event re-explains the first with
a vicious, ironic nostalgia. This curious parallelism is what makes Daggers
more than a mere genre movie. Girded by the rails of pattern rather than
real plot, the film feels blithe, difficult to pin down, and categorically
ambiguous-a fact implied by its various titles. While the American title
is lovingly lowbrow and Shaw Brothers, the Chinese title is weighty, sleek,
noirish, and launched into objective fact ("Ambushed in Ten Directions"),
the Japanese one romantic and vaguely French ("The Lovers").
Daggers, however, is director Zhang Yimou's follow-up to the callowly
beautiful Hero and, like that movie and a number of others (Ashes of Time,
Bride with the White Hair, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kill Bill,
Zatoichi, Warriors of Heaven and Earth, and, in a way, Goodbye Dragon
Inn), it belongs to a martial arts/art-house genre of films by hip young
directors upgrading genres they loved as teenagers-"martial arts
plus."
Daggers, like other "martial arts plus" movies, is visually
buoyant, well choreographed, and willing to drag Hong Kong movie conventions
up by the collar. In one scene, Kaneshiro's character, Jin, pegs a squad
of Chinese troops with his bow and arrow. They fall down, dead. After
Jin and Mei take off, the soldiers straggle up, brush the dirt off, and
the arrows fall out from the soldier's armpits, sashes, and loose articles
of clothing-Jin has purposely just barely missed all of them! This burlesque
image-macho imperial soldiers playing possum-is Hong Kong convention.
In the opening battlefield sequence of Tsui Hark's first Swordsman remake,
a soldier stumbles onto another soldier's corpse. But the supposedly dead
soldier opens his eyes and admonishes the first to get his own spot! Zhang
complicates this display of Jin's over-the-top prowess when, halfway through
the movie, Jin ends up flinging arrows at imperial soldiers-the guys on
his side-and it seems fatally obvious that this time (to use my Jean-Claude
Van Damme movie preview voice) he's shooting to kill. The Hong Kong convention
(already a subversion of our war film clichés) is itself subverted.
"Martial arts plus" movies tend to be fun, hysterical, and lifeless:
they conflate Hong Kong exoticism, choreography, and zany exploitation
flick bloodletting with American production values and the most potent
Hollywood commodity of all-rampant sentimentality. But, like many martial
arts plus movies, Daggers is also never really touching. It is willing
to trade emotions (things so intrinsically ascetic that we cannot even
see them) for the aestheticism of production values, spectacle, and homage.
Because they quantify lyrical effects, martial arts plus films hoard their
art rather then saving them up only for the most crucial, tactical moments.
These effects end up micromanaging the movie and, as style-anthologies,
films like Kill Bill rarely meld together into larger, mist-like whole.
So the martial arts plus movie (like noir, surrealist art films, musicals,
and Godard) must answer a rather unromantic question: is mere art enough
for art?
The problem with martial-arts-plus aesthetics is actually that they are
not aesthetic enough-if by aesthetic, we also mean quirky, individualistic,
deviantly fresh. This is the difference between generic, gauzy failures
(Hero or Kill Bill Vol. 1) and the fuller, quirkier successes (Ashes of
Time and House of Flying Daggers). The former movies have a parasitical
relationship to art, while the latter create it. Let's call the former
movies "rhetorical" and the latter movies "specific."
Works are "rhetorical" if they can be paraphrased without losing
fidelity, "specific," if any summary would inevitably leave
something out. The following notable or recent films are viciously, dumbly
rhetorical: The Dreamers, The Hours, Goodbye Lenin, the last two Matrix
movies, Femme Fatale, The Red Violin, most Merchant-Ivory movies, The
Shawshank Redemption, Cinema Paradiso, American Beauty-all barely-peopled
movies where the characters are stand-ins, mannequins. As their sentimental,
soundtrack-cudgeling characterization, rhetorical works are deficient,
embedded works. They are embedded because they lack the rupturing uniqueness
to be anything other than a symptom of their society; this is why rhetorical
works often partake of parable, kitsch, parody and satire, pastiche, propaganda,
nostalgia, and mass art. They are deficient because they lack aesthetic
adventurousness, camouflaging themselves with shared clichés and
signals. As Manny Farber once wrote, comparing similar scenes in an ossified,
late Godard film to an early one, "Adultery is neither represented
nor symbolized in traditional terms; it is rather triggered like Pavlov's
dog by a series of associations which remind us of earlier movies."
Unoriginal and sentimental, rhetorical works tap into the generic longings,
biases, and sorrows of the community, instead of springing from the less
universal, quick-darting individual brain
It is easy for documentaries, neorealist films, and comedies to be specific,
since life and humor are inescapably quirky, and hard for abstract, metaphysical
works-such as Marienbad, Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Toto the Hero, Amelie,
and in literature, the works of Kafka and Borges-to be other than virtuously
rhetorical, since these works want to be only their ideas. The terms are
therefore not normative. Neither type of work is necessarily better than
the other. Rhetorical works are merely usually worse. They tend to be
strong on plot and poor on character-since characters, unlike plots, degrade
in reality as they're cloned from film to film. What often makes the anomalously
great rhetorical film great is the way acting lights a film with individuality.
The difference, for example, between Zhang and his Fifth Generation Chinese
competitor, Chen Kaige is that almost all of Zhang's earlier films are
precise, bawdy, and subtly psychological; this can be said of only two
of Chen's major films, the neorealist Yellow Earth and Farewell, My Concubine,
a color-by-numbers film that surrounds Leslie Cheung-the film's sole item
of life!-with a theatrical melodrama where even the people are props.
Hero is an entirely rhetorical film, being both propaganda and formula,
yet many western critics have unintentionally condescended to it, seeing
it as too pretty to warrant disgust. But Hero's thesis-the petty moral
which occasioned its several million dollar financial commitment by the
Chinese government-is that totalitarianism is not only justified but preferable,
for what we lose in freedom, we gain in security. What else should we
expect from a film that premiered at Beijing's Great Hall of the People,
the site of newly ascending Chinese premier's Hu Jaobing election? (It
was, incidentally, a premiere festooned with huge placards announcing
"China's film industry-on forward! Cheer toward the Oscars!")
And who is the sovereign that Hero rallies behind and supports? While
the film purports to offer different modes of heroism, only one of these
heroes is still alive and onscreen by the close credits. I'm talking about
Shih Huang Ti, the Qin monarch who became the first Emperor of China after
a notably brutal military campaign. Easily read as a precursor to modern
Beijing, Hero's hero initiated book-burnings for all non-technical or
non-Qin related documents (including dissident texts). Those scholars
he did not merely exile, he burned or buried alive. Once we see Hero as
a pro-dictatorship film sponsored by the most powerful dictatorship in
the world, the film can't help but feel repugnantly beautiful, outrageously
tacky, like an Indiana Jones movie in which Harrison Ford hands Hitler
his whip so Germany can build a prosperous European Union.
"The view," Zhang Yimou said in a recent interview, "that
I've changed in the last few years is quite a widespread opinion. Because
people read political messages in my films, they expect me to be a political
fighter who's always on the front lines. So whenever they cannot read
into my works a kind of dissident view or political interpretation that
they read into earlier films, they become disappointed." Zhang's
assertion-that his films are apolitical-is hilariously disingenuous. It's
not as if Zhang's previous films-which tended to be about China's feudal,
patriarchic past oppressing actress Gong Li-were star-romping science-fiction
shoot-'em-ups. Hero itself is vibrantly, obviously political. As Tony
Leung, one of the stars of Hero, recently said (and later recanted)-"I
agree with the message of peace and human kindness in the film. For example,
during the June 4th incident, I didn't join in any demonstrations, because
what the Chinese government did was right-to maintain stability, which
was good for everybody." By "June 4th incident," he means
the Tiananmen Square protests. Or as Zhang said in another interview:
"I've made adjustments to accommodate the spirit of the times."
But perhaps we can be more hopeful. If Hero worships an autocratic empire,
then its symbol of that empire-the Wizard-of-Oz-meets-Leni-Riefenstahl
storm troopers-is hardly sympathetic. And although the film brown-noses
dictatorial bureaucracy, ending with Chen Daoming's emperor ordering his
armies to kill Jet Li's Nameless-even though Nameless saved his life!-the
film is more obviously in love with Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung's lovelorn
freedom fighters. While this may be a convenient narrative, in which resistance
leaders find themselves co-opted into the authoritarian storyline, the
ease with which Leung and Cheung smash through the petty goth brigades
and Qin Dynasty stone might suggest something else-Hero as wish fulfillment.
In 1992, when an interviewer asked Zhang Yimou if he was making The Story
of Qiu Ju to appease government authorities, Zhang answered neither yes
nor no. Instead he clutched his neck as though being strangled and said,
“Do you know how difficult things have been for me?”
House of Flying Daggersreads like an inversion of and an apology for Hero.
Unlike any other Zhang film, Daggers thrills-and perhaps ultimately disappoints-in
its embrace of oddball, almost-Seijun Suzuki-spirited exuberance rather
than realist political discourse. It has no dissident view because it
has no view. (If it is political, it is political in its avoidance rather
than confrontation of politics-that is, as political as any Hollywood
action movie.) Unlike Hero, Daggers's intelligence stays bottled up. Its
plot twists are only about its characters-fictional rebels and fictional
armies-rather than, say, the utilitarian benefits of totalitarianism.
Thus, while Hero was only visually epic, tinny where it tried to overwhelm
us with mere quantity, fatuous political discourse, and adolescently black-plumed
hordes, House of Flying Daggers feels most expansive at its most personal.
The movie's still not totally specific, but it is a rare film-its most
specific moments are sleek and weirdly graceful: the light pouring out
of Zhang Ziyi's skin; the rusty mortal forest; mud and leaves flung into
the air. Daggers also rejects Hero's jejunely totalitarian politics in
two ways: first, by assigning rag-tag dissidents as protagonists, ignoring
the brutal and drone-like government troopers; second-and more subversively?-by
being a purely private historical epic. We never learn the identity of
Nia (the leader of the House of Flying Daggers) and the film cuts to the
love story right as the imperial troops advance on the rebel hideout.
We never learn the outcome of this climatic fight scene and leave unsure
who are the ambushers and who are the ambushees. Any subplot larger than
the lovers is left astray, unleashed and elliptical, so that the entire
sociopolitical world of House of Flying Daggers is a decoy.