RED ENVELOPES: Daggers in the Hizzy House

Say what you will about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it opened up a previously untapped vein for movie that move at a glacial pace, traffic in unrequited love, and have stunning cinematography and fantastic fight scenes. As usual, Ang Lee has much to answer for.

And sure, we all benefitted from this breakthrough. But no one quite so much as director Zhang Yimou, who finally found a way to get the Chinese government off his back for making movies like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern.

"If I make movies with lots of martial arts in them," he reasoned, "they won't bug me about the content, because they won't think there is any."

Thus empowered, Zhang went off to make Hero, which took the Crouching Tiger template a step further by enhancing it with a ravishing color scheme, adding a layer of humorous absurdity to the battle scenes (a shot of one man fighting off tens of thousands of arrows is particularly memorable), and proving definitively that a movie with Jet Li does not have to be crap.

I liked Hero, but didn't love it, so I was all ears when people started telling me that Zhang's next film, House of Flying Daggers, was everything good about Hero and then some. Jason Chin went so far as to lend me his copy (which featured menu screens in Chinese, telling me that he probably picked it up on a street corner in Greenwich Village), which I watched whilst whipping up a delicious batch of Toll House cookies. And now I can say with unwavering certainty and firm conviction: "Eh."

I think there's a law of diminishing returns. Like Crouching Tiger and Hero, Flying Daggers features an apparent criminal (played by Zhang Ziyi, who appears in all three of these films) out to undermine the ruling government. There's someone enraptured by her -- here it's a police spy -- and tries to win her love, all while the government pursues them and attempts to subdue them with hundreds of soldiers. The plots of these three films are not identical, but there is a sameness that makes watching the film frustrating. It would be like making more Matrix movies that were just like the original, but changed ever so slightly. Oh. Wait.

The movie is certainly an accomplished piece of work. Zhang once again has a tremendous sense of the visual, including a stunning fight scene in a bamboo forest that features assailants on every level. More than that, Flying Daggers has a tremendous soundscape, with every movement literally amplified to the height of importance. Nowhere is this more evident than in an early scene in which a dancer has to mimic the sounds of stones being flicked off of a circle of drums. The balance between silence and sound is brilliantly accomplished, and undoubtedly the film's greatest achievement.

But it's just so slow! The discovery of the title organization -- and the subsequent surprise about its membership -- comes so late in the film that it's hard not to question the point. And the final fight scene, set against a transition from autumn to winter, almost feels more ironic than poetic, as I was tempted to look outside and see if the seasons had changed for me as well. I'm all for a patient, thoughtful approach to filmmaking. But the languid rhythm of this movie seemed aimed more at inducing sleep than introspection.

Among my recent Christmas gifts was The Best of Sugar Ray, a band of whom I said many times, "I would never want to own any of their albums, but the moment they come out with a greatest hits CD, that'll be worth having." And while even that has its share of filler, I think I've been proven right. And so it might be with Zhang Yimou. His two recent forays into martial arts love stories have stunning moments, but the whole package doesn't add up to much. But maybe, if they put together a "Best of Zhang Yimou", that'll be something to see.

On an only-slightly related note...
A frequent poster to this site, Mr. Paul Winston, has apparently received a blog for Christmas, and he is using it to review some of his favorite films. (For the record, he seems to be watching a much better class of movie than I.) You can read them yourself at his blog, Film Treats, which I've also added to the newly-updated list of links over there on the left. Mazel tov.