September 8, 2004
Hero
I never really thought about what Zhang Yimou had to do to get his work made and released in Communist China. That's probably because his work that I'm familiar with (almost all starring Gong Li) never needed to be quite so explicit; Raise the Red Lantern and Shanghai Triad came by their messages about capitalist decadence quite honestly, and The Story of Qiu Ju (probably my favorite of his movies, with the radiant Gong Li pregnant, muffled in a peasant's costume, and working her way up the political ladder trying to get justice for her husband, who has been kicked in the groin by the village boss) and Not One Less are stories about the perseverance of villagers in contemporary rural China, removed from the pace of a frantically modernizing country. Both of those are messages that I'm sure the people controlling the movie industry in China were happy to see promulgated. Hero, on the other hand, just burns. The setup is all right; Jet Li's Nameless tells the story of how he, a lowly provincial clerk, defeated the three most feared assassins in the kingdom of Qin: Sky (Donnie Chen), Snow (Maggie Cheung), and Broken Sword (Tony Leung). The king of Qin responds with what he thinks really happened, and Nameless tells the final version of the story. I think Li's Tsui Hark films and the other wirework-heavy movies he made in the early '90s are fantastic, but he has very real limitations as an actor, but as Nameless he's not called to run into his boundaries. Leung and Cheung are both fantastic (the Mandarin title of Hero is Cheung's character's name), and Zhang Ziyi is spunky in her supporting role. And Zhang can simply flat-out compose a shot; the fight sequences in particular are jaw-droppingly gorgeous (my favorite is being the study in reds and yellows as Zhang Ziyi and Cheung duke it out in an autumnal forest), more like painterly color studies than anything else. (There's a similarly nice love scene in blues and whites.) But they're not great fight scenes; Li and Cheung batting down hundreds of arrows on a school rooftop is fantastically kinectic, but Zhang seems uncomfortable just sticking his camera on his actors and letting show off their fight choreography chops. The editing is choppier than I think it really needed to be, and you never quite get a sense of the absurd athletics that go into making a top-notch chop socky fight scene. And then there's the plot, which is what got me thinking about Communist China in the first place; the whole movie is a paean to the importance of sacrificing individual good for the collective whole, in the person of the king of Qin, soon to be the first emperor of a unified China. Subjegation to a strong national leader, even if you despise him, is presented as absolutely the noblest thing possible. I'm sure some of the vibe is Confuscian and not simple propaganda that Beijing signed off on when they funded Hero, but despite the gorgeous tableaus, I can't recommend it; in the end, it comes across not as Zhang Yimou's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but as Leni Riefenstahl's Once Upon a Time in China.
(spoilers)
Maybe it was because I was pretty well prepared to see the overriding nationalism of the end, but for some reason, I thought the movie undercut that reading. I think that the ending had two things going on, sacrifice for the greater good and the brutality of the law that exists beneath it. I think that "Our Land" is a dream that the film acknowledges must vie against the reality of a centralizing power. I think that there are two crucial decisions at the end of the movie, two calls for sacrifice, out of which "Our Land" can be made. The first is Nameless's decision whether to kill the King; the second is the King's decision whether to kill Nameless. Nameless decides to sacrifice his vengeance (and by extension his life) for the greater good; the King does not, or cannot. I think that he wants to let Nameless go, but cannot, because his Kingdom won't allow it. And I think that sets the stage not for "Our Land" but for a brutal nationalist government.
I couldn't even persuade T of this, and it's probably bullshit, but it makes me more satisfied with movie.
*deludes self*
Of course, I don't think he's really concerned with subverting the Chinese communists, just that there's elements there. I agree that he's mostly concerned with color and motion and etc etc.
This movie elicited controversey in China too - many people thought Zhang Yimou sold out.
I actually agreed with Jet Li's decision. I agree with claxy on (part of) his interpretation of the ending - the emperor could not let Nameless go. It would violate everything his kingdom was based on (Legalist theory). To put it in perspective, he was fairly equal in implementing his laws - he punished his son just as harshly when the son spoke out against him. I'm not sure that it is a message against the Communists since the Qin Emperor is integral to the formation of the Chinese People.
The Qin dynasty was brutal, but it united China and ended the perpetual warfare that had been going on for hundreds of years. Short pain for long gain. Also, as hated as the Qin Emperor was (and perhaps still is), his contributions to China cannot be underestimated. Ie. Great Wall, Written Language, Standardized Currency and Weights
The translation of 'Our Land' is also a bit deceptive...it actually means 'everything under the sky' and is correlated to the emperor ideology. In some definitions, 'Our Land' is defined as everything ruled by the emperor. So 'Our Land' was achieved for the first time since the Zhou Dynasty. After the Qin Emperor, the dream of a united China was always there - there would be only one more time of disunion afterwards.
Re: Confucian ideology - I believe Nameless is the Qin Emperor's subject so sacrificing his life in the hopes that the Emperor will be moved and learn from it is the greatest duty and honour of a subject. Of course, Confucian ideology supports an emperor that is more of a philospher-king rather than a warlord, but overthrowing the emperor would be a BIG no-no. Esp. if the emperor has the mandate of heaven.
Last comments - I didn't like Hero, but I could actually watch it. Which was more than I can say for Crouching Tiger. The story is actually based on an old legend of a man trying to assassinate the First Emperor - I don't know what the original version/legend is like but I watched one version where he saw that the lands in Qin were fertile and lush, the people were well-fed and dressed and decided that the Emperor offered the best hope for China. That one was produced in HK rather than Communist China - and I believe it was before 1997.
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So any thoughts on 'Fearless', especially in regards to Communism?