777 times lovelier than I'd ever seen
September 2004
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.
