High-Wire Morality

JUST HOW GREAT is Zhang Yimou's Hero? There's an astounding sequence where Maggie Cheung as Flying Snow, the lethally skilled paramour of a Chinese warrior, must defend herself in a sword fight with that same lover, Broken Sword (Tony Leung). The circumstance is absurd, the tension impossible, yet it is the stuff of vibrant romantic myth. Flying Snow's lunging, sweeping movements feel timeless. While she stirs up dizzying, circular patterns with her long black hair and rippling robes, she also evokes classic woman-warrior imagery. In the story's logic she is sacrificing Broken Sword in order to save the life of the emperor, but in visual terms this is the ultimate representation of a woman in conflict with herself. Flying Snow is engaged in an outsized, metaphysical battle between her spiritual and political instincts. As she swirls, her body picks up the sound of the wind; grunting and exhaustion aren't enough to express her god-like conflict. Nature itself becomes part of her psychic and physical turbulence. More than a fight scene, it's a psychotronic dance-heartfelt but also erupting from the deep, rarely evoked soul of movie excitement. And it's not the only such scene in Hero.

Like The Godfather (which had been called "the Gone with the Wind of gangster movies"), Hero plays like a series of set pieces-a chain of eminently watchable stories (fables) that when taken together, mythologize the creation of the Chinese nation and its first emperor. These tales are told by Nameless (Jet Li), an itinerant swordsman, delegated by rival tribes to assassinate the Qin dynasty's emperor (Chen Daoming). In a generic respite of civility-where hunter and prey face each other across rows of flickering votive candles-Nameless first relays the story of his murderous journey. Thus unfolds his encounters with Sky (Donnie Yen), Flying Snow, Broken Sword and their young female acolyte Moon (Zhang Ziyi).

Hero is an exercise in what academics call narrativity. Nameless represents the anonymous handing-down of legend, and when his stories are matched by the emperor's own counter-myths, the film grows into an elaborate-hell, magnificent-demonstration of pop-culture communication. Zhang shows how stories that are eagerly received can also be improved upon-for reasons that are either political, emotional or for sheer creative inspiration. Clearly, this art filmmaker (best known for Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou) set himself the goal of engaging the popular martial arts form and giving it the breadth of his own, more serious movies. Surprisingly, Zhang doesn't stultify the genre with leaden high ideals; he pours into it his purest esthetic instincts. The result is a movie that fulfills the martial arts tradition.

Over the past three decades that Chinese martial arts movies have become the archetype for international action cinema (replacing the western, gangster and modern war movie), the emphasis has been on vengeful violence. That was how filmgoing boys were taught to be men and how the perpetually downtrodden working-class audience settled for the kick-ass fantasy of other people not taking shit. Despite defenders of the genre's many variations, it was the lack of complicated emotion that kept martial arts movies from being great. (Great kid stuff maybe, but remote from the gravity of feeling that linked De Palma to Peckinpah to Kurosawa to Dostoevsky to Wagner to Shakespeare to Euripides.) Zhang makes history with Hero by bringing emotion to the martial arts film.

Poetic words are spoken in Hero, such as the opening epigraph, "People give up their lives for many reasons/For friendship for love or for an ideal/And they kill for the same," but what makes this more than the typical fortune-cookie logic of chop-socky flicks is the emotional justification that comes from the film's staggering visual beauty. There were pretty pictures in A Chinese Ghost Story and Once Upon a Time in China, but those films lacked the benefit of Zhang's esthetic temperament. His gift for expressive settings, the sensitivity to color in films like Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern and Ju Dou and his melodramatic knack for actors' (especially actresses') emotional registers provide amplitude not normally associated with a genre devoted to the macho test of nerves. Check out the expressions volleyed between Nameless and the emperor; their contrasting senses of history are also the essence of their personalities. Both men understand sacrifice as the price of heroism. Equally trenchant are the loving exchanges between Flying Snow, Broken Sword and Moon; passion is relayed in definitive flashes of anger, shock, regret, suffering.

When martial arts practice infiltrated Hollywood, the genre was reduced to stunts and f/x in place of feeling. The wire suspension that choreographers like The Matrix's Wo-Ping made famous traded insider's savvy for the suspension of disbelief. Watching those stunts was cold excitement. Hero is choreographed by Tony Ching Siu-Tung for an altogether different effect. The "wow" of combat athletics is replaced by the dance-like sincerity of purposeful movement. Zhang and Ching Siu-tung understand that complex choreography and music share the same principles. The many fight scenes in Hero are actually like musical numbers. Movement expresses the characters' psychology. Instead of fighting being a literal show of might, it becomes a display of feeling. The way Zhang makes the musical and the martial arts movie merge turns an abstraction into an abstraction. If that sounds pompous, then you simply have to see the lightness, wit and splendor of these acts. They go beyond balletic affect into phantasmagoria.

When Nameless explains the skill his rivals possess, he importantly mentions the relationship between martial arts technique and other forebearing, intellectual pursuits-the principles of form and action that are also apparent in calligraphy, archery, music-making. Fighting isn't simply prowess, but a discipline of spirit. (Broken Sword is renowned for his swordplay technique-the art of serifs and slashes-that was perfected in his calligraphy lessons.) That knowledge is what makes the scene of red-robed students in a calligraphy class being bombarded by an army's shower of black arrows feel apocalyptic. It's not just a battle attack targeting innocent lives; it's the height of civilization in peril.

Simply put, this is not yahoo filmmaking. It's the most astonishing flow of visual imagery on the screen in years. Zhang began as a cinematographer (he worked on Chen Kaige's highly formalistic Yellow Earth and The Big Parade), which may explain the superlative clarity and contrasting hues he achieves here with the great Christopher Doyle. Every sequence is coordinated in a different color scheme for a rush of sensual impressions. It recalls the deliberately mythic look (classical imagery shaded with moral and political nuance) that Bertolucci and Storaro created for Little Buddha-yet different. Hero dares the all-out effrontery that Bertolucci and Storaro showed when they shook the world with The Conformist in 1970. Zhang and Doyle turn love and war-ecstasy and tragedy-into surreal extravagance. It's not decorative, it's volatile. And they keep the marvels coming: a showdown amidst golden leaves that change color as if they possessed mood, a resting place on a glistening lake that suggests an Asian Valhalla, as well as the psychic lunarscapes in Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time.

These settings seem heightened (if not created) by each character's longing. Every one of Jet Li's tales as Nameless situates a scene in a personal motive, yet, soon, the same imagery is doomed by mankind's intrigues. No other Jet Li film I've seen has been this sophisticated about national myth. Zhang explores the moral complexity of history. Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon failed, ultimately, because its lack of moral dilemma condescended to the international market. Hero reimagines Chinese history with a moral purpose. It also reimagines the martial arts film without the facetiousness of Quentin Tarantino's cross-cultural distortion in Kill Bill. Q.T. doesn't understand the salutary effects of dance ritual in tandem with violent release (also one of the grand themes in Takeshi Kitano's The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi). Perhaps his misfortune as artist and moviegoer is believing the adolescent American male canard that fighting is psychologically truer than dancing-an idea Hero vanquishes. Yet, Tarantino can be saluted for sponsoring the Stateside release of Hero, the year's richest movie. o