By Brian Hu

Staff writer Brian Hu checks in from Taipei periodically to regale us with his crackpot musings, re-musings and once-in-awhile revelations as a cineaste.

The lonely road home: Tsui Hark's Seven Swords

I saw Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon when it was first released in Taiwan during the summer of 2000, and I didn't realize the significance of the audience's disapproval (vocalized through jeers and snickers) until the film exploded in mainstream and academic circles internationally. While American audiences have embraced the film as a modern classic (“One of the greatest films ever made!” screams Joel Siegel, according to the DVD cover), Chinese audiences remain mixed on the film for a variety of reasons which are too many to summarize. The debate rages on, and as shown by a recent cover story in the scholarly Cinema Journal featuring two academic papers and a response by screenwriter James Schamus, the dust will not settle soon.

Meanwhile, in spite of local audiences' rejection of the film as anything “special” or “new,” Ang Lee's wuxia has managed to significantly shape audiences' conceptions of the genre in its subsequent cinematic (and even soap opera) incarnations. Many of those initially skeptical of the film later criticized Zhang Yimou's Hero for being a pretty ride, but not as good as Lee's wuxia film. During my next trip to Taiwan in 2004, I saw Zhang's House of Flying Daggers on opening night. Again, there were groans, raspberries, and laughter, but also, ironically, the complaint during the bamboo fight and Zhang Ziyi's bathing scene: “It's just copying Crouching Tiger!” The local consensus seems to be that Zhang Yimou's subsequent wuxia films were simply not as good as Lee's film, which after bringing Taiwan Oscar gold, people seem to have forgotten they rejected.

Regardless of one's stance on Crouching Tiger, it's hard to deny that it has become the new benchmark of the genre, informing blockbusters like Zhang's two films, as well as He Ping's Warriors of Heaven and Earth. This is in part because Crouching Tiger marks a significant stylistic shift in the genre away from the rapidly shot, manically stylized, very-Cantonese wuxia films of the '80s and '90s such as the extremely popular Swordsman films: New Dragon Gate Inn, and the Once Upon a Time in China series. What these classics have in common are thinly veiled wirework, expressively rhythmic editing, a sense of humor, and perhaps most importantly, a distinctive narrative and aesthetic pace that inspired scholar Esther Yau to name her edited book on Hong Kong cinema At Full Speed. Academics have attributed this nostalgia-inflected sense of perpetual speed to Hong Kong's cultural dislocation in the years leading up to 1997, when Hong Kong would be handed over to mainland China.

A reasonable question then would be: how would we describe the aesthetics of Hong Kong wuxia post 1997, after which the allegory model seems to break down? This became something of a moot question since film production in Hong Kong took a tumble after 1997 (also the year of the Asian economic crisis) with wuxia films -- one of the most expensive genres -- becoming too expensive of a gamble for most studios. Further, Tsui Hark, the godfather of modern wuxia, who produced or directed all of the Hong Kong films stated above, fatefully began a Hollywood career with some Jean Claude Van Damme pictures. Then came Crouching Tiger and the rise of the mainland/Taiwanese version of wuxia and the genre has never been the same since.

All this makes Tsui's return to Hong Kong all the more interesting. As one of the most distinctive auteurs in '80s and '90s world cinema, Tsui is unlikely to shed his aesthetic tendencies. However, Crouching Tiger has reinvented what audiences expect wuxia to look and sound, and perhaps more profoundly, it marks a shift in the business of blockbuster production, with China/Hong Kong/Taiwan/U.S. co-production becoming the most successful model.

Ignoring for the moment Tsui's 2001 wuxia film Zu Warriors, which was more one of several “experiments” in digital effects attempted in post-'97 Hong Kong than a wuxia film in the footsteps of Ang Lee's work, Tsui's newest film, Seven Swords, shows us how Tsui has adapted to the new production environment and the post-Crouching Tiger audience. Released in Asia surrounded by considerable media coverage (despite not having the A-list star caliber of Ang Lee or Zhang Yimou's films) and rumors of a four-hour cut, Seven Swords managed a strong opening weekend in Asia, where I saw it with an audience whose response was decidedly less negative that those I witnessed for Crouching Tiger and House of Flying Daggers.

The vocalized comments during the film were mostly of praise or wonderment (“Whoa, that's a big sword!” said one adult viewer, in Taiwanese). While, in my opinion, the acting was decidedly worse that that in Crouching Tiger and House of Flying Daggers, the audience didn't ridicule Leon Lai or Donnie Yen as they did Chow Yun-fat and Andy Lau in the aforementioned films. And while audiences vocally laughed at the over-the-top plot turns in House of Flying Daggers, the audience refrained during similar cheesiness in Seven Swords.

My explanation for this difference in reception has to do with Tsui's style. Whereas Zhang Yimou took Crouching Tiger's emotional and visual highs and cranked it to, for some, unbearable levels, Tsui reacts to Ang Lee's film with the opposite. Romance is limited to subplots; sacrifice is a necessity rather than part of an idealistic code of ethics; revenge is painful, but not romantically so; and most of all, heroism is nowhere in sight. None of the seven main characters striving to protect a village stands out as valiant; right and wrong are barely mentioned, and nobody, except perhaps some children, engages in heroic activity worthy of repetition. Whereas in Lee and Zhang's films, action scenes are showstoppers like musical numbers, where actors (and their stuntmen) show off miracles of the human body meant to glamorize martial arts (think of Zhang Ziyi's showdown in the roadside inn from Crouching Tiger, or every single fight in Zhang Yimou's films), Tsui refrains from the temptation to shoot the next classic fight scene, with the possible exception of a short duel set in a terribly narrow alley. For a two-and-a-half hour film and the presence of legend Donnie Yen and choreographer Lau Kar-leung, Seven Swords has remarkably few action scenes. The ones that do exist seem to spend more special effects money on mud, grime, and blood rather than on fancy wirework.

This surprising departure from recent wuxia is related to the fact that Seven Swords is not so interested in the code of the jianghu and its subsequent emotional turbulence, which are the staples of novels from The Water Margin to the works of writer Jin Yong, all of which inform the structure, choreography, design, and narrative of Crouching Tiger. Rather, Seven Swords is mostly interested in the sheer corporeality of wuxia. The desert isn't the sexual playground of recent films, but an oppressive setting for cold bloodletting. Visually, the film throws out the colorful polish of Zhang's films, a strategy which is exercised most memorably in an early scene in near-black and white (with blood-red the only preserved pigment). The film is very rated R, with decapitations and other disfigurations a standard feature of the battle scenes. However, the film isn't violent as much at is physical; violence implies good/evil, emotion, danger, and sometimes glamour, whereas physicality is tactile, dirty, cold, and often unexplainable. The action sequences in Seven Swords are jarring, ugly, and seemingly disorganized so that often we can't tell who is who, a direct contrast to the color-coded confrontations in Hero and House of Flying Daggers.

But action is too obvious a way to explore physicality. Further, it really isn't the center of Seven Swords. Most impressive about the film is the way the physicality of the body remains intense between battles, and in more subtle ways. The way a male character holds the crown of a Korean love slave is shot in such a way that she becomes fragile and physically threatened. The way Donnie Yen's character whispers in her ear is less erotic than potent with the intimidating prowess he exerts through the power to blow subtle gusts of air onto her earlobes.

The memorable use of ghoulish makeup inscribes menace physically onto the faces of warriors, while the chains and metal in costumes are depicted (for example through lighting and sound design) to heighten the sense of physical burden upon their bodies. The seven swords of the film's title are given some spiritual meaning (they come from a sacred mountain), but even more so, they're depicted as heavy and unwieldy, as is the case with a two-sided sword that is so difficult to manage that one feels it will pierce the swordswoman every time it is picked up. Like the Green Dynasty in Crouching Tiger, the swords in Tsui's films almost become “loyal” to their “masters,” but unlike Chow Yun-fat's weapon, these swords are not legendary or magical, but dangerous and strange.

In terms of narrative logic, the film works very differently compared to the recent wuxia films. Warriors of Heaven and Earth and Crouching Tiger are straightforward epics, while Hero and House of Flying Daggers play with narrative logic to some degree, but the meaning remains completely legible, even when seasons are changing mid-fight or when “truth” is told from different angles. On the other hand, Seven Swords, like many '90s Hong Kong action films, is so tripped up in the momentum of its considerable speed that many narrative details are left unexplained. The film's motor is revved to such a velocity that Tsui flashes forward to future plot points without explanation, as if he's in such a rush that he can't wait to pull his tricks out before the setup. For some that's frustrating, but for others, it's a fresh blast from the pre-1997 past, which I believe is an important reason the film has been accepted by Asian audiences. I can't tell you quite who all the characters are or what they did together, but you sense their physical struggle through the explosion of temporal and tactile energy Tsui chooses to unfurl upon us.

Thus Seven Swords is, as are so many of Tsui Hark's films, a genre-bender. The most exciting difference here though is that Tsui is stealing back a genre that he helped redefine before Hong Kong cinema went into a decline at the end of the millennium. As with all genre reinventions, the film chose (or perhaps was forced) to adopt some of the characteristics of the new wuxia film (the widescreen panoramas, the pan-Asian cast) while infusing it with Tsui's ongoing interest in stylized corporeality (as in his now-classic Blade), bringing to the film elements of '90s wuxia, Kurosawa's films such as The Seven Samurai, and contemporary special effects. Unfortunately, he doesn't incorporate his old talent for raw emotion (see his The Lovers and Green Snake for standout examples) or social content (his Once Upon a Time in China films seem to get more powerful with age), and in that way could use some of the humanity of Ang Lee's film. While his sense of the body is as strong as ever, where Seven Swords disappoints is that the story's physical coldness often translates, as is the case with Tsui's recent Time and Tide, as emotional frigidity.

Yet Seven Swords is a ferocious attempt by Tsui at genre reinvention (or is it reorientation?) by transforming the dislocations of pre-1997 Hong Kong action cinema into the confusions of wuxia in the post-Crouching Tiger era. In one scene, Donnie Yen tells his enemy, “We're both quite similar: we both have no road left to follow,” before wandering away in a land he can't call home. Tsui takes that jianghu ethic very seriously as he envisions a new direction for the genre.

Published: Thursday, August 4, 2005