(all the snapshots are of Hero; VLC couldnt open my House of Flying Daggers DVD for some reason)
This I'm reviewing two films by Zhang Yimou: Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004). Both of these are wuxia films he directed in a row. Hero tells a Rashômon-like tale of assassins (Jet Li, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Donnie Yen, Ziyi Zhang) who try to murder a powerful warlord in pre-unified China. House of Flying Daggers takes a look at the rivalry between the authorities and a rebel group; in middle of this battle there is a story that involves a triangle drama and LOTS of twists. The latter film is dedicated to the memory of Anita Mui, a famous Hong Kong singer who was supposed to have a role in the film. Instead she died of cancer at the age of 40, and Yimou decided to write her character out of th film and dedicate the film to her memory.
Hero's Rashômonesque content means that it is told in a bunch of stories which arent necessarily true. Nameless (Jet Li) has killed all of the assassins threatening the warlord, but is that the whole truth? Is there something beyond his silly, yet simple and believeable story? What does the warlord know? These are the questions that are played around with until the very end of the film. We see similar locations and situations reused a few times because they are used for every story. When I rewatched the film, I didnt remember at all how silly the first story is. Combined with the eccentric form and acting, it was a rather odd experience. The further I got into the film the better I realised why it was so. There is a good reason for it, but I'm not going to spoil it for you. All the stories deal somehow with love, betrayal and strong beliefs. Surprisingly I realised that I actually enjoyed Hero's content more than its form because I expected it would be completely vice versa.
House of Flying Dagger's narrative is less ambitious and less ambiguous. It does have its own share of complicated twists that keep nicely changing the perspective to the relationships of the character. These twists actually work well. These changes of perspective do bring problems too: how do you describe the film? It has a lot of different elements that are put together with its martial arts combat so the only decent category would be wuxia, naturally. These twists appear so swiftly throughout the film that it left me a little uneven. The characters are also a little flat and you get the feeling they are only used as insignificant devices for these twists, but the climax saves them. The beautifully shot climax is simply wonderful. It is such a poetic cinematic moment that even only for that scene I would recommend this film to anyone.
Hero's cinematography focuses on using extremely strong colors. Everything from clothes to locations are covered in one strong color. Sometimes this is used well to portray the emotions going on in the film, but sometimes it feels rather random. It gives the shots a strong sense of harmony and that is combined with carefully controlled (and mostly calm) camera movement. The first story is full of awkward editing, special effects and even acting. I felt that this is used to show the absurdness of the story, but Yimou goes really over-the-top with it at some points. The film does luckily get a lot more serious in its content and form in the later stories. As you might except from this harmonic form, there are a couple of dreamy landscape shots that are used in between a few scenes. Sometimes it feels like that Yimou just wants to show that a lot of money was put into the film. There are scenes so ridiculously massive that I could only be impressed. There is no CGI used for literally hundreds of thousands of extras in many scenes. You really have to see the shots full of those extras in motion to understand how great they are.
Yimou consciously changed the form for House of Flying Daggers although it does have one very Heroesque scene with the focus on one color. This time it is actually poorly handled and the scene ends up being rather horrible because of that. The fights mostly have clever and great camerawork and editing, but there is one terribly painful aspect to the fights. Those FREAKIN' FLYIN' KNIVES. In middle of this serious films we occassionally get these ridiculous slowmotion shots that follow flying knives that fly in the most abstract ways. Those shots are so silly that they ruin the complete flow of the film. Even the beautiful climax is a bit ruined by one extremely shot of this sort.
The acting varies a lot in both of these films. Ziyi Zhang has a role in both of them, actually. In Hero she does a decent performance although her role is rather insignificant. In House of Flying Daggers she gets to flex more of her acting muscles, and she makes a rather good performance. Jet Li's performance in Hero is stiff beyond what is good for the character. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung are both phenomenal in Hero, as expected. These two should be together more often because it worked even better in Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love. Takeshi Kaneshiro performs very well in House of Flying Daggers. His performance kept me interested in the film. Andy Lau, on the other hand, was both stiff and felt very forced all the time. His performance really stood out horribly.
Zhang Yimou's films are interesting to watch, but the quality isnt guaranteed to be awesome. These two films are essential for fans of his films and wuxia, though.
Scores:
Hero (2002): 8 out of 10
House of Flying Daggers (2004): 6 out of 10
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