Sword-crossed lovers

When I was a kid and I'd play war with my buddies from the neighborhood [neighborhood meaning the 3 closest houses by foot through the forest], I was always the one that'd just been gut-shot, the one fighting off gangrene. In the tide of intense mock-battle, I took up the mantle of war-muse, inspiring the pity and rage of my compatriots, creating a personal cause for which to take up arms. "Treeeeeeevooooor [my name of choice]! Blllaarrrgh!" Tom would say, springing from our hand-dug trench--usually in slow motion--to wring vengeance from the pulp of a vast, cruel world. This usually lasted about five minutes before Tom and Jay tired of trying to patch my wounds. The two would then wander off in search of excuses to accidentally sock younger kids in the face with the butts of laser rifles. I, however, would remain, fighting my private war against God for the glory of melodrama, reveling in the aesthetically rich act of dying with honor. I didn't know it at the time, but I was Chinook Lane's Zhang Yimou.

His newest movie, House of Flying Daggers is much like my performance as that gut-shot private first class with no last name, a heart-wrenching and vivid portrayal of anguish and grief--one that's still writhing and kicking in front of your eyes long after you've stopped caring.

It is sentimentalism forced through gritted teeth and hacked at with swords. It's the worst romance novel your mom ever read rewritten by your martial arts-obsessed friend Seth. It's a near perfect example of Wuxia genre cinema and, perhaps as a result, often unbearable to watch. That's a shame, because House of Flying Daggers is the most visually stunning movie I've seen since--maybe ever.

As in previous films, Yimou goes in for visual decadence, drenching the screen in color. Hero focused itself on single colors, taking each in turn, varying tones and shades to suggest meanings lying beneath the tales themselves and to hint at the prejudices of its storytellers. This worked beautifully for a movie that told the same story from several opposing viewpoints. Flying Daggers, told in a frilless, straight ahead narrative, allows the colors to mix with one another, creating complex patchworks of visual symbol I can't even begin to wade through. And while Hero was full of color ramped up to the brightest, richest possible hue, at select points in Flying Daggers Yimou chooses to wash out sections of frame. During a climactic battle, he drains the yellows from the field in which two men fight, leaving a hazy white foreground against brilliant autumnal colors. Minutes later, as rage builds and the fight takes on supernatural dimensions, affecting the very seasons, Yimou obscures the rest of the scene in a maelstrom of snow as well. Where the grandeur of Hero's cinematography was often purposefully caricatured, House of Flying Daggers displays a studied--and more mature--nuance throughout.

Frustrating then, that such visual beauty would be met with dialogue whose mediocrity I have a tough time expressing. Slapdash, hackneyed, inane and spent all work, but some kind of guttural roar of frustration might be closest to what I was feeling whenever these gorgeous people opened their mouths. Something like blllllaaaaarrgghghgh; so horrible I can't speak it. It ended up a tremendous detriment to the experience. There are of course, questions of translation and whatnot and that's not to say the love in this story feels cheap or fake. There is real chemistry between Zhang Ziyi and co-star Takeshi Kaneshiro, but it's not in their words, it's in quiet moments between lavish action sequences, and even in the action itself, as cool technique and mastery of arms often gives way to hacking and slashing with blind passion and personal disregard. While brilliantly shot, it's ultimately unfortunate that a writer/director who exacts such precise control of his visuals and such care in crafting unspoken emotion would treat the dialogue like a throw away element.

Thematically, it's a story about love and death and how the two are often connected--especially in a place where everyone has a sword. But there's a point, in that climactic scene, as two master swordsman are driven by some other-worldly chivalric love to literally cut each other to pieces, that the film almost becomes more, transcending the hokey dialogue certainly, but transcending even the genre itself. As this battle rages, spawned of a friendship divided by a love triangle orchestrated--to an extent--by warring factions, Yimou momentarily cuts away and shows imperial troops headed for a clash with the rebels. In contrast to the emotion and individuality of the two combatants, the imperial troops are faceless and uniform, their swords raised back at an impractical angle. Right then, Flying Daggers feels like more than just a love story, more than even a story of manipulation and betrayal. It feels like something timeless, an allegory of how passion and duty are instruments wielded by the powerful to incite people to kill and be killed for affairs of state. In that moment it seemed as though a great upswell was coming to elevate the story--finally--above a mere exercise in chivalry. But then someone talks and, you know, ruins it.

From there Zhang Yimou entrenches himself firmly in the melodrama he has created, becoming preoccupied with a half-dozen or so fake deaths and real deaths, swoons and finally, kind of, redemption. It overstays its welcome, but everything before it is so rivetting I wasn't going anywhere for a while anyway. In never returning to the larger battle against the state, it seems as though he saw what the movie might become and shrank from it. That's a presumptuous gripe, but it's unfortunate that a movie of such magnificent scale should ultimately be so narrow in scope.