Quotes of the Day
Zhang Yimou sounds defensive when he speaks of Hero as "a genre piece." The implication is: just a genre piece, a diversion, a long sword fight played by grownups. Perhaps the director is thinking of his last purely frivolous work, the 1989 Codename Cougar, a goofy skyjack thriller that outfitted his severe star and muse at the time Gong Li in a tight stewardess uniform. If so, Zhang is underestimating both the power of the movie-epic form and his ability to inhabit and revive it.
For Hero—Zhang's attempt to explode in the worldwide movie market as Ang Lee did with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—is a lucid and cunning drama: ancient history (3rd century B.C.) refracted through a modern skeptic's sensibility. It views the birth of a nation through the murky motives of some of the first Emperor's potential assassins. For they are as duplicitous in their emotional lives as in their fatal politics.
The plot is a series of tales told by the warrior Nameless (Jet Li) to the Qin King (Chen Daoming). Any or none of the stories may be true; this is Rashomon with a Mandarin accent. But the moral, or rather the ethic, is as clear as it is bleak: man must make war to secure the peace.
Nameless has three main adversaries: Sky (Donnie Yen), a master martial artist he defeats in the film's first, superb battle scene; Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a calligrapher who is as adroit with a brush as with a saber; and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), Broken Sword's soul mate. Flying Snow has a side skirmish of her own with Moon (Zhang Ziyi), Broken Sword's smitten apprentice. Loyalties are tested, alliances made and sundered. Death is the price for betrayal—of the King or the heart.
Zhang made his reputation as a cinematographer. And in his early films as a director, cinema became the acutest form of rapture. These movies were tales of perfidy played out in lush tones and textures; the camera and color not only told the story, they were the story.
Hero marks a return to that precise, luscious style after a decade in which Zhang flirted with less beguiling visual and narrative strategies. A triumphant return thanks to his work with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who has shot many of Wong Kar-wai's films. Zhang, of course, controlled the design of Hero, but Doyle's hurtling, poetic personality shines through; you can sense the camera in his hands as surely as you could feel the brush in Jackson Pollock's. He is a calligrapher with light.
Each image is ravishing: clouds rushing over low mountains; a sword point that slo-mo slices through drops of water; lovers curled into each other, sleeping under red silk; a sword fight in a grove of golden leaves that turn red, plum, magenta and fall like fat confetti; soldiers squatting in a circle, caked in clay; a gray landscape of dunes daubed with Cheung's turquoise gown.
To stage the fights, Zhang chose Ching Siu-tung, a renowned choreographer who has also directed 21 features, including such Hong Kong classics as A Chinese Ghost Story, Swordsman II and The Heroic Trio—not to mention a 1989 quickie called A Terracotta Warrior, starring two kids from the mainland, Gong Li and Zhang Yimou. The very first set-to in Hero is a terrific one between Li and Yen. (Each man first imagines the fight, like a chess player visualizing his opponent's possible moves.) How swift their swords! How eloquent their body language!
The film's later duels might lack the buoyant grandeur of Yuen Wo-ping's action scenes in Crouching Tiger, but they have a stateliness that suits the gravity of the plot. These are working warriors with a deadly goal. Several of them are also artists and calligraphers. They believe that every stroke of the pen or the blade must be justified. They don't fight to dazzle; they fight to kill.
Hero is a reunion of sorts for the principals. The four Hong Kong stars—Li, Yen, Cheung and Leung—have combined on various projects before. Ching has put them all through swordplay and wirework. Doyle had shot six films with Leung and three with Cheung. Li and Yen go way back: in the late '70s, they trained together as teens in Beijing. So their rain-soaked battle in Hero has the savor of an ancient schoolyard grudge match.
Leung and Cheung, who smoldered so sadly in Wong's In the Mood for Love, get to express the gamut of emotions in a couple who know each other's tricks. They are Rhett and Scarlett, Tristan and Isolde; and they end their time together in an image so startling and beautiful that it stabs the viewer's astonished heart.
For a quarter-century, from early Bruce Lee to late Jackie Chan, martial arts was the pulse to which Hong Kong films ticked and kicked. Those were expressions of the industry's vital adolescence. Hero shows how the same vitality can serve a thoughtful, resonant, mainland maturity. This is a story of noble insurgence against noble fidelity, and of the ways love may find its fulfillment only in death. Zhang Yimou may have dipped his cinematic pen in "mere" genre, but in doing so, he has inscribed a masterpiece.
- Richard Corliss
- Zhang Yimou sounds defensive when he speaks of Hero as "a genre piece."