Crouching Genius, Hidden Movie
by Robert S. Jersak

Directed by one of the greatest filmmakers of our time (Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, The Road Home). Featuring a cast of world-class martial artists and actors. Winner of seven Hong Kong Film Awards. Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at both the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards. Recipient of the Berlin Film Festival’s Alfred Bauer Award – a prestigious honor celebrating “breakthrough films that open up new perspectives in cinematic art.” Championed by legions of critics and fans. Not released in the United States.

For reasons untold or unclear, Miramax continues to hold Zhang Yimou’s Hero (Ying Xiong) under wraps in America until November 2003. Perhaps the film’s depiction of a zealous militant regime, assassination plots, the questioning of leadership, and pleas for peace, have made someone nervous at the Homeland Security Department. Nevertheless, Hero will make its way to a theater (relatively) near you. I urge you to see it when it arrives. There are going to be a lot of comparisons to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Both films feature award-winning musical scores by Tan Dun and riotous performances by the energetic and beautiful Zhang Ziyi. Both films weave martial arts and dramatic plots into an engaging motion picture for audience members of all attention spans. Though CTHD almost won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2000 (and won in the Foreign Film category), Hero is as grand a film in its own regard.

The story is rooted in both Chinese history and lore: The King of Qin is engaged in a struggle to amalgamate the seven independent kingdoms of China. To unify his empire, Qin must destroy each state’s opposing forces quickly and completely. Yet as armies fall to his command, a lust for vengeance begins to build in the shadows around him. Legendary assassins, trained in ancient martial arts, arise and await their opportunity to strike.

As Hero begins, we are led to believe that the three most lethal and avowed enemies of Qin have been defeated. The warrior “Nameless” (Jet Li) enters the King’s palace carrying the shattered weapons of Broken Sword (Tony Leung), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) and Sky (Donnie Yen). Seated within his cavernous hall, the Qin King invites the hero to approach within ten paces, and to share the tale of his astounding victory. From this point forward, the film becomes a series of flashbacks both imagined and real. Wildly choreographed swordplay sequences and stunning cinematography detail Nameless’s perilous journey to protect the King from the assassins. Qin, however, takes issue with the hero’s rendition of the truth, and begins to piece together an alternative explanation for his enemies’ undoing and the hero’s unlikely return, based on his hard-fought experience from a previous palace encounter with Broken Sword and Flying Snow. The hero must find a way to alter the King’s impressions, or lose his head before the real cause of his mission is revealed.

The story is certainly engaging, though Hero isn’t so much what it’s about, but how. Every now and then a film reminds you of the power of sound, sight, dance, song, silence - some facet of the theater-going experience that deepens and moves us. Each of the film’s successive narrative perspectives are drenched in color, each so deeply and artificially saturated that it brings to mind the Japanese art film Kwaidan, or the early AIP work of Roger Corman: a blissful, technical, deliberate excess of oranges, reds, greens, blues and whites that nearly makes you want to throw every Dogme ’95 film you’ve ever seen out a ten-story window. Vibrant draperies, tapestries, banners and robes ripple and swell with constant wind, and languorously paint the wide corners of the screen with pigment. The effect, done poorly, could have made the film into a 98-minute “Obsession” perfume commercial. In Zhang’s hands, it becomes art.

This, along with CTHD, is the type of film George Lucas tried to emulate - grand operatic Saturday-morning marquee spectacles that still manage to bear a beating heart of humanity and a strong spiritual pulse; rare films where special effects and storytelling both got to ride in the front seat, and only pretentious commercialism get left behind. For George, those days have long since passed, and it heartens me to see filmmakers like Lee, Zhang and Peter Jackson actually using digital technology to further the cause of cinematic storytelling, rather than pervert it.

Today, when the validity of international leadership is called into question, Hero belongs to an American audience. Though Qin’s proclaimed intent is to liberate the remaining six kingdoms, and spare their people from generations of skirmish and infighting, his authoritarian rule is also systematically destroying the cultural nuances of each separate state. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Qin’s archers assail a calligraphy school in Zhang. As the black arrows tear through walls, the teacher rises to comfort the students, and urges them to meet their fate and remain at their work. “Please remember, their arrows might destroy our town and topple our kingdom, but they can never obliterate our culture.” In a time when ancient city-states are being sacked, sovereign nations are preemptively attacked, governments are forcefully restructured and films are distributed solely at the whims of millionaire executives, Hero gives us both a marvelous form of escapism, and a forum to discuss our era’s cultures, empires, leaders, soldiers, heroes . . . and the growing tide of dissent.

©2003 Robert S. Jersak
CineScene