Zhang Yimou's film Hero is a ravishing beauty, an elegant, sinewy creature blessed with such art and grace that the visual poetry of the piece literally leaves you breathless.
While it has been compared to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Chinese-American filmmaker Ang Lee's masterpiece, Hero is a different animal altogether. The films share sexy starlet Zhang Ziyi, both saturate the screen with vibrant, almost surreal colours, and both trade on the film equivalent of the ancient wuxia literary tradition (the martial arts warriors depicted possess extraordinary powers, such as the ability to fly).
But Lee's Crouching Tiger is a lyrical ode to romance set among maverick heroes and heroines in a mystical, medieval-like era.
Zhang's Hero, playing in Mandarin with English subtitles, is a Chinese historical drama rooted in the warring period 2200 years ago when the King of the state of Qin was battling six other kingdoms to unite ancient China under one emperor -- himself.
The fictional, legend-like story of the film concerns an orphan called Nameless (Jet Li in a magnificent, exquisitely nuanced performance). He comes to the Qin capital with the weapons of three assassins from other states. Each assassin was a bitter enemy of Qin and a fearless fighter who had vowed to kill the King.
In a series of tales that mimic the story-telling structure in Kurosawa's 1950 classic Rashomon, Nameless tells the King how he vanquished Long Sky (Donnie Yen), Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), as well as dealing with the white hot anger of tempestuous Moon (Zhang Ziyi).
Nameless' stories are flashbacks, obviously, and each is a self-contained unit with its own unique physical setting, pace of action, intense colour palette and design elements, all photographed with a high artistry by cinematographer Christopher Doyle.
So each chapter is a staggeringly beautiful experience unto itself. Each is a mythic visual poem meant to invoke moods and ideas but not necessarily tell an absolute truth of what happened.
Critically, the martial arts confrontations are not conventional fights. Instead, they are machine-precision ballets in which a droplet of water sliced by a sword is given the same visual weight as a blow to a person's flesh. Even in the large scale war scenes, acrobatic individuals fight off a rain of arrows that is unparalleled in cinema history for its physical impact. At all times, one man, or woman, stands out in the mass.
Hero does have the look and scope of an epic, with its cast of thousands, with the most extensive use of special effects in Chinese movie history and with its location leap from a tea house to mountain plains to a fortified castle defended by a mass army. Yet the film is a lean 100 minutes long (there is supposed to be an unreleased, two-hour director's cut that would be interesting to see).
The theatrical cut here -- the one that is on the imported DVDs already available in Chinatown and on the Internet -- is so Spartan, that it leaves you wanting more exposition, more character information. That is a good thing.
Less satisfactory, even troubling, is the film's message. Unlike House Of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou's new martial arts film in the upcoming film festival, Hero argues that the individual should sacrifice for the greater good. The unanswered question is whether this noble gesture is in the name of war or peace.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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