Cinema Paradise

By Noy Thrupkaew, The American Prospect. Posted September 17, 2004.

As I staggered out of Zhang Yimou's latest epic, Hero, I found myself puzzling over a question bordering on blasphemy: Can a film be too beautiful? I felt a twinge of shame at the thought. After all this time banging my spoon over an unrelenting diet of grey, cinematic gruel – this year's spate of political documentaries – how could I whine about Zhang's dishy film? The murderous ballet of the fight scenes, the blistering beauty of the cast, the optic nerve-sizzling colors – Zhang's art-house chopsocky flick verged on visual rapture, yes. But fickle ingrate that I am, I longed for my gruel, its gluey political convictions, the quiet devastation it wreaks on one's innards.

A strange reaction, because Zhang isn't known for pulling his punches to the gut. He's one of the greatest of China's Fifth Generation of filmmakers, the artists who wrung brilliant, feel-bad cinema like Farewell, My Concubine (by director Chen Kaige) and The Blue Kite (Tian Zhuangzhuang) from the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. Zhang's films were marked by a masterful sense of scale and balance – To Live, for example, played out one family's plight against a massive scrim of history. Zhang's work was also remarkable for its defiant rage against governmental repression, which resulted in repeated bans against his films.

Hero, in contrast, initially reads like a bit of impersonal state propaganda. Zhang has taken on the legend of the Qin dynasty emperor – the real-life despotic ruler who first managed to unite China in 221 B.C., after years of war. When the film opens, the emperor is greeting a guest called Nameless (Jet Li), who has killed three would-be assassins conspiring against the king. For his act of heroic loyalty, Nameless is given the right to approach within ten paces of the ruler, and begins to recount, at the king's request, how he managed to slay his formidable opponents.

Hero has drawn comparisons to a technicolor Rashomon, but unlike that marvelously noncommittal film, Zhang's movie lays out one clear truth after flirting with a few other false narratives. Nameless spins a few tales and the king counters with others, each wrought in a different super-saturated color – cold gray, a singing red, blue, lush green – until they arrive at the facts of what happened to the assassins Broken Sword (Tony Leung), his lover Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), and "Who stole my cool adjective?" Sky (Donnie Yen).

Buried underneath the dazzling images is an interesting movie about the sacrifice of individual human rights for the sake of state stability (or autocratic rule, however you might want to read that), about the battle between the hard-power tactics of the sword and the slipperiness of artistic resistance. Scratch beneath the extravagant wire-work, the exquisite tableaux, Broken Sword's flowing Pantene-worthy man mane, and you might find . . . The Emperor's Shadow, a 1996 film about the Qin emperor that is a far more satisfying treatment of the philosophical and ethical issues that are swamped by Hero's gorgeousness. In Zhou Xiaowhen's film, the emperor is locked in a fierce struggle with a childhood friend turned consummate composer; the king believes the musician has the power to write a national anthem that will unite the whole country. Their contentious relationship, of course, lays out the dilemma of the ruler who is attempting to impose a nationalist narrative on his unwilling subjects: You can rule people's bodies, but what about their hearts and minds?

Hero is too busy flouncing in the mirror to attend to these ideas, or to acquaint us fully with its characters. Without the human element to flesh out the film, the stunning graphics seem almost pornographic – only surface, slick visual titillation. All that swordplay, a hailstorm of arrows that leaves a building bristling like a porcupine, the silken swirls of Cheung's dresses, her ravishing face – cinematographer Christopher Doyle, famed for his work with Wong Kar-Wai (Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love) and on films like The Quiet American, is one of the finest directors of photography out there, and he's done magnificent work in Hero. But without a story to anchor his images, without real people in those sumptuous robes, his images veer from shocking beauty into pure camp. Some of the moments that were meant to be most jaw-dropping – a swirl of yellow leaves turning red from a slain woman's blood, say – stink like an overripe durian. The audience cackled at that one.

Noy Thrupkaew is a Prospect senior correspondent.

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