The Unseen Movie Review

House of Flying Daggers

From Zhang Yimou, the man who brought us the seductively beautiful Hero, the idiosyncratic, visually inventive and simply beautiful martial arts epic that was finally released a couple of months ago, comes his equally majestic follow-up. For anyone who liked his last effort, or the film to which it was most often compared, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, this is unlikely to disappoint.

The reason for such a rapid appearance of a follow-up to Hero is simple: the American studio which bought the rights for distribution in the West from the Chinese filmmakers has finally seen sense. It took cult director Quentin Tarantino two long years of campaigning to get the execs to realise that there could be a market for foreign language movies and finally take the plunge.

The box-office returns for Hero more than proved Tarantino’s belief that quality would bear out to be correct and, thanks to this, we have the delight of not one, but two superb epics in the space of a few short months, even though the productions of Hero and House of Flying Daggers took several years. In fact, so well did Hero do that Tarantino himself is now reportedly planning to try his own hand at producing a Mandarin language martial arts epic as his follow-up to Kill Bill!

The absolutely stunning Zhang Ziyi, whom the director, to whom she is no relation, discovered for his low-key, wonderfully mournful 1999 film The Road Home, is the most obvious link to both Hero and Crouching Tiger, as she appeared in both and is rapidly approaching well-deserved superstar status. Here she plays a mysterious dancer, suspected by agents of the Tang Dynasty – the excellent Infernal Affairs’ Andy Lau and Asian idol Takeshi Kaneshiro – of having connections to the revolutionary House of Flying Daggers. It’s not long before the action kicks off, and it is just as spectacular as anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing Hero would expect.

Much like his last movie, here director Zhang Yimou demonstrates his superb visual intuition to perfection, masterfully manipulating the film’s palette to add layer upon layer of subtle yet highly effective emotional nuance. Every frame of this movie reverberates with its director’s passionate love for film and for the genre, and the desire to produce simply the most stunning sequences he can.

The subtlety and depth of this kind of filmmaking – a relatively new development from a Chinese film industry which, until relatively recently, operated under extremely strict state censorship – has ensured once again that a martial arts flick, previously the refuge of the largely male obsessive, can appeal to a wide, cross-gender audience. The fluidity of the actors’ sometimes physics-defying stunts are perfectly complimented by both the camera and the almost surreally perfect sets and locations to create yet another feast for the eyes. The fight sequences are plentiful, and superbly choreographed, but are filmed so beautifully as to appear almost like a ballet.

The fact that Zhang Ziyi plays a dancer is wonderfully apt; this is a higher form of filmmaking – physical and emotional at the same time as looking simply fantastic. Hero was lauded by many critics as one of the most beautiful films ever made; House of Flying Daggers is more so.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM