NEWS STORY
'Wuxia' films
put Hollywood to Shame
It's official. The Chinese are coming soon to a theatre
near you. Three major Chinese films are slated for release in North America
in the next few months. They are Jackie Chan's Highbinders, a film called
The Touch, starring Michelle
Yeoh, and, finally, Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou. Be warned: These
movies aren't angling for the usual festival acclaim and art-house cinema
slots. Quite the opposite. They're aiming for Cineplexes and suburban malls.
They want to help sell popcorn and soft drinks. They want to generate
billboard-sized numbers.
Chinese, and in particular Hong Kong, cinema has already
had more impact on Hollywood than any other international tradition since
the '60s French new wave. Director John Woo has been in Los Angeles for a
decade, adding his distinctive stylizations to studio releases like Face/Off
and Mission Impossible 2, along with serving as guru to the likes of Quentin
Tarantino and Nicolas Cage.
Likewise, films such as The Matrix, Charlie's Angels and
Laura Croft, Tomb Raider plunder martial-arts traditions, as refracted
through the aesthetic lens of hyper Hong Kong, for the sake of better, and
more cool, action sequences. Twentysomething American actors can suddenly
vault like Daoist masters, without the bother of spending decades in
spiritual and physical training.
But the Chinese are no longer content to simply add
cultural grace notes to mainstream American movies. Starting this summer,
they will be wanting North American audiences to themselves. The three
upcoming films have much in common. All are action-oriented and were
expensive to shoot. Much of the financing and talent came from Hong Kong.
Highbinders, for instance, the latest English-language vehicle for Chan, the
city's favourite son, is rumoured to have cost local backers US$35 million.
The norm in Hong Kong is more like $3- or $4-million per film, even for one
as dazzling as Wong Kar-wei's In the Mood for Love.
Why the splurge? The question highlights the biggest
connection between the movies and the reason for their market confidence. A
few years ago, a group of producers went looking for Asian money to finance
a Mandarin-language project about an ageing swordsman and an anarchic
upstart. They had a director from Taiwan with a track record in the West,
several of the biggest Asian stars and a story that drew upon the most
enduring archetypes in Chinese culture.
Despite this, no one in Hong Kong would put up the US$15
million. The producers eventually found a Hollywood studio. Four Oscars and
unprecedented box-office success later, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon remains an unhappy Hong Kong story of a great deal -- and a major
movie -- that got away. Nobody plans to let it happen again.
Hoping that success will rub off, this new crop is staffed
by Crouching Tiger alumni. Michelle Yeoh, who starred as the female lead
alongside Chow Yun-fat in Ang Lee's film, is front and centre of The Touch,
both as its lead and co-producer. Zhang Yimou, who, until now, has contented
himself with creating the most important body of work by a living Chinese
director (movies such as Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern, most easily
seen at festivals and in art-house cinemas), has also drawn from the well in
Hero. His cast features not only the brightest stars in the Hong Kong
firmament, Maggie Cheung and Jet Li, but also Zhang Ziyi, the young Beijing
actress whose performance as the troubled girl fleeing an arranged marriage
in Crouching Tiger gave the movie such a lift.
But the real glue linking these films to Ang Lee is Jackie
Chan. True, Chan had no part in Crouching Tiger and Highbinders will more
likely more resemble one of Chan's "American" movies, such as Rush
Hour 2, than any of the half-dozen action masterpieces he starred in, and
sometimes directed, in Hong Kong.
The link, rather, is Chan himself, and his affiliation
with a cultural tradition largely unknown outside China called wuxia. Though
he is only 47, Jackie Chan experienced a childhood from the Qing Dynasty,
via Charles Dickens. His parents were domestic workers in a foreign
consulate in Hong Kong. When an opportunity came to emigrate, they enrolled
their wild seven-year-old in a local school that taught Peking opera. The
boy agreed to a 10-year contract with the academy.
The school beat and starved its pupils into learning
traditional opera's rigorous skill combinations. Classes included martial
arts and gymnastics, swordplay and choreography, song and dance. Chan
survived the decade and graduated as an extra in Hong Kong action flicks,
including walk-on parts in those of his idol, Bruce Lee. His signature style
combined Lee's hard fighting with feats of athleticism, physical creativity
and sheer daring, in a model quite unlike anything seen before.
A training in Peking opera, in other words, made Jackie
Chan. The opera is also one of the pillars grounding the genre of Chinese
cinema that gave birth to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The genre
sub-divides into movies of wushu, or kung fu, and those of wuxia, or sword
fighting. By design, Ang Lee's film is the wuxia tradition incarnated.
Until recently, most Westerners knew only kung fu,
beginning with the crude 'chop-sockies' from the '50s and '60s. These were
followed by Bruce Lee's fists of fury in the '70s, and, lately, by Chan's
cross of manic action with soft comedy. For all their popularity, wushu
movies pale in comparison with the more expansive and protean universe of
wuxia, where mountaintop monasteries produce spiritual masters and masterful
swordsmen, all of whom can, if need be, fly like angels.
Stories of knights-for-hire can be traced back to the time
of Confucius, five centuries before Jesus Christ. From the beginning, the
tales were set in the giang hu, the largely mythic sub-culture within
Chinese society populated by noble knights and sagacious teachers, venal
ruffians and corrupted officials.
The stories began to be written down about 1,500 years
ago, with the Bible of wuxia, the multi-volume novel Water Margin, appearing
around AD 1300. Chinese opera, a relatively recent development, borrowed
from these tales for its plot lines. On stage, fighting had to be carefully
stylized and the capacity to transcend the humanly possible -- to fly, in
effect, as true masters are able to do in the giang hu -- required that
performers execute vaults and flips.
Sword fighting novels and films were the rage in early
20th-century Shanghai. The books were best-sellers, and the movies, such as
Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery, from 1928, left audiences in states of
exalted agitation. Novels, including the epic by Wang Du Lu that provided
the story for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, were so popular that teenagers
began abandoning the city for those misty mountains, in search of kung fu
monasteries. At one point, the national government banned the novels and
films, fearing their influence.
By the '50s, most of the creators of wuxia cinema and
fiction had fled to Hong Kong and Taiwan. Ang Lee grew up in Taiwan during
this era, reading sword- fighting novels and watching the movies of King Hu.
It was Hu, an under-appreciated filmmaker, who figured out how to translate
the kinetics of opera onto the screen. He did so in part through the
intensity of his vision, and in part by hiring a ballet dancer, Cheng Pei
Pei, rather than an opera performer or martial-arts expert, as his lead.
Though Cheng was barely 18, her turn as the swordswoman in Hu's 1966 Come
Drink With Me set the benchmark for cinematic grace, by a woman or a man.
Decades later, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon features
Cheng Pei Pei in the role of the aging villain Jade Fox. Indeed, Lee honours
his debt to King Hu throughout the film, including the celebrated bamboo
grove fight, an extension of a similar scene in Hu's A Touch of Zen.
Crouching Tiger, which the director himself has described
as a "research instrument to explore the legacy of classical Chinese
culture," is a compendium of wuxia types and concerns. In master Li Mu
Bai, the character played by Chow Yun-fat, there is the swordsman whose
Confucian ethics co-exist with the Daoist fighting techniques of that
school's headquarters, Wudan monastery. (Kung fu is affiliated with Shaolin
monastery.) Chow's character is code-bound to avenge the murder of his
master, a classic storyline, and is also drawn to finding a worthy student,
to whom he can pass on his expertise. In addition, there are the usual
secret manuals and poison darts, the awesome swords and fighting monks.
Plus, of course, the vaulting. Characters fly in Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon, often with breathtaking poetic beauty. They do so not
just to impress audiences and celebrate physical grace. Defying gravity is a
stand-in for spiritual striving. A mastery of the self can, in certain
cases, lead to an individual connecting with the laws of nature. There is,
in short, both a tradition behind the flying, and a philosophy.
Philosophies, in turn, often serve as cultural projections
and wish fulfillments. Wuxia is a dream-catcher for the Chinese
sub-conscious. It is a form that allows the culture to express its most
ardent beliefs and its deepest longings. In cinematic terms, the genre is
all- pervasive in China. John Woo's celebrated gangster films are wuxia
updates -- sword fighting with guns. The best kung fu film produced in Hong
Kong in recent years is Stephen Chiau's 2001 comedy Shaolin Soccer. It
follows some genial losers who assemble a soccer team and use fighting and
philosophy to defeat a squad of super-nasties. Swordsmen fly there, too,
dressed in shorts and cleats.
So far, Hollywood's borrowings from this tradition have
been predictably shallow. When Cameron Diaz reverse high-kicks an evil guy
in Charlie's Angels, it is a nifty visual trick using hidden wires. Nothing
less, nothing more. When Keanu Reeves ducks under a bullet in The Matrix,
there is high-minded chatter to accompany the trick. Too bad the chatter
doesn't make any sense.
Will these upcoming Chinese releases, ambitious to please
Western audiences, be more coherent? Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon showed
that Asian films could retain their authenticity and still find wide appeal.
(Lee's movie, in fact, was only a modest success in China. Audiences found
the story too familiar and the action too slow.) The secret probably lies in
remembering where the flying comes from and what it signifies. For an
outsider, some knowledge of wuxia can help. For a Chinese actor or director,
simply being yourself is the way to go.
by Charles Foran Saturday
Post 18 May 2002
