| Zhang Yimou's HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS [7/10] |
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| Wednesday, 16 February 2005 | |
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House of Flying Daggers is an enjoyably spectacular martial-arts romance from a director who enjoyed enormous success with his last picture, Hero. Director Zhang may have reaped great financial benefits from Hero's success, but the film attracted no shortage of flak from observers who detected dodgy modern-day parallels in his tale of period political intrigue which was widely interpreted as a not-so-subtle endorsement of the current Chinese government's policies towards breakaway areas such as Tibet. Flying Daggers sends out rather more mixed messages: the film dramatises the struggle faced by individuals who feel torn between duty and liberty - a struggle which Zhang himself has clearly yet to reconcile. The government (of 859 AD) is repeatedly referred to as corrupt and unworthy of office, and the main underground opposition movement - the 'House of Flying Daggers' - is presented as principled and glamorous. But despite a relatively tiny number of major roles, there are sympathetic and unsympathetic representatives of each side - and loyalties are constantly shifting as cross gives way to double-cross, and multiple games of deception are played out. In a couple of areas, House of Flying Daggers falls a little short of its predecessor - though it often looks very good, no-one is going to accuse this picture of being "the most beautiful ever made". In other areas, however, the newer film hits the mark with a surer aim: the story - essentially a love-triangle between blind dancer Mei (Ziyi Zhang), and a pair of government agents (Takeshiro Kaneshiro, Andy Lau) is rather less nightmarishly tricky to keep straight (especially as western audiences are getting the full two-hour version, whereas we had to decipher a radically chopped-down Hero which often risked elliptical opacity). Zhang and his fellow scriptwriters, meanwhile, foreground the romantic elements of the story - even more so than Ang Lee in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the wuxia (swordplay & chivalry) crossover which kicked open the door through which Zhang has so confidently bounded. Neil Young 19th December, 2004 [seen 28th October 2004 : Odeon West End, London : press show - London Film Festival] this is a condensed version (for Tribune magazine) of the original review from 2 Nov 2004 HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS [7/10] : Shi mian mai fu : China (China-'HK') 2004 : ZHANG Yimou : 119 mins |
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