The Bride With White Hair

Wuxiapocalypse

The Bride With White Hair
(aka Bak fat moh lui zyun)
Hong Kong 1993 Directed by Ronny Yu
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some definite spoilerage here.

The 1957/58 serialised novel Baifa Monü Zhuan by Liang Yusheng has been the subject of a fair few movie versions over the years. The only one I’d seen before watching this new Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray edition of The Bride With White Hair was a preview screening of the 2014 version, The White Haired Witch Of Lunar Kingdom (reviewed here), which was quite spectacular and impressive but, alas, apparently not impressive enough to find any kind of distribution in the UK other than at that London Film Festival screening.

This 1993 version is at least the third movie version of the tale and, though I don’t like Shakespeare all that much, I can at least recognise that it does indeed play like a version of Romeo And Juliette to some extent, although a version where most of the two warring clans (including the clan which the famed Wu Tang Clan are based on) are dead and the hero and heroine both survive and go their separate, tortured ways due to their own misunderstandings that each betrayed the other.

So, yeah, if there’s anything The Bride With White Hair is not, it definitely isn’t a barrel of laughs.

The film is very much a wuxia in the way in which it stages its fight scenes like some kind of ballet choreography (which really makes the flow of the bigger action pieces in this one seem a bit too artificial, in my opinion) and also uses a lot of wire work. So if you like movies that have a lot of people leaping into the sky with their swords ready like some kind of homicidal Superman for no apparent reason... then you’ll probably get a kick out of this.

The violence is typically stylised but, at the same time, manages to seem quite tame, even though mutilated characters are spraying gouts of arterial spray and depositing their jet propelled innards randomly around the frame. Indeed, the level of the violence perhaps, where The Bride quickly slices a man into nine pieces with her whip, to have him land in a pile of body parts on the ground before her, for example, may sound quite graphic and bad but, somehow the colours and artificiality of the shots in which this hyper-real violence is escalated makes the film seem somehow quite sedate and comfortable in comparison to much less grisly deaths in other movies. The various scenes are infused with some nice colour palettes to liven up the shots, where the warm blues and reds of one scene will follow on from the icy cold, snowy wastes in neutral pale colours of another. It all looks very nice although, I’d have to say, the new Blu Ray transfer does, I suspect, show up more faults on the film than one might expect. By that I mean to say, although the transfer is excellent, certain scenes seemed both a little too bright but also washed out at the same time, like someone decided to hit the ‘saturation toggle’ just a little too much to inadvertently make the people on the screen seem to be not much more than just a collection of pixels at some points. It’s possibly to do with the way certain characters are lit or possibly something to do with the film stock it was shot on. Possibly it was even shot on video for all I know but, that’s just a guess based on what I’m seeing here. Sometimes a good transfer will bring out the best in a movie and, sometimes it will show up more of its faults which, I suspect, is the case in point here.

The two leads, though, played by Brigitte Lin (The Bride) and Leslie Cheung (as Cho) are absolutely brilliant and imbue the characters with a certain emotional charm which immediately endears them to the heart of the viewer... or at least this viewer. The ‘over the top’ villains who are causing all the grief in the movie for these two are, quite deftly and gradually at first, revealed by the director to be a conjoined siamese twin brother and sister. These martial arts demons are, it has to be said, equally impressive in some ways but also quite over the top in their joint hysteria. I didn’t really enjoy their performance nearly as much as their two co-stars and, their very existence in this does give the obvious foreshadowing that, at some point, somebody was going to slash the two apart with a sword. This kinda happened as expected but, by this point, I wasn’t really caring about the villains so much as the state of mind of the two lovers who have been torn apart by the evil twins’ jealous desires.

Also, the whole plot device about Cho guarding the flower that blooms rarely in the snowy wastes which will restore the youth and life of the dying seems to get lost quite early on and, since the novel was apparently so voluminous, I’m suspecting we only get a ‘highlights’ version of certain aspects of the story here. That being said, I know there was a sequel made to this version (which apparently is nowhere near as well thought of as this one) in which both the leads returned so, it might well pick up that element of the story at some point. I’ll need to see if Eureka Masters Of Cinema decide to issue a version of that as I’d certainly be interested in seeing where the story is headed.

All in all I’d say I generally enjoyed The Bride With White Hair although, not nearly as much as the 2014 version of the story. I found the music a bit less impactful than it perhaps should have been too, to be fair... a little bit like audio wallpaper in this case... and I thought the action scenes could have been longer and more impactful in contrast to the many dramatic scenes but, yeah, it’s not a bad little movie and the highly stylised look and feel of the film is certainly of interest. Worth a look, especially, perhaps, if you’re not all that familiar with the genre (so will perhaps be more impressed with it if you have nothing to compare it to).