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).

Dragon Inn

Everybody Was
King Hu Fighting

Dragon Inn
aka Long men kezhan
Taiwan/Hong Kong 1967 Directed by King Hu
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray Zone B

It’s been a good while since I last saw Dragon Inn and the Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray edition seemed an excellent way for me to catch up to it again. I find it strange though that I am only now finding out that it’s not an actual Shaw Brothers movie at all... I’m sure my old Region 3 Hong Kong DVD is actually branded to that company but, maybe they just distributed it in certain territories. This director’s previous film was definitely a Shaw Bros production though, the great Come Drink With Me (which I reviewed right here). Dragon Inn isn’t, for me, as engaging a film but it’s still pretty great and fans of Wuxia in general should really like this although... it’s reputation probably proceeds it these days and I’m sure most Wuxia enthusiasts have probably already seen it.

It’s actually interesting because one of the extras on this Blu Ray mentions that Dragon Inn dates from before the wire work era of martial arts cinema and, indeed, there doesn’t seem to be any on show in this film. However, I find myself having to take that claim with a pinch of salt because, frankly, there was some great wire work in Come Drink With Me so... yeah... I don’t know why the Eureka people are claiming that here. I’ll come back to something else they say in the same extras supplement in a little while.

So what we have here is a film which sets up a basic plot and has a sequence where an absolute load of characters are introduced in voice-over narrative, telling about a group of eunuch overlords running two main factions and... yeah, it all got a bit too complicated for me. People who know me well know I don’t understand political stuff and a lot of the plot set up was passing me by but, what this does do to an extent, is just set up that there are good guys and bad guys and roughly points you in the direction of... a good guy who gets executed has his children sentenced to exile but the bad guys change their mind and go after them anyway. However, various other good guys want to protect the kids but the evil ones pretty much know that they’ll have to pass by the Dragon Inn for a night to stay and pause for refreshment on their journey away from said bad guys. So a small bunch of military types take over the Dragon Inn, perhaps not knowing the absent owner was a General or some such in the good guy army. And, after a few lone maverick style ‘good guy and gal’ characters come to the inn and make themselves known, it becomes a battleground of intense stares, implied conflict and, of course, various bits of action business as the film progresses.

Pretty much the first two thirds of the film are set in the titular establishment before the last act, where various people are fighting outside the inn and in local environs. This film does have some of the action styles associated with the absent wirework such as leaping high via hidden trampolines and also leaping great distances, accomplished with jump cuts from fast moving camera pans from tree to tree, giving the specific character I’m thinking of the appearance of constantly teleporting... so, it’s a curious compromise and it rings truer, to my ears, that the director’s statement that he wanted to steer clear of a lot of trickery to concentrate on the innate skill of the performers is probably the more probable fact of the matter, rather than it actually pre-dating said wire work solutions in the genre.

Also, this movie once again shows the propensity with Chinese films of this period to just needle drop in soundtracks from other films. Although the film has a composer of its own, as credited to Lan-Ping Chow, there are several steals including a Morricone piece from A Fistful Of Dollars which gets tracked in a lot, to give the suspense scenes of ‘are they or aren’t they going to go at it hammer and tongs in a minute or not?’ style tension a bit of a lift. Interestingly, on the extra I mentioned earlier (and I’m really not knocking that extra, I learned a few things from it too), it says the music in these scenes is so close to A Fistful Of Dollars as to be ‘actionable’. Frankly, it sounds so close that, as I said, I think it’s just needle dropped in and I have to wonder if the way it’s expressed on the extra is just a way for the British distributors to avoid their own lawsuit? There are a few recent British Blu Ray releases that have some quite high profile score cuts tracked in now, as various boutique labels start issuing these kinds of films and, well, I’m just grateful that the music used on these films stand as a historical document ‘of their time’ rather than having been tampered with due to legal issues. Wait until they start issuing some of those Turkish films on UK Blu Ray though... it’s surely only a matter of time... and then you’ll really know it. Some of the ‘steals’ on those things are way less subtle than this movie.

Anyway, all in all it’s a rather enjoyable flick, full of action and machismo thrown into the mix equally. There are some lovely sequences where the roaming camera fluidly manages to take in the whole of the environment (such as following... or as I learned from the extras, providing contrary movement)... in respect to the characters in the inn and roaming between both levels of the building. There’s also a nice touch which I can’t help but think, in terms of the genre (if this is, indeed, a genre signature), signals the introduction of various characters in video games of the 1980s and onwards, as various villains in this are sometimes ushered onto the screen with multiple musical stings as each are paraded before the camera. It’s an unexpected but nice touch in places (although I suspect it could get a little irritating if this happens in a lot of movies in one sitting).

If it’s action coupled with great camerawork you’re looking for then Dragon Inn is definitely a good ‘go to’ movie. It’s even better if you like to hear characters constantly goading and criticising their opponents for being eunuchs but, honestly, that element is not really something which did much for me... maybe it’s a Chinese thing. A nicely made film though and with a couple of nice extras from Eureka... one being a short visual essay which I have commented on here and also some really nice newsreel footage from the time showing the Star Wars like queues of the people of Japan queuing up for what was obviously a very lucrative film at the box office. Lucrative enough to get a mention on their local news, at any rate. The Eureka Blu Ray edition is as good as I’ve seen the film looking and it’s definitely the one to go for if you are wanting to take a look at this martial arts gem. Wuxia on, Wuxia off.

Come Drink With Me

Golden’s Hours

Come Drink With Me
(aka Da zui xia)
Hong Kong 1966 Directed by King Hu
Shaw Brothers/88 Films/Celestial Pictures
Blu Ray Zone B

Come Drink With Me is one of the best of the many great Shaw Brothers, classic wire-work kung fu style movies and it was probably the first of the really big films to highlight the martial arts star Pei-Pei Cheng. She’d already played a few minor characters in films such as the first of the Monkey films, The Monkey Goes West (she’d also turn up in one of the three Monkey sequels, Princess Iron Fan) but most westerners would probably know her best, these days, as the villainous Jade Dragon in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, made 34 years after this movie.

In this one she plays the somewhat enigmatic Golden Swallow, an infamous agent who is out to get her brother out of his position as hostage/bargaining chip after, in a blood thirsty opening battle, some bandits kidnap him so they can exchange him for their captured boss. For some reason, in her first couple of encounters with various gang members and also her unexpected ally, Drunken Hero, played by Hua Yueh, she seems to be somehow mistaken for a man. Which is kinda strange because she certainly never looks like one and then, all of a sudden, about halfway through the film, everybody just starts talking to her as a female. I suspect I’m missing something subtle in Chinese cultural cinema semiotics here so I’ll just leave you to speculate on that one yourself (and possibly inform me via the comments section below?).

Either way, it’s a great film and there are some lovely set pieces in it. It’s been a good decade or so  since I delved into my old Region 3 DVD of the film but I still remembered the brilliant scene where the Golden Swallow is calmly seated in an inn and somewhere between 12 and 20 bandits reveal themselves to her, completely underestimating her fighting and hand coordination skills as they take a good drubbing from her. There’s some brilliant over the top stuff in here such as when two bandits throw a load of those Chinese coins with the square holes in the centre at her. Still seated, she tosses three chopsticks at the ceiling, spearing all the coins to the roof with the three sticks as she opens her fan to collect all the coins as they roll off again. There’s some nice stuff here including some wire work as everyone seems to be able to leap and change direction mid-air, just a little, with their kung fu skills.

My only real disappointment in the film is, after she’s poisoned and rescued by her new ally, once she escapes from the temple of the bandits in pretty bad shape, the film becomes as much about the Drunken Hero’s character as it does her own and, although she is a force to be reckoned with in terms of marital arts skills and the general jumping around shenanigans that many of this genre of Shaw Brothers films were known for, the drunken character... who also has a song and dance number earlier in the picture... is revealed to be at the absolute top level of his kung fu powers. What that means, folks, is that he can part the stream of a waterfall by emitting sustained force from his hands, catch huge rocks with just one finger and, later on, match his brother wisp by wisp as they fire deadly force smoke from the palms of their hands at each other. I must get the name of their kung fu teacher.

So, yeah, although there’s a big battle at the end of the movie with Golden Swallow leading a team of women in defence against the bandits after they retake the boss of the gang, there’s a second climax to the film which is just the drunken master and his warrior monk brother jumping around and firing smoke at each other to act as the ‘next level’ denouement of the movie. Which is a shame because I love the personality of Golden Swallow and her particular fighting style, using two very short swords in each hand, the right one held as normal and the left one often held in a back-stroke position, in much the same way as Zatoichi used to hold his sword cane (incidentally, there was a crossover production between the Hong Kong based Shaw Brothers studio’s One Armed Swordsman and Japanese studio Daiei heroes blind swordsman Zatoichi but, yeah, I’ll get around to re-watching that for this blog in a while, I guess).

Like a lot of the Shaw Brothers movies from this period, the film is very colourful and has some nicely framed sequences... although the camera does seem a little shaky in places (not sure if that’s because of how good the new Blu Ray transfer is when combined with a certain kind of footage or if it’s something else). The music is pretty good and standard fayre for something like this although, in those little pauses they always seem to have every few fighting moves in films like this, the music steps up and builds up tension purely with percussion, in much the same way that an Italian western under the influence of Ennio Morricone would have similarly underscored the showdowns.

Although there’s also a lot of humour in the film, this might be too much for some people to stomach in terms of the suspension of disbelief when people start leaping just a little too high or firing energy around from the palms of their hands but, if you can just go with it, I think you’ll find Come Drink With Me is a fun little gem and there’s a reason why it often turns up in those ‘1001 movies you should see before you die’ lists. Certainly it’s one of my favourite Shaw Brothers movies and it even gave rise to a sequel a few years down the line called Golden Swallow... although I remember being somewhat disappointed in the second one which, although again starring Pei-Pei Cheng in the title role, seemed less like the character from the original film and, if memory serves, she had less to do in it too. Still, the first one is absolutely one of the great martial arts movies and the more adventurous of you might want to give this one a go, especially in the newish, nicely restored Blu Ray version from 88 Films, which also includes a commentary and the trailer (and a booklet and slip case if, like me, you purchase the first edition pressing). It’s chop quality socky!

The White Haired Witch Of Lunar Kingdom

A Witch In Time

The White Haired Witch Of Lunar Kingdom
2014  China
Directed by Zhang Zhiliang
Seen as part of the London Film Festival 
on Sunday 19th October 2014

I kinda knew, somewhere in the back of my head, that The White Haired Witch Of Lunar Kingdom was not the only film dealing with this character before I booked my ticket to see this at the London Film Festival... I remember seeing the old Tartan DVDs (now quite scarce) on the shelves for titles like The Bride With White Hair. In fact, this story has been adapted for the screen many times over the years since its first publication as a serialised novel, Baifa Monü Zhuan by Liang Yusheng, between August 1957 and December 1958.

I still wanted to see this one, though, because it looked like it was going to be really colourful and, since I’ve not seen any of the previous attempts at turning this into a movie or TV show, I at least wouldn’t have anything to compare it to in a negative light. I have to say, I think I made the right choice with this one because, if nothing else, this is probably one of the most spectacular films to be screened at the LFF this year and, in the words of one of the organisers, “not like anything else we’ve got playing here”.

I get the idea from what I’ve read of a basic synopsis of the novel that, clearly, some liberties were taken with the overall story but, quite honestly, I’m not too worried about it with this particular work as I suspect it’s been treated quite differently, in terms of details, in all of the on-screen incarnations that it’s had. I’ve no real way of telling you if it’s in any way a good adaptation of the original source novel, either in accuracy or in spirit, so please bear that in mind when you read this.

The film is amazingly put together, right from the start, with a blisteringly beautiful opening title sequence which has a lot going on in it. I’ll jump back to a certain aspect of that opening towards the end of this review but, after this sequence is played out, the style of the camera work very much favours the long, slow camera pan and the wide reveal... with the editing between shots at a minimum. It’s visual pacing may be leisurely but, it has to be said, it moves pretty fast. There’s an awful lot of ground being covered in this movie and, considering the film is only an hour and three quarters in length, the director has managed to pack an amazing amount of story into it. Someone like Peter Jackson would probably have filmed it as nine hours and released it as three separate movies.

If you’ve not seen a lot of these kinds of Chinese martial arts films, the modern examples of films of this nature being such gems as Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, then you will probably need to get used to the fact that a lot of the characters in this have honed their skills so that they can jump and leap about at great heights and, as in this one, bounce back off of the surface of water by merely touching it with a sword in the right way (a tactic the main male protagonist Zhuo, played by Xiaoming Huang, uses to retrieve a veil he has knocked off of the main female protagonist and title character). If you are still trying to get used to that kind of stuff after a few minutes of the film then this may not be your thing but, if anything, this film did remind me of those old Shaw Brothers films of the 50s, 60s and 70s... where such leaps from reality are quite normal.

What especially made me think of that direct lineage from the Shaw Brothers to this movie is found in the style used to introduce characters... by putting little captions up by the side of them throughout the movie every time a new character was introduced. The Shaw Brothers did a similar thing in their film The Water Margin (later made into a famous Japanese TV series, which was one of the few to penetrate the West via BBC broadcasts in the 1970s and 1980s). I seem to remember the actors and actresses playing the roles were also flashed up in relation to their characters as you went through the movie, something which The White Haired Witch Of Lunar Kingdom stops short at when it comes to the performers behind the characters.

The colours, as I expected, are absolutely spectacular and often very bright, as you would associate with some of the examples of the wuxia genre in more recent years. It's a very controlled use of colour and the director does have certain palette sets into which hues from other kinds of scenes rarely intrude or bleed into (apart from in the incredible juxtaposition of colours in one specific scene, that is, which I won’t spoil for you by elaborating on here). Overall, the film looks truly beautiful, even in its more frosty colour sets, which also complement the “White Haired Witch”, played beautifully by Bingbing Fan (who played Blink in X-Men Days Of Future Past and also appeared in the Chinese version of Iron Man 3), when she actually does reach the point where her hair turns white.

The story is incredibly convoluted and, every time you think you’re coming to some kind of closure or end game, a new part of the adventure starts. It’s almost like we’ve got three or four stories in one, with running characters, in the space of what is a very limited running time. The film, I’ll grant you, does have an episodic quality to it in certain places, but for all its jumps and slight narrative gaps, it all supports the central character arc and fits together beautifully as a single follow through in the end.

Asides from strong cinematography, some amazing performances from the various leads and a beautiful score (which I suspect I might have trouble getting hold of at the moment)... the film also has some stunning fight choreography which doesn’t suffer, like many Western made action movies these days, from an overabundance of cuts. The first meeting/fight between the male hero and the title heroine, takes place in a little cove on rocks in water and the ways it’s done is just beautiful It’s not about two people fighting, it’s about two people getting to know each other’s limits and introduce themselves... if anything, in fact, the whole fight reminded me of two lovers trading caresses for the first time. This fight isn’t about injury or about death, it’s a courting ritual and it’s very much like a conversation two people might have as they try to get in touch with how they feel about the person opposite them. It’s a great sequence and it made me realise there was more to the director, Zhang Zhiliang, than at first meets the eye...

And meet my eye he did because the director was present for the screening, with his translator, and had some interesting things to say.

One thing he did make a point of saying was that the story very much follows a Taoist philosophy, with the path of life being guided by dark and light. This manifests itself very early on in the film, in fact, in that opening title sequence I mentioned. One of the things that happens in this sequence is that two fighting fish spin around and come together and are morphed into the Taoist symbol of ying and yang... so that’s a very quick way of the director giving us a visual pointer right there. However, the director then went on to say that the reason why this particular story appealed to him, in contrast to a lot of the wuxia in the history of the genre, is precisely because the heroes and villains in this one are not approaching their path through a specific ying/yang philosophy... they are seeing and reacting to things in shades of grey and he finds this much more reflective of real life as we experience it these days, with all the governments and corporations, and even individuals, acting in a very “shades of grey”manner, where it’s hard to distinguish the villains from the heroes and vice versa. This is what attracted this director to the characters in this specific story.

Now, as a comment on that, I’d have to say that, contrary to that statement in one way, there clearly are very much honourable heroes and despicable villains in this piece and they are extremely clear cut. However, that being said... and in direct correlation with what Zhang Zhiliang said in the Q and A, you do have passages of the film when the villains have sympathetic moments and there is, very much, a period in this story where the main male protagonist seems to switch allegiances and makes a choice which leads him away from the path of light... although, as you’ll see if you get an opportunity to see this one, there are reasons why he does this. Sometimes you have to make a decision to come down on the wrong side to achieve a position where the overall stakes can be turned to a greater good.

Shades of grey can be hard to read, sometimes, but what isn’t hard to comprehend is that The White Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom is an amazing and gob-smacking movie full of spectacle and excitement. My only real problem with it was right at the end in the final moments of the movie. A closure, of some sort, is visited on the main protagonists but, when that closure comes (and I’m so not saying what kind of denouement this film has, it’s got a great ending) the film makers have seen fit to add a horrendously cheesy sounding Chinese pop ballad over the top of it... I could really have done without that after a near perfect movie.

Now, I’m really not sure if this film is going to get any kind of release in either the US or the UK. I know that the director has prepped a 3D conversion of it and that he sought advice on how to shoot it to best effect to allow for that, so maybe the combination of 3D and spectacle may be enough to garner it a release for Western audiences. I hope so as I would love to see this again and would desperately like a Blu Ray transfer of the movie. That being said, there’s a scene where a wooden bridge is destroyed which results in two horse falls so I’m guessing that, even if a release is planned in the UK, the BBFC won’t let it through uncut (they don’t allow horse falls). So it’ll be interesting to see if this movie gets any kind of release over here in the near future. It certainly deserves one because it’s a fantastic movie, a wonderful character piece (as well as an action piece) and it’s a work of art that deserves a big marketing push when the time comes. Outstanding movie... don’t miss it if you get the chance to take a look.