Zhang Yimou’s previous movie, Hero, which unfortunately only got an art-house release in South Africa, seemed an obvious attempt to outdo Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as an exquisitely artful version of the traditional far-eastern martial-arts extravaganza. In many ways, it worked: Zhang’s visual sense is unparalleled. But he could not provide the emotionally resonant undertone that gave Lee’s movie an extra dimension, so it all felt a bit empty.
With his new opus, The House of Flying Daggers, Zhang would appear to be trying to build in that emotional element — to give his characters something more to do with their feelings than worry about whether the warring states of ancient China will be unified, which was the big issue in Hero. He gives them a bit of a love triangle to be going on with while they deal with the political and martial concerns at hand.
We are once more in that special mythical time somewhere in the distant past of Chinese history. In this case, we’re not so far back as in Hero; at least we’ve reached AD. It’s the ninth century and the ruling Tang dynasty is declining, though it still seems to have plenty of over-trained soldiers at its disposal. At any rate, the state is under threat from a secret organisation called, yes, the House of Flying Daggers. Only in this mythic ancient China would revolutionaries hoping to overthrow the state come up with such an exquisite name for themselves. Or, for that matter, would they plan and execute their plots with such poetic delicacy.
We start with two state soldiers, Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Leo (Andy Lau), getting wind of the House of Flying Daggers‘s latest plot, which involves the blind daughter of the revolutionaries’ late leader. It seems she could be in hiding, disguised as a prostitute, at the local brothel, the Peony Palace. The girl in question is Mei (Zhang Ziyi).
Naturally, Jin and Leo rush off to the Peony Palace, a brothel so extrava-gantly upmarket that it transcends the name. It not only has hordes of beautiful women on offer, but an entire orchestra available, at the snap of the madam’s fingers, to provide the musical backing for the most eye-popping dance/fight sequence you’re likely to see in some time.
You’re still catching your breath after that when Mei, with help from Jin, goes on the run, heading cross-country for the House of Flying Daggers. From this point on, the plot is too complex to summarise, and in any case it contains a number of enjoyable twists I wouldn’t want to spoil.
It is all done with wildly beautiful scenery and cinematography, with multiple fight sequences designed to astonish, as they do. The movie works towards a climax that is puzzling only in that the personal, romantic concerns Zhang erased from Hero are now more important than the big political ones. It’s as though he has overcompensated and swung too far the other way, and he’s still no Ang Lee when it comes to building a simmering emotional tension. It’s all a bit more simple and schematic here. Still, The House of Flying Daggers is gripping and entertaining, and so ravishingly gorgeous to watch that it doesn’t matter much.