'The voice is the voice of Chen Daoming but the hand is the hand of Zhang Yimou'

[flemmings]

Which is to say, I watched Hero on my day off.

Improves on a rewatch: plot not so WTF-y, grinding colour schematics less Vogue shoot and more 'Oh yes Zhang does that' (and has since Red Sorghum), and I've learned to listen to the actors speaking Chinese, rather than just read subtitles. 'Oh hey the Emperor uses the informal I here and then goes back to gua ren!' Step by step and row by row...

(So that in the extras afterwards, I'm wondering about Zhang's accent/ dialect? because his mandarin sounds quite different from the action director's- and I hope it's not just because the action director, who I thought was from HK, was really speaking Cantonese and I've become unable to hear the difference. But it's also different from Uncle Ming's mandarin, not that Uncle Ming got more than a sentence or two in the Making Of... sections; and Uncle Ming's daily mandarin sounds subtly different from the Emperor's mandarin which sounds subtly different from Gou Jian's mandarin, and is that the theatrical diction you guys were talking about, nado nado)

Have also learned to watch these things as a combination of opera and ballet and Cirque du Soleil, with a huge dash of manga, which puts paid to my atavistic bourgeois-French knee-jerk reaction of But this is imbecilic. Unlike the HK versions of same, high budgets and Zhang's eye let me make out what people are actually doing as they swoop and glide. My TV set isn't tiny: it's what a nonwatcher considers as reasonable a size as one can get before becoming ridiculous ('what's that picture window sitting in your living room?') But it's not big enough to handle epic fantasy-size films, let alone badly lit night scenes in Cantonese movies.

The Emperor, yeah, is still not!Chen Daoming, but might serve as Notes Towards that A/U Fu Chai I constantly play with. The Emperor is much more yin than Hu Jun is, or possibly could be, and not enough yin to be really Uncle Ming. The voice is there, the... je ne sais quoi, the ambience, the sexual fascination, is missing. 'Oh,' she says, disappointed, 'he plays a man.'

I can't remember what the mainland grousing about Hero was all about- selling out to the West, was it?- or was it Chinese NAmericans grousing about Zhang selling out to the CCP? Some people love to grouse. I agree that Hero breaks what seems to be the cardinal rule of mainland historical dramas: it doesn't do Sucks To Be Us. (Oh look how we suffered under the unenlightened rule of anyone but Mao, oh what benighted times these were, oh life by its nature is a howling wilderness where the bad end unhappily and the good unluckily and lovers kill each other in spite of themselves oh no wait he *did* do that one.) But yanno, it's *not* an historical drama. It's intended to be a martial arts film, and is in fact a martial arts art film, ie not a low-budget HK churn-out. If the HK directors can have fun with, and make fun of, Chinese history, shouldn't Zhang Yimou be entitled to do the same?

At this rate I might even find myself watching Curse of the Golden Boobies. Except that the boobies in question bug me, for reasons I can't define. But they bug me the same way as Qing male hairstyles: ugly and distracting.

Comments

[i-am-zan.livejournal.com]

ahahahaha!

Ilove this commentary. It's wonderful...and Red Sorghum..he made that??? Wow! I never realised. That film haunts me sometimes, in a good way I think.

Hmmm haven't watched the last film mentioned but it's there on a long list of "to watch someday" films.

Meanwhile I had to be content with Clint Eastwood in "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" sadly, I am certain I can quote whole chunks of it. ^__^ and "For a Few Dollars More" - The excuse could be...awesome music score by Ennio Morriconne.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

That film haunts me sometimes, in a good way I think

That film haunts me in a very bad way. Skinning people alive eww yecchhh.

[i-am-zan.livejournal.com]

Aaah maybe that came out wrong. I meant in a 'good' way in that I thought it was a story well told with the unfolding of the whole, a layered (no pun intended) kind of experience and yes it haunts me because of that too!
...

and I love your icon! the horse has Kirin's look about to launch into something. ^_~

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

While it may be a martial arts art film (and I liked it very much) it struck me as a very much a Confucian/Chinese thinking/pro-CCP movie as well. In the 'we must all sacrifice for the common good' way.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

The idea that a geographical area does better when united into one country than when it remains a bunch of small states fighting among themselves is called common sense throughout European history. I don't see why the same notion suddenly becomes propaganda for the annexation of Taiwan when applied to China. If only because the first emperor- not a particularly nice man, and not presented as a particularly nice man in Hero- *did* unite a bunch of uselessly squabbling states, and did it by crushing them.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, the objection to Hero is that it white-washed the First Emperor, which was not just cruel and bloodthirty, but also burnt books. It's what goes for political dialogue in China nowadays. It's just a talk point.

But Uncle Ming had the snarkiest comment about his role -- "The director draw me a circle a meter round, and I did the best I could in it." Which is pretty much how Zhang direct all his actors, but Uncle Ming is the only one who can say it out loud, of course.

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

Oh, that was me.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be able to tell with the other actors (and must suppress the urge to say that HK actors need to be ruthlessly confined anyway, for their own and the film's good) but I did notice how the Emperor's eyes were so much flatter and less expressive than Gou Jian's.

[feliciter.livejournal.com]

Hero was Zhang Yimou's most CCP-ideology-friendly film until Curse of the Golden Boobies. Good to watch both for the spectacle a comparison, IMHO.

Uncle Ming's Qin emperor was a lot more yin than other portrayals before or since, though certainly the necessary dogmatism and ruthlessness were perfectly expressed (come to think of it, that was probably all that Zhang Yimou wanted from Uncle Ming, which is a sheer waste of the man.)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Utter waste. But then, consider if a yang someone had been playing the Qin emperor: the whole (non-)assassination plot and confrontation would have felt much different-- far more HK martial arts film. As it is- well, *someone's* needed to provide the third (all compromised and problematic) yin nexus with Snow and Moon, to balance the three yang embodiments of Sky, Sword and Nameless.