House of Flying Daggers (2004)

During the Tang Dynasty, two police officials plot to uncover the rebellious Flying Daggers clan by investigating a blind performer (Zhang Ziyi) who is believed to be the daughter of the clan’s recently deceased leader. Love for the same woman comes between the two officers as hidden agendas and true identities are revealed.

Following Hero, Mainland Chinese “art house” director Zhang Yimou returns to the swordplay genre in House of Flying Daggers. It is in his own words, a “traditional martial arts film” with a romantic love story. It possesses elements of traditional martial arts films and at its best, gives the genre a much needed facelift. With outstanding action direction from Ching Siu-tung, meticulous and ornate art direction, dynamic camera work and CGI enhancement that captures all of the action in thrilling detail, and with pulsating sound effects and music, the film is a sumptuous feast for the senses. However, it is the love story that ultimately dominates Flying Daggers and this is where things go wrong.

The basic premise is fit for any swordplay actioner. Period police officials use their kung fu and wits in an effort to bring down a martial arts clan that is rebelling against the emperor. Prolific Hong Kong actor and pop star Andy Lau (Infernal Affairs) is Officer Leo who sends fellow officer and friend Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to cozy up to a blind performer named Mei (Zhang Ziyi) who works at the Peony Pavilion entertainment house. She is believed to be the daughter of, and successor to, the Flying Daggers clan leader whom the officials recently killed. Leo manages to have her arrested after she reveals her kung fu skills in a failed attempt to kill the officer. Still undercover, Jin rescues her with hopes that she will lead him to the Flying Daggers hideout. The plan seems to be working, even as Leo and Mei start to fall in love with one another, until trailing officers begin to attack with orders to kill. Now the two really are on the run and Jin must decide whether his growing love for Mei is worth fighting for in a rapidly-changing situation that he doesn’t understand. Jin’s final decision takes him to the heart of the Flying Daggers, reveals the truth behind a situation gone out of control, and ultimately sets him against Leo in a frenzied duel for love and honor.

Zhang Yimou does know his wuxia storytelling and puts in many of the genre’s standard elements including the secret society, two-faced characters, plot twists, women in drag, and of course the swordplay itself. In many ways, he’s taken these things and nicely updated them for a new generation. Instead of Chinese-operatic stoicism and arcane melodrama, we have passionate people in dynamic and evolving relationships. Instead of dozens of underdeveloped heroes each with bizarre names, we have just three with single-syllable names. Instead of sword heroes swinging unnaturally like a pendulum from wires in a static wide shot and on an indoor set, we have warriors bolting through the tops of bamboo trees in a huge forest, hurling bamboo spears and shimming down the stalks like uber ninjas. As for weapons, throwing daggers, arrows and even long sleeves almost take on personalities of their own as Zhang allows us to become intimate with their flight paths, physics-bending abilities and lethality. With an all-seeing camera and the wizardry of CGI, never before have the swordplay arts been revealed so clearly or enticingly.

Zhang is very in tune with the power of sensory impact. Through a combination of sight and sound, the action takes on new dimension as horses’ hoofs thunder, swords ring out and bamboo splinters with the force of a blow. The bamboo fight is the film’s showstopper and is without a doubt action director Ching Siu-tung’s finest work to date. Elements of previous screen fights are here, but he doesn’t rely on convention. The level of sophistication and precision is far above his early 1990s work in films like Butterfly and Sword and is no doubt influenced heavily by Zhang’s meticulous direction. It’ll spoil viewers unfamiliar with past bamboo forest-set confrontations.

Dramatically, Zhang Ziyi’s ribbon dance and fight doesn’t come together, but it is visually compelling. Ziyi’s dancing experience serves her well as she hurls long sleeves into drums and wields a sword. I loved the way Zhang Yimou ends this fight. Andy Lau performs a move that really conveys the power and speed that you’d imagine a jiang hu swordsman would possess. Takeshi Kaneshiro’s bow and arrow action is similar to the Legolas action in Lord of the Rings, but without the CGI acrobatics. He shares a fight with Ziyi in a field that is perhaps the best dramatically. As soldiers close in on the pair, Jin realizes for the first time that this is no longer a controlled undercover mission. What happens next is anyone’s guess and Zhang Yimou uses this uncertainty to enhance some great group action that pays homage to the classic Lau Kar-leung swordsman formations found in Shaw Brothers movies.

The film hints at an impending confrontation between the Flying Daggers and government troops in a massive brawl, but Zhang Yimou skips out on spectacle this time to focus on the growing romantic struggle between the three leads. It turns out to be a missed opportunity, for we’re left with a stereotypical and overly dramatic duel between angry suitors. However, Zhang has a few nice touches added to this scene like the dramatic snow storm that blows in and could visually represent the chilly fury that has consumed the hearts of the combatants. It’s a small thing, but I noticed that the cutting edges on the fighters’ swords become heavily dinged from steady blows. This is representative of the detail Zhang goes to in creating a semi-realism that adds greatly to the action sequences. Another example is how our heroes grow tired and even get sloppy in their fights. By the end of the final duel, form gets tossed out in favor of portraying the raw emotion of the two combatants through increasingly ugly and brutal fighting. In this sense, Zhang Yimou has taken the sword hero and given him a dose of New Wave realism, while maintaining the integrity of the genre as a celebration of a trained martial art and not just random brawling, just as Tsui Hark had accomplished in The Blade (1995)

What a shame then that Zhang Yimou is able to film such exciting action scenes in what really amounts to a romantic film that falls flat on its face. The angst-filled love triangle and all of its trappings are repeatedly beat over the heads of the audience in drawn out scenes that had me fidgeting uncomfortably in my seat. The dialogue is corny and unconvincingly put forth by the actors. Zhang simply loses his way early on and never recovers.

Admittedly, wuxia plots are traditionally corny, but it works a lot better in a film where the action comes first. In the case of Flying Daggers, Zhang is trying to balance the romantic and action angles evenly. What he may have forgotten is that in a “traditional martial arts film,” the audience wants action first. But with this emphasis, these films are usually dismissed as genre entertainment and rarely get the awards. Zhang appears almost desperate to give his action film legitimacy in the mainstream and among the art house crowd where his dramatic films have thrived. Either that, or he simply doesn’t know how to explore the martial arts film to greater depth. I doubt the second theory for Hero was an excellent example of expanding on martial themes and philosophy. I just think he got sidetracked in his pursuit of exploring love as a “triumph of the human spirit” in a swordplay movie.

Swordplay films, with their long history of special effects and fantastic action, should be viscerally entertaining work that we want to revisit. When the action stops in places House of Flying Daggers, so does my interest in the film. At two hours, the thought of seeing it again without a fast-forward button at the ready frightens me. But I have no regrets in having seen it once in the theater. For all of the film’s faults, Zhang Yimou and Ching Siu-tung have orchestrated a minor masterpiece of beautiful and pulse-pounding action sequences where flying swordsmen and women have never looked so good.