SEEING SHANGHAI TRIAD THE MOVIE THE FOURTH TIME

 

Saw one of my favorite films again, Shanghai Triad, by Zhang Yimou, starring Gong Li. It's the story of a mafia boss and his girlfriend, Bijou, in Shanghai, 1930s. We see what a fourteen year old boy sees. The story begins when he arrives in Shanghai from his rural village. His uncle works for the Tang Triad, found the boy, a Tang, to work with the Triad as servant to the Boss's girlfriend, Bijou, a nightclub singer played by Gong Li. The Boss only trusted family in his Tang organization. The boy, the nephew of the Boss's fourth cousin, just happened to enter the story as a story behind the scenes, out of sight, was on the verge of rising to the surface. We see the boy's first week, one day at a time, learn what he learned about the world he fell into, and see him begin the process of becoming that world, himself. He is in a kind of shock by the end that we know he will recover from as he acclimatizes to the world of hard core gangsters that mean business. The boy entered the story when the Boss knew about his girlfriend's infidelities with his partner in crime he called his blood brother, who the Boss knew was plotting to kill the Boss and take over his role as Boss. The story we see is the working out of the Boss's trap to set up a moment to ensnare traitor and girlfriend together on a small island in the big river where Boss could off them and no traces be found.

 

the boss, his blood brothers and bijou

 

Just a week seeing the Boss's plan play out, not knowing this is what is happening until near the end when he sits down friend-turned-enemy and girlfriend-turned-enemy, explains to them how he found them out and how he set them up, how he lured them to the island they would never leave. I like about the story telling in the film that it tells the story seen on the surface, then retells the story by way of the undercurrents invisible from the surface. A gang war is way below the surface, another Boss is conspiring to take over the Boss whose story we are following. They tried to kill our friend the Boss, but he survived. Luring friend and girlfriend to the island was a part of his bigger scheme to undo the Boss attempting to undo him. He told friend-turned-enemy he would arrange it so it looked like the other Boss was responsible for his disappearance. This would undermine the other Boss, and be instrumental in his fall. By end of story, the boy's uncle is dead who brought him into the Triad leaving the boy with revenge in his heart. All he had witnessed in his first week was so extreme, just knowing what he saw drew him into the Triad, as he could not leave the Triad knowing what he knows. He committed to a world that is upside-down in relation to his life at home in the village. The boy is last seen hanging upside-down from a sailboat's mast, seeing the world upside-down. In the words of the Boss, he was being trained, like a dog.

 

uncle, the boy, bijou

 

The story has layers of stories going on that are connected by being the same story seen from different points of view at once. This was my fourth time seeing it, and I remember from every viewing, toward the end, when we are finding out what certain people in the story knew all along, how surprised I was to see people I felt were background characters turn out to be foreground, even contributors to the underlying stories. The people involved, from both factions, are merciless people, merciless in a particularly Chinese way. This brings up another aspect of the film that draws me to it, that it is a peep into Chinese culture, Shanghai in the Thirties, customs, beliefs, issues such as trust, loyalty, commitment. The story was made from a contemporary Chinese novel, made by a Chinese director and film crew, Chinese without Western influence in story-telling, no sense that the Chinese are inferior to whites. Plenty of Westerners were in Shanghai at the time, but they were peripheral to the world of the Chinese in their own city. I like a story from another culture told from the inside, from the culture itself by people whose lives are the culture.

gong li as bijou

Recalling the boring WW2 movie, Red Tails, about a squadron of black pilots. They acted like white guys, talked like white guys, obviously the screenplay written by a white guy, who had no sense for black culture, no appreciation. It was a bunch of white guys in black face to such a boring degree it killed the movie for me. I'd rather see a Chinese film made in China, a total Chinese production. Recalling Diary of a Geisha, good film, Japanese story, the actresses mostly Chinese playing Japanese, the novel and screenplay written by Anglo Americans with second-hand knowledge of the culture. Shanghai Triad is core Chinese. Zhang Yimou, the director, has made half a dozen of my favorite films. His films are so visually stimulating that last night, while watching it with friends, Lucas and Judy, Lucas noted a couple times that each second in the film would make a beautiful art photograph. The beauty of the production, interiors, exteriors, cars, clothes, Gong Li, atmospheres, were bathed in light that glowed, gave every scene an aura of light. Even in the night, light defined the dark. The quality of light and the beauty of the photography took the edge off the sinister goings on behind the scenes, such that the final deed was all the more shocking in its soft surroundings.

zhang Yimou

 

 

 

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THE HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS - ZHANG YIMOU

Watched The House Of Flying Daggers again tonight with my friends from Georgia visiting for a few days. It's my friends the Carpenters, Lucas and Judy, from Conyers, Georgia, off I-20 east of Atlanta. Daughter Meredith and her husband Greg, here from San Francisco, came with them, and Greg's mother, Ruth, from Chicago. We ate a good meal prepared by Meredith and Greg, PhDs in biology and chemistry, respectively, as good in the kitchen as they are in the laboratory. Meredith is working in a new field involving DNA from ancient teeth, like Leakey's Lucy, that kind of ancient. I'd left about a dozen DVDs there last time Lucas and Judy were here. Greg and Meredith chose The House Of Flying Daggers. I was happy to see it again. Haven't seen it in a few years. Looking at what I love about it, I find it is largely a visual fest of colors and flowing lines. The story is simple and complex. It actually is both. It's very simple. And it's rather complex. Early on, Judy asked of one of the actors, Takeshi Kaneshiro, "Is he a bad guy?" I didn't know what to say. I never think of characters in terms of good guys and bad guys. I just watch and see what happens. I said I didn't know. I've seen the film half a dozen times, but never thought of him as a good or bad guy. Now that it's over, I can't see that either word has meaning for his character. He was both and neither.


It always does me good to see Zhang Ziyi in any film she's in. I believe she had a small, but notable role in Lust-Caution, the film of the underground resistance during the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s. She was the ninja girl who stole the sword and flew through the air with it in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. She had a role in The Hero with Jet Li, most memorable in the sword fight among the trees full of falling red leaves blowing around them in the wind, her last scene. I think it's Maggie Chung who defeated her in the scene of swirling reds. Zhang Yimou, the director, makes some gorgeous films, lush with colors, with flow, with feeling. His stories are minimal, yet emotionally complex. In a big gray palace with huge columns, silk draperies of yellow-green suspended from the ceiling made a flowing labyrinth for a sword fight between the king and a would-be assassin. In The House Of The Flying Daggers, the sword fight at the end happens in a landscape of autumn in full color. Snow starts falling as the sword fight goes on. By the time the fight is over, the snow is about 4 inches deep. Another time, I watched the brief documentary, the Making Of, that goes with the film. Zhang Yimou said while they were filming the sword fight the snow started falling and he decided to go ahead and keep on filming as the snow fell. It made a scene that was out of this world and very much of this world.


The visuals in varieties of forest in autumn, vertical dark lines with the pointilist orange and yellow dots of leaves among them, vertical white lines with pointilist yellow leaves. Then there is the bamboo grove of vertical green bamboo poles with leaves growing up high in the canopy. Running through the vertical green lines, soldiers in green uniforms striding through leafy air above, chasing Zhang Ziyi and her partner, Takeshi Kaneshiro the good guy/bad guy. She's in love with him, but the other one, Andy Lau, is in love with her, has waited for her 3 years. They're the ones who sword fought in the end. At the beginning, they were army buddies stationed together, men loyal to the emperor, or so we believed then. Much deception going on, which is uncovered, step by step, by sequence of events, until at the very end all deceptions come clean. Andy Lau played the man in waiting for three years, a member of the House of the Flying Daggers, also a spy inside the Chinese army. In Hong Kong, Andy Lau is a director of some good men-with-guns films, romantic comedies, and he acts in several of his films. He's one of the Chinese actors and directors of note in this time. He makes a good gangster movie. Search his name at netflix and a long list of movies come up.


By now I've seen most of Zhang Yimou's films, all the ones I can find at netflix, each of them several times. They're the kinds of films I watch a second time before returning them. Landscape is important in all his films. This one used the landscape of forest from the inside, then at the end seeing it from a meadow outside the forest. In a forest like the horses were running and walking through, no limbs were on the ground, no low-growing limbs, the ground evenly carpeted in fallen leaves at the same time the trees are full of colored leaves. The entire screen is covered with golden reddish orange of autumn leaves on the ground and in the trees, vertical dark lines of tree trunks, a man in a purple robe riding his horse through the scene, sometimes walking, sometimes running. Zhang Ziyi wears a flowing yellow-green outfit -- can't call it a dress, can't call it a robe -- running through the bamboo forest of vertical green lines just a shade darker than her clothes. He, the Japanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro, wore purple through the scenes of vertical green lines and the scenes of the vertical dark lines with the golden ground below and leaves above.


I hold Zhang Yimou up there with other directors like Ole Bornedal of Denmark, Ingmar Bergman of Sweden, Kristof Kieslowski and Roman Polanski of Poland, Andrei Tarkovsky of Russia, several from France, Kurosawa of Japan, Peter Greenaway from England, Lars von Trier of Denmark. I know before I start a film by Zhang Yimou, I will be satisfied all the way through it, every scene. He also made Raise The Red Lantern from a short novel by Su Tong. He enhanced the story visually, made it a fest of colors and shapes, beautifully dressed people moving among the symphonies of both brilliant and dull, warm colors around them that sometimes are cold. His film, Ju Dou, with Gong Li, happens in a place that dyes silk red. Red silk banners hang drying and flowing in the breeze through much of the film. The first time I saw it was without subtitles. Saw it later with subtitles and all I missed was names and relationships, like uncle, cousin, like that. I've seen Raise The Red Lantern several times and read the novel, know the story fairly well. It's time to see it without subtitles. I may want to look at other of his films without subtitles. I find I see the colors and compositions much better without the words to read. I don't mind reading them, but that time I saw Ju Dou without subtitles was memorably beautiful. It taught me I don't need to understand literal meanings. The tone of voice of what the actors are saying often carries the meaning. I like to hear the Chinese language too. I hear it best without subtitles. The House Of The Flying Daggers would be good without subtitles. The visuals tell the story and words fill in the blanks.


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HERO THE MOVIE

The weather goes on being steadily cold. Never a letup. The mud has dried enough that it's not slushy mudpit any more. The ruts are deep, but they don't sling mud. The ice has largely melted off the surface of Brown Road, though seems like it's still ice half an inch below the surface. Friday night I skipped driving to Woodlawn for the music at the Front Porch. The forecast was for ice rain, the temp at 31 and 32. On setting out I saw it was going to be one of those nights so black it absorbs the headlights so I can't see anything and makes oncoming headlights so bright I have to look away. It's especially disorienting between Woodlawn and this side of Galax where the cars are the thickest and I'm driving among extremely bright lights and can't see anything my lights are supposed to be shining on. Virginia doesn't keep their yellow lines and white lines on the highways very fresh, so I can seldom see them when the sky is so dark.

In Sparta, I made the decision, went to grocery store for some items, went home and called Scott at Front Porch to say I wouldn't be making it. Came home and went straight to bed. Got up in early afternoon today wanting only more sleep. Sleeping off a week of being on the run, though not objectionably. Every time I go to town, I stop at Selma's for some coffee in the morning, mocha in the afternoon. I and several others are happy to have her here. You can find Selma now on facebook at Backwoods Bean. Feeling like I didn't want to do anything but sleep some more, though wanting to be up some so I can sleep some tonight.

I put on a movie, HERO with Jet Li, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, people who are big stars in Asian films. This is one of the great ones by Zhang Yimou, the director. It was made a few years after reuniting Hong Kong with mainland China. Art is waking up in China. Novels and poetry of high quality writing have been coming out of China over the last 20 or so years, recently more and more. Shanghai seems to be the art center of the new China. I've googled contemporary art museums there to see what the artists of the present are doing in China. What I see is they're coming on fast. The 21st Century is on the verge of becoming China's century. The Chinese have the potential to make 21st century art as dynamic as 20th century art has been. Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace prize this year in prison. They wouldn't let him out. When Martin Luther King Jr won it, his government at home wasn't at all tickled about it, either.

The talk about the Hero in videos about the movie afterward, like Quentin Tarantino in an interview with Jet Li, and short videos on the making of the film, interviewing Zhang Yimou, and actors, calling it an action movie. Tarantino was surprised to see Zhang Yimou take on the action genre. It seems to me out of place to call this an action movie. Surely it is, because it has sword fights and million-arrow assaults, they're even the theme. Yet, where action is concerned, it's so beautiful it's something more like modern dance, like the long sword fight between two women dressed in flowing red gowns in a landscape of trees with red leaves for awhile and golden leaves for awhile, the leaves flying in the air. One of the women named Snow, the other, Flying Snow. They fly into the air, sail over the ground, in attempts to kill each other. The way it was filmed was more like it was dream reality instead of awake reality.

The time Flying Snow and Noname (Jet Li) stood on the roof of the calligraphy school fighting off the arrows of the Qin army with swords, flying around, swirling red cloth, hitting the arrows out of the air with their swords. And there was the time the two of them had a sword fight to the death, she in flowing pale blue silk twirling in the air, turning, slicing the air with her sword, giving her adversary some serious resistance. They all move like martial artists, though Jet Li may be the only one of them who is adept at the martial arts. The others learned their parts from a martial arts choreographer. Jet Li loved being in it so much he said he cried when he read the script. It was the movie he'd been hoping for. I can't contest that it was an action movie. It just didn't feel like it.

There was a bigger story going on, the unification of Our Land (China), 6 provinces that were continually at war. The emperor of Qin united them by conquering all of them. He was unpopular, a target for assassins. Jet Li was an assassin set on killing the emperor. By the time he was given the opportunity, he had come to understand the emperor's thinking and was with him. Another assassin, Broken Sword, had a swordfight with the emperor earlier in the story in a maze of yellow-green drapes of sheer silk hanging from overhead. They moved in the breeze as the men had their swordfight in that flowing dreamscape. There again, the assassin realized he was in agreement with the emperor and decided against killing him. The story had emotional depth and every scene was breathtakingly beautiful. Maybe this is the 4th time I've seen it. Every time, it has the freshness of the first time. I become so involved in the beauty of the whole production, I miss that it's an action movie. I think of it among the most beautiful movies of my life.