| See No
Evil Alan A. Stone
Hero
Directed by Zhang Yimou
Miramax
8
Zhang Yimou, the greatest of China’s Fifth
Generation filmmakers,
was once thought to be the creative voice of political protest
inside China. Sinologists interpreted his early films
Ju Dou
(1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991) as
parables against
the totalitarian state; his struggles with government censors
were widely discussed in the West; and Gong Li,
Zhang’s leading
lady, was seen as a repudiation of the china-doll stereotype in
favor of a stronger, more independent woman.
But when Zhang’s first film
about contemporary
China, The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), appeared, the distinguished
Sinologist Jonathan Spence wrote that he was forced to consider the
question of whether Zhang had given in to Communist Party pressure
and censored himself. The cordial reception a litigious peasant woman
receives from bureaucratic legal officials seemed like government
propaganda. So did the apparent moral of the story: that complaining
about corruption brings more harm than good to oneself and one’s
community. That lesson, etched on Gong Li’s face at the end of the
film, could have been dictated by Deng Xiaoping. Qiu Ju certainly
marked a turning point in Zhang Yimou’s relationship to his
government. The filmaker and author Evans Chan, one of Zhang
Yimou’s harshest critics, describes him as the Leni Riefenstahl of
China. Some of the basis for this view can be found in Hero, the
kung-fu blockbuster that is now making Zhang Yimou one of China’s
new millionaires. Three years after it appeared in China, Hero is the
most commercially successful Chinese film ever to be distributed in
the United States, and Zhang is the PRC’s all-time box-office
leader. * * * Five years ago Zhang Yimou said in an interview that
filmmaking is “about survival, and only next is artistic value. If
you can’t survive, then where does this value come from?” Asked
more recently about his shifting politics, his cautious but candid
answer was, “Because people read political messages in my films,
they expect me to be a political fighter who is always on the front
lines. So whenever they cannot read into my works a dissident view .
. . they become disappointed. I keep saying that I’m the same
director. I’m an ordinary film director, I’m not a political
fighter.” Zhang Yimou no
longer needs to worry about
survival, and he certainly cannot call himself an apolitical
filmmaker. A Zhang documentary was part of the Chinese government’s
submission to the Olympic Committee that chose Beijing for the 2008
summer games, and the government has entrusted him with the
responsibility for directing the opening ceremonies in Beijing. Zhang
Yimou also conceived and choreographed the pageantry for the closing
night of the 2004 Athens Olympiad. With millions watching on
television, Zhang issued China’s stunning invitation to the world
to come to Beijing. At the climax of the spectacle the spotlights
focused on an innocent little girl, a living china doll of the sort
that has increasingly become the defining image of Zhang Yimou’s
“speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil”
artistry. Indeed,
Zhang has arguably positioned himself as the chief artistic spokesman
for the new China, an emerging political and economic giant whose
Maoist political ideology has collapsed and which now seeks to base
its claim to legitimacy on the nationalist pride of its citizens. If
sports have emerged as an especially powerful way for countries to
create nationalistic fervor, film is the great medium for building
unifying nationalist myths. In China, Zhang Yimou is helping the
government to achieve both objectives. Still, it is a long step
from here to Leni Riefenstahl. To appreciate the force of Evans
Chan’s comparison, one has to get past Hero’s
entertainment value
and think about the story it tells. For most mainstream
American film reviewers, Hero was fabulous cinematography,
brilliantly balletic kung-fu battles, and great entertainment. The
only question was why it took so long to get to America: it was made
in 2001, released in China in 2002, and only arrived here in 2004.
Hero was the most expensive film ever made in China, at $30 million
(less than a third of the cost of a typical Hollywood feature), and
Miramax was the principal investor. Zhang gathered together a cast of
Chinese film stars—the kung-fu legend Jet Li; Tony Leung and Maggie
Cheung, who made ordinary people charismatic in the surprise Hong
Kong hit In the Mood for Love; and Zhang Ziyi, the teenager Zhang
Yimou discovered and Ang Lee made famous in Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon (2000). Zhang Ziyi is known in China as the little Gong Li,
and her forte as an actress is the projection of an inextinguishable
innocence. Although in China
Hero broke the box-office
record set by Titanic, Miramax delayed its American distribution. One
explanation (several have been offered) is that the Miramax
co-chairman and co-founder Harvey Weinstein doubted its American
box-office appeal and was considering major editorial surgery (a
one-hour version was distributed in Europe). But, the story goes,
Quentin Tarantino persuaded Weinstein to leave it alone. Kill Bill
was Tarantino’s version of a kung-fu movie, with Uma Thurman as his
Jet Li. He had made it in Beijing, which saved his producers a great
deal of money and put him in contact with China’s filmmaking
glitterati. It is said that Tarantino told Weinstein that the uncut
Hero was “really, really great” and the decision was made to
proceed with American distribution and attach Tarantino’s name (and
with it, it was hoped, his Kill Bill fan base) to Zhang Yimou’s
film. Tarantino’s name is the first thing on the screen in
Hero—a
striking measure of his self-importance and Miramax’s confidence in
his Midas touch. Tarantino’s seal of approval seems to have helped:
Hero opened in August at number one and continued to make money into
the fall. Hero is not
Zhang Yimou’s worst film. That honor
belongs to an earlier Hong Kong commercial film, Codename Cougar, an
amateurish effort that failed even to make money. But in Hero, unlike
Zhang Yimou’s better efforts, the characters are all mythic cartoon
figures who lack even the psychological density of archetypes. Zhang
Yimou, who had been spinning his wheels, making smaller and less
significant films, concedes that he decided to make Hero after he saw
the artistic and commercial success of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon. Ang Lee, a Taiwanese filmmaker, proved that the Hong
Kong kung-fu movie could be repackaged for Hollywood and the
increasingly global audience. Using wires, special effects, and
digital enhancement his martial artists flew through the air and
fought each other from the tops of bamboo trees. Despite its stylized
action, his film had psychological depth and evolving, memorable
characters. Though Ang Lee’s success set off Zhang Yimou’s
enterprise, Hero does not match Crouching
Tiger’s achievement as a
film. Hero’s kung-fu scenes may be more inventive and
balletic than
Ang Lee’s; I will leave that judgment to Tarantino and other
kung-fu adepts. It seemed to me an adult version of the mayhem on
display in children’s cartoons, an aesthetic of stylized violence
that conceals the infliction of pain. Zhang Yimou
nonetheless remains one of modern film’s greatest cinematographers.
His palette is inventive—red in all its shades is his
signature—and he films monumental landscapes that are harsh and yet
awe-inspiringly beautiful. In his early films—most dramatically in
Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern—the artistry
of his cinematography
matched the power of the narratives. For Hero, Zhang Yimou teamed up
with the Australian cinematographer Chris Doyle (In the Mood for Love
and Chungking Express), considered by many to be the most original in
Asian cinema. Together they created a film that is arguably too
beautiful. Because the plot is convoluted, a Rashomon-like retelling
of contradictory narratives, colors are used to code the sequences
and thus keep the audience on track. Costumes, landscapes, and
everything else change from red to blue to green to white to black.
But as the film unfolds, the imaginative beauty of each sequence
becomes banal: imagine being in an art museum with a fabulous
collection of paintings that have been arranged by color. And despite
the color-coding, many in the audience will still be left scratching
their heads about what actually happened. What does happen? The
film (whose screenplay is coauthored by Zhang Yimou) is set in the
time of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor Qin, who conquered the six
other provinces and created the first unified Chinese empire
(221–206 B.C.). We are introduced to Emperor Qin (Daoming Chen)
sitting behind rows of flickering candles in a vast empty throne room
in a walled inner city. Though he never moves from the throne, the
flickering, which almost seems choreographed, keeps the visual scene
from becoming static. The emperor lives in fear of assassination, and
it is easy to believe that he is the kind of tyrant who deserves such
a fate. At the other end of the throne room is the great swordsman
called Nameless (Jet Li). The audience is meant to suspect that
Nameless is the assassin who will succeed where all the others have
failed. The confusing
storyline involves Nameless’s physical
proximity to the emperor and is played out as an exotic version of
the children’s game of giant steps. When we first see them they are
as far apart as the throne room allows. As Nameless describes his
success in killing the emperor’s assassins he is allowed to move
one giant step closer to the throne. His feats, presented as
color-coded flashbacks, begin to strain credibility. How can this
unknown and nameless hero have defeated these legendary warriors? The
answer, we discover, is that they have sacrificed themselves,
warriors from provinces where the emperor’s army has slaughtered
thousands of people, so Nameless could get close enough to the
emperor to assassinate him. With Nameless in position, the film goes
to color-code black. The myth
that nation-building unifies, that
nationalism will cure all, appears suddenly as an epiphany. As
Nameless is about to strike, he becomes the only person who has ever
understood the true dream of his emperor. Behind that man’s cruel
and autocratic appearance is a compassionate leader whose only
ambition is to unite China in peace as one nation and end centuries
of warfare and bloodshed. The emperor’s courtiers suddenly appear
and like a Greek chorus demand that the nameless hero—who had the
chance to kill the Emperor and miraculously repented—die for his
assassination attempt. The great and all-powerful Emperor Qin must
bow to tradition, and the assassin who spared his emperor dies in a
hail of black arrows as a sacrifice to the birth of the nation.
Historians of China tell a different story about the Emperor Qin who
used book burnings and mass murder to silence all political dissent.
But myths have more power than history: they transform
wish-fulfilling fantasy into conventional truth.
Zhang Yimou has
already made another
kung-fu film. If creativity is really about survival first and
artistic value second then we can only hope that,
with his survival
assured and his resources virtually unlimited, Zhang Yimou will
rediscover the artistic values that made him one of
the world’s
great filmmakers. <
Alan A. Stone
is the Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law and Pyschiatry
at Harvard
Law School.
Originally published in the December
2004/January 2005 issue of Boston Review |
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