Dragon Inn (Long men kezhan)

 

Director King Hu

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DRAGON INN (Long men kezhan)              A-                                                                           aka:  Dragon Gate Inn                                                                                                               Taiwan  (111 mi)  1967  ‘Scope  d: King Hu

It’s a particularly controversial period... there was a much discussed book by Wu Han about Ming politics.  It was on the one hand the period when Western influences first reached China; on the other, it was one of the most corrupt periods in Chinese politics.  Most of the Ming emperors were bad; some were drug addicts, some were very young indeed when they came to the throne.  Power was effectively in the hands of the Court Eunuchs, who created their own secret services, the “Dongshang” or “Eastern Group.”  Without exaggeration, you could say that the power of the Dongshang exceeded that of the German Gestapo.  They could arrest and execute virtually anyone, including ministers of the Courts, without accountability or, indeed any legal process.  Both Dragon Gate Inn and A Touch of Zen deal specifically with the operations of the Dongshang.…At the time I made those movies, the James Bond films were very popular, and I thought it was very wrong to make a hero of a secret service man.  My films were kind of a comment on that.

—King Hu

Among the more original filmmakers of the 60’s and 70’s, where his artistry has less to do with narrative story telling than an emphasis on form, making beautifully stylized films with meticulously authentic costumes and set designs, where the dance and musical-like nature of Hu’s work is more painterly and poetic than novelistic or dramatic, and appreciated more intrinsically for its relevance to Chinese opera, painting, literature, and history, with this film setting the standard.  Born in Beijing, King Hu (aka Hu Jinquan) moved to Hong Kong at the age of 18 and started work as an illustrator for film advertisements, painting billboards or designing handouts, later becoming a director, graphic artist, set builder, actor, and screenwriter, best known for his Wuxia films that became popular in Hong Kong cinema in the mid 60’s and onwards.  It was his proficiency at speaking Mandarin, his native language, that helped him get a start in Hong Kong studios, initially assigned as a set decorator before appearing in 37 films as an actor between 1954 and 1965, joining the Shaw Brothers Studio in 1958, working as a second unit director and screenwriter until finally directing his own film, COME DRINK WITH ME (1966), his first wuxia film, a transitional work as it was still a Shaw Brothers Studio movie, combining fantasy and special effects with elements of realism.  Yet the success of the film allowed him to break away from the Shaw Brothers in 1966 and go his own way.  Making only fourteen films in his thirty year career, his fame is largely based on six wuxia features.  Before him, filmmakers shot fight scenes based on the acrobatic techniques of Beijing opera, often resembling a staged show, but Hu was the first director to use sophisticated cinematic techniques achieved through editing and multiple camera angles while shooting on location, combining Chinese history with religion and philosophy while also expressing military strategy, elevating martial arts action into a sense of cinematic poetry, featuring skilled female combatants to counter male-dominated themes, drawing inspiration from art and literature, never viewing himself as part of the movie industry, but as part of the wider body of the Chinese arts.  Hu consulted with historians when writing his movie scripts, choosing the Ming dynasty for most of his movies, known for being one of the most chaotic periods in Chinese history.  Hu often gave historical lectures throughout his career, speaking in Paris and at Harvard in the mid-70’s discussing the literary career of Lao She, later conducting a series of lectures in the 80’s on Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci.  Traveling to Taiwan to make this film, the Chinese Cultural Revolution particularly inspired its making, specifically the struggle against intellectuals and the disgrace of Ming dynasty historian Wu Han in 1966, who doubled as the deputy mayor of Beijing, targeted for having written a play set in the Ming dynasty where a court attendant chastises an emperor, a thinly veiled reference to an actual occurrence between Mao and one of his top generals during the disastrously managed Great Leap Forward of the late 50’s and early 60’s when famine caused the death of up to 30 to 40 million Chinese, leading Wu to become one of the first victims of Mao Zedong’s persecution.  Left to die in jail while an entire generation of young Chinese were taught to denigrate their own culture, some even actively seeking to destroy it, Hu was provoked into making the film as a tribute to Wu’s career, as his work on the imperial secret police, the dongchang (Eastern Depot), had particularly influenced Hu as a young man.  For the exiled Taiwanese, ruled by a repressive one-party system that purged its own political and cultural elite (murdering as many as 40,000 victims), while remaining under martial law for almost four decades, they took a personal interest in Hu’s allegorical connection to the Mainland, giving them a taste of a mythical China that blurred into the present, where a heroic fantasy evokes the tragic Chinese experience of endless tyranny, oppression, and exile.  Blending Chinese traditions with Hollywood westerns and Japanese samurai movies, Hu created ballet-like fight sequences taking the audience on spiritual journeys that confound expectations, featuring sword-wielding heroines, mistaken identities, secret allegiances, rooftop chases, and showdowns in taverns and bamboo forests, breaking box office records in Taiwan, Korea, and the Philippines on route to becoming a cult classic. 

Hu has designed something that quite simply doesn’t exist anymore, often imitated but rarely equaled, creating an exaggerated picture of perpetual exile and nomadic instability, defined by the restless and rootless lives of his characters who thrive in a seemingly endless wasteland, lavishing attention on detail, displaying a rare economy, creating one of the more darkly humorous and deeply entertaining Scope spectacle films of all times.  Set during the Ming dynasty, the opening scene exhibits pageantry and is given plenty of colorful Kurosawa costume drama in the vast emptiness of an open plain, resembling Shakespeare’s King Lear, surrounded by his massive armies, reading his decree of how he intends to abdicate power and divide his extensive domain among his three children,  Yet here, given similar pomp and circumstance, the emperor’s minister of defense, General Yu, is executed for betrayal and insurrection, framed on trumped up charges by an all-powerful court eunuch, Cao Shao-qin (Bai Ying), a tyrant who controls both the secretive Eastern Agency and Palace Guards, representing the worst excesses of ruthless ambition, where Cao is meant to resemble Mao, surrounded by devoted followers who are meant to resemble Mao’s Red Guards.  The Emperor has allowed Wu’s family to live in exile, but Cao has other ideas, dispatching a clan of elite assassins known as the Black Arrow Troop to cut off the bloodline, to hunt down the minister’s escaping, exiled children with a planned ambush taking them to the remote mountainous location of the Dragon Inn, a northern border region where mysterious strangers begin to congregate, each with growing suspicions of the other.  In examining the corruption and suppression of intellectuals by the eunuchs, the film is not only meant as an allegory to reflect the chaos occurring on the Chinese Mainland, but also as an attack on the Communist Party regime.  In using the wuxia genre as his vehicle, it allowed Hu to criticize without politicizing, while simultaneously illustrating nostalgia for his homeland.  There are masterful compositions by cinematographer Hua Huiying featuring breathtaking landscapes, as Hu paid tribute to classical Chinese landscape paintings, yet bloody swordplay battles featuring inexplicable aerial jumps are the highlight and main feature of the film, as each extended scene leads to yet another extended swordfight, turning into a battle royale that borders on dream fantasia.  The narrative plot is kept at a minimum, yet every scene feels like a showdown of deception, as there’s a battle of wits taking place in attempting to outmaneuver the other, with neither side willing to reveal their hand, meant to hide their intentions, with the dongchang resorting to poisoned liquor, small darts, flaming arrows, including a battalion of trained assassins to annihilate anyone that gets in their way.  Yu’s former subordinates appear, like apparitions, attempting to usher the children to safety, but Cao’s secret police are blocking the way, led by Pi Shao-tang (Miao Tien) and Mao Zong-xian (Han Yingjie).  We see the elegance of a female warrior, Miss Zhu (Shangkuan Ling-fung), fending off soldiers with ease, the equal to any man, along with her hot-tempered brother Zhu Ji (Hsieh Han), who arrive at the inn along with a secret traveler that arrives earlier, Xiao Shaozi (Shih Chun), who dazzles with his ability to thwart opposing trickery or sneak attacks, catching darts with his chop sticks, or arrows with his bare hands, simply defying the laws of physics, yet he’s there to meet the innkeeper, Wu Ning (Tsao Chien), who was one of the the executed General’s lieutenants.  So without realizing it at first, these four align to counter the full force of the dongchang, who subject the inn to a flamed aerial assault of burning arrows, tricking them into a fight in the dark of night, accompanied by fiery musical excerpts from Mussorgsky’s orchestrated Pictures at an Exhibition, specifically The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba Yaga), Mussorgsky Baba-Yaga and The Knight's Gate from "Pictures at an Exhibition" YouTube (9:30).  

Fully integrated into the fabric of the narrative, indoor tavern sequences are staged with attention to characterization and a keen sense of atmosphere, demonstrating Hu’s intimacy with the decor and lifestyle of traditional Chinese inns.  These “inn films,” aptly named because they are almost wholly set in the tavern, are notable as political allegories, where one side fights for a political or patriotic cause against a side representing the forces of repression and authoritarianism, perhaps mirroring the Cold War conflict between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party, yet exhibiting a pursuit of righteousness, which has its roots with Chinese opera, with the motivations of the characters onscreen clear from the outset.  The inn itself is not much to look at, drab, somewhat rundown, with wooden tables below and rooms upstairs, all under a mud-thatched roof.  Not much of a décor, commandeered by a military unit of the dongchang, located in the middle of nowhere, where emerging from the jagged mountain edges are soldiers challenging anyone that passes nearby.  Both Xiao Shaozi and Miss Zhu have handled Cao’s minions with ease, where one fights against many, dispatching the bad guys with nonchalance, where each confrontation is a challenge of honor where only one side can prevail.  Because of the collection of freedom fighters who display a spirit of rebellion, this breaks down into an ensemble piece, moving from one figure to the next, yet an early extended sequence with an emboldened Xiao Shaozi may be the most exemplary, as it displays humor and daring wit, along with a series of surprises, where the man refuses to reveal his identity or be broken by a series of deadly attacks, handling each confrontation with ease, eventually forcing the dongchang to submit by asking him to join forces, yet he resolutely refuses, as he’s a free spirit.  This appears to be the heart and soul of the film, that you can’t kill an idea, that it will somehow thrive and survive, even if under a hidden identity.  So much information is given at the opening voiceover narration of the film establishing the historical and narrative parameters that it is almost impossible to digest, yet many heroic characters die at the end after facing seemingly insurmountable odds.  While the direction is stunning, this epic film is also an extended choreography of superlative martial arts confrontations that seemingly go on forever, featuring some of the most brilliantly designed sword fights and hand-to-hand combat to ever grace the screen in martial arts films, with an unmatchable mix of rhythm and movement.  The stunts and fight scenes were choreographed by Han Yingjie, also one of the principal actors and a Peking Opera performer, creating acrobatic set pieces, introducing ballet-like leaps and jumps into the final sequences, displaying superhuman speed and agility in an inevitable showdown with Cao Shao-qin, often veering into mystical realms of the supernatural, where his action is faster than the eye can see, quite stunning, really, especially considering the time it was made.  Sound is as important here as it is in Kurosawa films, very percussive, again drawing a certain musical rhythm and timing from the staged opera, yet adding his own personalized aesthetics, infusing his films with energy and finesse, lavishing attention on set pieces, drawing every shot in advance, supplying the cast and crew with photocopies, studying them from many angles, preoccupied with the visual design even before shooting begins, where the shot is a meticulous reconstruction of an idea.  Hu was a talented calligrapher, painting the opening credits himself.  Tsai Ming-liang’s GOODBYE DRAGON INN (2003) is a tribute to this film, set during a deluge of rain in a decrepit Taipei movie theater on its final night in business, where the last few mysteriously elusive customers are either drawn to the movie screen playing this film, or are humorously distracted from it.  Wong Kar-wai’s ASHES OF TIME (1994) and the significantly improved 2008 REDUX version bears a similar remote setting, also exuding philosophical themes, with both films resembling a Chinese version of the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns.  Ang Lee’s CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000) and Zhang Yimou’s HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS (2004) are both tributes to this film, while Tsui Hark remade it twice, in 1992 and 2011.  To celebrate one hundred years of Chinese cinema, the Hong Kong Film Awards released a list of The Best 100 Chinese Motion Pictures, with this listed at #7, Hong Kong Film Awards' List of The Best 100 Chinese Motion. 

Soul On a String

SOUL ON A STRING           C                   

China  (142 mi)  2016  d:  Zhang Yang

Following on the heels of the Russian revisionist film Paradise (Rai) (2016), this is another example of a nation literally appropriating another country’s language, land, and culture in an attempt to alter the world’s perception of China, which is the occupying force in Tibet.  Imagine the Nazi’s making a fantasy film in French about Paris during their WWII occupation, Israel making a mythical film in Arabic about the Palestinians during their armed occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or Britain making a film in Gaelic about the Northern Irish while under British military rule in the 70’s.  A visually stunning film like this, with its panoramic vistas, has a way of elevating one’s appreciation for the ravishing beauty we see onscreen, but completely leaves out any background historical context.  Mao Zedong’s Communist Nationalist army took over Tibet in 1950, hailing the act as a liberation from an old, feudal system that included both British and American imperialist influence.  Resentment for the Chinese grew in Tibet over the following decade with armed rebellions breaking out.  In March 1959 the capital of Lhasa erupted in a full-blown revolt, where asserting Chinese nationalism, anywhere from 200,000 to a million Tibetans were killed and approximately 6000 Buddhist monasteries were ransacked and destroyed, forcing the Dalai Lama, the widely revered Tibetan spiritual leader, to flee to India, where he has lived in exile ever since.  China’s assertion for its territorial claim goes back to the 13th century, when both Tibet and China were absorbed into the Mongol empire.  Known as The Great Khanate, the empire contained China, Tibet, and most of East Asia, becoming known as China’s Yuan Dynasty.  Throughout the Yuan, and subsequent Ming and Qing dynasties, Tibet remained a subordinate principality of China, though it retained varying degrees of independence.  The Himalayan mountain range provides a mountainous wall of strategic security for China, while Tibet possesses a significant mining industry, also serving as a primary water supplier.  China has invested billions into Tibet and flooded the nation with Chinese immigrants over the past decade where its resources have been included in the economic development plan for Western China known as China Western Development.  Like the former satellite nations of the USSR, all answering to Moscow, the needs of Tibetans, who are devout Buddhists, residing in an economic zone described as a Tibet Autonomous Region, now answer to Beijing, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party and are under constant threat by overzealous security forces.  This conflict of limitless spirituality and occupying military rule has resulted in the self-immolation of more than 140 Buddhist monks in protest of Chinese rule in Tibet since 2009, as documented by Tsering Woeser, a well-known Tibetan writer and activist, Why Are Tibetans Setting Themselves on Fire? | by Tsering Woeser ..., which includes passages from Tsering Woeser’s Tibet on Fire: Self-Immolations Against Chinese Rule, from The New York Review of Books, January 11, 2016. 

That being said, one must be extremely suspect of how China appropriates Tibetan culture, as it is just another form of political exploitation.  In the not too distant past, China outlawed filming in Tibet, where actress Joan Chen defied Chinese censors by shooting there in her directing debut film XIU XIU:  THE SENT-DOWN GIRL (Tian yu) (1998), an overt condemnation of the Cultural Revolution and winner of seven awards at the Taiwanese Golden Horse Film Festival.  While there are current Tibetan filmmakers, such as Pema Tseden’s THARLO (2015) or Sonthar Gyal’s RIVER (2015), who provide an authentic view of life in modern Tibet, the rest of the world remains cultural outsiders.  Films about ethnic minorities, and in particular films about Tibet, are subject to special scrutiny in China, where anything filmed in Tibet requires approval by the Tibet Committee of the United Front Work Department which operates under the Communist Party’s Central Committee — not just the state media regulator, as is the case with most films.  According to Shelly Kraicer, Toronto film critic and scholar of Chinese cinema, “At the end of the day, everybody is still using and exploiting images of Tibet.”  Director Zhang Yang previously directed overly commercial works like SHOWER (1999) and SUNFLOWER (2005), but before making this film he decided to spend a few months living in Tibet in 2013, where some of his experience is captured in the documentary PATHS OF THE SOUL (2015), which follows the Werner Herzog template established in WHEEL OF TIME (2003).  While Herzog and his crew travel to a Buddhist pilgrimage site in Bodgaya, India, Zhang, in a part documentary and part fiction film, follows the journey of a group of Tibetan Buddhists on a pilgrimage to Lhasa, the holy capital of Tibet, much of it reflected in continuous repetition of prostrating one’s self on the ground.  Zhang’s new film, where all of the actors in the film are Tibetan and speak Tibetan, is based on a story by the prominent Tibetan writer Tashi Dawa, drawing on Tibetan folk traditions and magical realist elements as it follows the adventurous exploits of a man named Tabei (Tibetan actor Kimba) who is brought back to life by a living Buddha after being killed by lightning, offering him penance to cleanse his murderous past and a chance for rebirth.  The film follows his elongated and roundabout journey, including a collection of eccentrics he encounters along the way, as he pursues a mission to bring a Dzi bead, or sacred stone, to a mythical holy land. Using a comical, over exaggerated Sergio Leone spaghetti western style, the film continues to view Tibet as a fairy tale land of fantasy and exoticism, leaving out any references to ethnic abuse or signs of a culture repressed, as thousands of Tibetans are being forced to leave their grazing land and an agrarian way of life that is centuries old, replaced by Chinese bulldozers and more widespread pollution, with fear gripping an occupied community, not to mention arbitrary arrests and brutal detentions that continue without due process under Chinese communist rule, including torture and shoot-to-kill policies in effect, many for something so commonplace as flying the banned Tibetan Snow Lion flag. 

The film is the exact opposite of that grim reality, painting a picture of staggering opulence, like a reworking of Wong Kar-wai’s visually luxurious ASHES OF TIME (1994), blending Buddhism with Western motifs, set in endlessly vast desert landscapes, all captured in widescreen by cinematographer Guo Daming, featuring sweeping aerial shots, Soul on a String by ZHANG Yang - Trailer - YouTube (1:58).  At two and a half hours, this overlong yet epic journey of mythological self-discovery combines two of Dawa’s best-known short stories from the 80’s, Tibet, a Soul Knotted on a Leather Thong and On the Road to Lhasa, featuring a prologue, a shoot-out, a battle-hardened, resurrected criminal on a new mission, where he prefers to be a loner, but along comes a girl named Chung (Quni Ciren), who leaves her sheep and goats behind as she’s smitten by his strange appeal after a night in the same bed, remaining by his side throughout the journey, followed by Pu (Yizi Danzeng), a dwarfish and peculiarly mischievous mute with psychic powers.  Following them are two brothers, trigger happy Guori (Zerong Dages), seen in the opening shoot-out, and the more measured older brother Kodi (Lei Chen), as both vow to kill Tabei to avenge the killing of their father.  However Guori has a habit of killing a rotating cast of companions named Tabei, leaving behind a trail of wrongful men named Tabei whose killings had nothing to do with the crime, which eventually start to weigh on his karmic consciousness.  Also following him are Gedan (Siano Dudiom Zahi), a mysterious stalker who seems to be recording the events on paper and may be the narrator, and Zandui (Solange Nima), a lone wanderer with a goofy dog named General.  Many of the secondary characters provide comic relief, growing more ridiculous over time, where all are one-dimensional characterizations, while the film, as resplendent as it may be, is little more than escapist entertainment, featuring swordfights and honor codes that play out in western lore, set against a backdrop of awesome visual splendor.  It’s something of a confused curiosity where recurring characters randomly cross paths, reaching for a strain of pop mysticism, with the title referring to the leather string that Tabei wears around his neck that holds the stone, as well as Chung’s habit of counting the days of her romance by tying knots on a leather cord, where both, according to Buddhist teachings, need to free themselves of all earthly burdens and attachments.  But that being said, while it’s immaculately gorgeous, there’s really no successful resolution by the end, as the journey simply ends.  This may remind some of Tarsem’s THE FALL (2006), a visually extravagant film shot in twenty-five different countries over the course of four years, which is equally breathtaking to look at, but it does a better job of conjuring up images from a 5-year old’s imagination, taking a kaleidoscopic trip literally around the world, extending the limits of storytelling, and doing a better job of blending fantasy and reality, ultimately becoming a much more intimate and rewarding experience.