If this is all a little much for you, “Hero” is also terrific eye candy. I read that it is the most expensive film in Chinese history. Before I go off on what great eye candy it is, consider how much more you’ve already had to use your brain than you did in the most expensive films in American history. There are guys flying off rooftops, across tree branches, and running across lakes. Motion is slowed until water hangs in the air. Armies amass and move in unison, flags and banners are always waving, and whenever unnamed characters need to show up, they turn up by the thousands. The emperor’s palace is so vast and empty that even Charlie Kane might start to feel lonely in it. These sequences thrill us with the beauty and poetry of ballet more than with the heart-pounding athletics of a normal action film.
Every battle seems to convey some form of character development, if you can believe that, but there’s also the choreographed pleasure of watching rituals and formality. Warriors bow to each other before battle and servants scurry about with their heads low. Conversations are prescribed and stilted, with epithets like “Your Majesty” used in situations in which Westerners might find the phrase “you dirty sonuvabitch” more appropriate. Formality and warfare collide; Sky’s battle with Nameless is set to the strings, not of an orchestra, but of a blind man sitting a few feet away from them, and contains an instant in which fighters and architecture are perfectly framed as if they were built that way. Director Zhang Yimou finds humor in both the social rituals and the fighting. It’s perhaps my favorite kind of movie humor, in which the characters are unaware of how funny they are. They behave how they must behave, and the movie only lets us know very sneakily how amusing it finds these people.
The movie comes with the title “Quentin Tarantino Presents.” He in fact has nothing to do with any part of “Hero” except the funding and prestige necessary to secure its American release. The movie is really the work of renowned Chinese director Zhang Yimou (“Raise the Red Lantern,” “The Road Home,” “Shanghai Triad”) and it was an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002. Like “Triad” and “Red Lantern,” “Hero” explores the relationship between the powerful and the powerless, with results that might not please Westerners attuned to Hollywood happy endings. Indeed, the emperor of “Hero” is allowed a fair amount of screentime to justify his bloody, tyrannical quest to unite China and end all wars. When he implies that his rule will also create a universal system of weights and measurements throughout the land, he even seems quite reasonable.
At the most, Tarantino might be responsible for the handful of unnecessary title cards at the end and the beginning that historicize things for us. But how “Hero” and other kung-fu films have influenced Tarantino is unmistakable. Tarantino is rightly lauded for the odd approach his characters have to their lives. “Hero” contains a great little moment in which a character realizes he will probably die in the next few minutes. His response is not uncommon for the martial arts genre. “Perhaps today I shall not escape my fate,” he says reflectively. He looks sideways for a moment, contemplatively, then resumes his earlier conversation as if to say “ah, whatever.”
Finished August 31, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
Page one of "Hero" (2002). Back to home.