Hearts and darts
Cupid fires off in House of Flying Daggers.

By Kimberly Chun

House of Flying Daggers
PHOTO BY BAI XIAO YAN
NO ONE CAN accuse Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou of lacking a certain Taoist agility, of failing to swing with the slings, arrows, and flying cutlery of history, like a surefooted wuxia master capering across the feathery leaves of a bamboo forest. If Zhang's 1987 masterpiece, Red Sorghum, sliced to the bone with fierce agitprop and overripe sensory overload – subtly presaging the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 with its brew of resurgent individualism and back-to-the-basics socialism – then his subsequent "decadent" period of Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), which slid past censors by barely a jeweled hairpin on the old-school/old-studio beauty and star power of paramour Gong Li, resembled a rebellious, love-struck reaction to political crackdown. The still-transcendent social realism of muckrakers like The Story of Qiu Ju (1992) and To Live (1994) next marked the repentant return of a prodigal son to more blatant struggles of the revolution (with the occasional backslide, such as 1995's Shanghai Triad).

The last of that supposedly realist bunch – the 2001 comedy-melodrama Happy Times, which follows a bumbling wannabe businessman, a blind girl, and the makeshift family they reluctantly form as the ideological ground beneath them shifts and an increasingly chaotic urban China gets wasted on the newfound intoxicants of capitalism – found Zhang hitting a tear-jerking high working in a genre that encompasses The Tramp and La Strada. So who can blame the auteur, in China's freer market, for diving further into genre filmmaking, dagger clenched between his teeth – into the most crowd-pleasing field of martial arts movies, with 2002's visually sumptuous but far too cold, stiff, and proper Hero? The corollary might be Roman Polanski dog-paddling directly from Knife in the Water to Pirates. As a result, Hero's combat scenes seem far too freeze-dried – dutifully going through the 360-degree Matrix-style CGI pan, even when using genuine martial artists Jet Li and Donnie Yen – to ever make us care about the kingdom at stake, let alone the little regicidal assassins who don't amount to a hill o' beans. Zhang learned to direct action in front of the camera with that blockbuster, and it shows in his latest bout with the genres from down south. House of Flying Daggers boasts one of the more punk rock titles since 1977's The Fatal Flying Guillotines, and at least a few well-paced, up-to-par fight sequences, including the made-to-be-memorable "echo game," a splinter-inducing battle in a bamboo grove, and a forest tumble with horses, all of which feature girl-power dynamo Zhang Ziyi, who manages to act, fight, and look luminous while greatly outnumbered and underarmed. Watch your back, Natalie Portman.

Intelligent daggers take wing like flocks of birds, turning corners en masse and going point to point with well-thrown swords – consider them Cantonese Cupid's arrows in this Mandarin martial arts romance. Ludicrous story line and plot holes aside – hey, quick-and-dirty storytelling that favors originality and sensation over overvalued logic and cohesion is a tradition – Zhang cuts the genre through with his trademark sensuality and love of human drama, making sure there's something for everybody in the world marketplace, including a pan-Asian cast comprising part-Japanese and part-Taiwanese heartthrob Takeshi Kaneshiro, veteran Hong Kong star Andy Lau, and, of course, Beijing ingenue Zhang Ziyi.

The scene is 859, as the enlightened Tang Dynasty falls into decline, and a Robin Hood-like crew called the House of Flying Daggers have been up to good, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Held responsible for the slaughter of the Flying Daggers' leader, county police captains Leo (Lau) and Jin (Kaneshiro) have been ordered to find his heir, a daughter, and on a tip, they infiltrate the Peony Pavilion brothel, suspecting their quarry is the new blind dancer, Mei (Zhang). After she fails to talk, Leo comes up with a plan to have ladies' man Jin pretend to rescue Mei and have her lead him to the Flying Daggers.

Standard stuff, but even as Zhang plays with convention, as in the shadow-free, aggressively pastel comic scenes at the brothel, he can't turn off his brain and instead inserts knowing and occasionally jarring elements into House. The woods come to feel like sound stages, art-directed with white birch and red-and-gold leaves, as Zhang's camera takes the time to focus on soldiers playing possum (as part of Leo and Jin's charade) as they get up, dust themselves off, and wander offstage. The director prefers to pause on the backs of the lovers at critical junctures, rather than dwell on their faces, and lavishes attention on their vertical frames, reduced to abstraction against the parallel lines of the trees, all targets for the horizontal missiles of the title. Though Mei, Jin, and Leo make love and war, weep and strategize, they remain simply players on Zhang's grassy stage, and as a general's troops close in on the remnants of an Amazon-like matriarchy, House's lovers and fighters are as small-fry as Chinese peasants brutalized by the Japanese imperial army. Although Zhang's cerebral touches have a distancing effect on our ultimate sense of engagement, even when he pulls out the stops, lets his snow come down, reduces the usually riveting Lau to grunts and a distractingly Devo-like hairline (2004 might be considered the Year of the Bad Wig, what with Colin Farrell's flaccidly faux Alexander mudflap), they do place House, with pinpoint accuracy, among the rest of a master's pessimistic romances. It works either way – though, of course, according to Zhang, it (be it love, violence, or an individual's stand against uncaring hordes) – will never work. 'House of Flying Daggers' opens Fri/17 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.