Reviewed by Tim Wong

SERVING AS an elusive release, Hero (Ying xiong) is a Zhang Yimou film that for once is neither sentimental, nor starring Gong Li. All those beautified laments over the Cultural Revolution set to semi-didactic undertones he's famous for did eventually turn apolitical – the post-Not One Less romantic afterglow of The Road Home, or the soggy tissue bittersweet-ness of Happy Times, for instance. And judging by Happy Times – believe it or not, a contemporary present-day film – Zhang must have been fidgety, waning or in desperate need of a new muse (so it's all Gong Li's fault). Turns out, all he ever wanted to do was make a martial arts movie, finally submitting to those withdrawn boyhood fantasies, and offloading any social conscience and historical obsessive compulsiveness along the way.


Hero itself is historical, but more in the sense that it's two years old and counting. Having experienced the now-serial Miramax rape and pillage of Asian Cinema firsthand, then enduring a prolonged sentence detained firmly away in the Weinstein dungeons, the film is at last poised for release of the general theatrical kind. An utterly cinematic, liberally aestheticised canvas of the Orient's most photogenic scenery and performance alumni, it's been a wait that's come late, but better than never.

Directly speaking, Hero is no less attentive to detail than any one of Zhang's period films beforehand. Costumes, location, art direction – all essential cogs in a finely oiled moviemaking machine hell bent on the recreation and authentication of Chinese history. Except this time, Hero exists in a mythological realm, the historical elements rendered legendary more so than factually. Apparently, it's all very reductive, even propagandistic in the pimping of Socialist mores and homogeneity, propelled onwards by the group chant that we should all remain under one gigantic, collectivist roof. Part of the point here is to also simply frame everything (be it loosely) in the appropriate genre-context, so we're able to watch attractive humans fly, walk on water and make colour-coded love within a temporal state of belief. That's exactly the frame of mind Miramax wants you in – here for the spectacle, not the political – and they succeed in part, but only because Zhang and the ubiquitous white-man-of-Asian-Cinema, Christopher Doyle, have made the film so visually ridiculous.

Few films elevate themselves aesthetically beyond the point of no return, and Hero happens to be one of those films. There's a lot of Days of Heaven to be found here; distance between audience and characters; meaning that buries itself under the glory of images; observation as opposed to participation. In theory, the premise of Hero is invigorating enough to avoid all of the above – a morally basic cross-examination of truth vs. fiction and all the grey area in between – yet the film is so preposterously, unbelievably good looking, it took this writer a third viewing to sit up and take notice of anything other than Maggie Cheung. Visually, it's all about fetish, whether it's intensifying a swath of dyed cloth (in 54 pedantic shades of red), the falling of autumn leaves (each subjected to a gruelling 4-tier ranking system according to their yellowy-ness) or Maggie's cheekbones (no elaboration required) – a deep obsession invested in the notion of moving colour pictures and how stimulating we know they can be. If the film fails as art in content, it succeeds unanimously as a renaissance in pure cinematography – a highly distracting overgloss maybe, but an entirely irresistible one all the same.

Granted, a film of Hero's cut and thrust also proves DVD to be that most exaggerated of wonder-inventions; the promise of bringing the theatre into the home a concept that never really eventuated in the complete sense. Already immortalised on the shiny disc format, Hero, when projected, is amplified at least ten-fold; a totally indescribable thing as far as words can manage, and certainly a never bettered example as to why we go to the movies in the first place. The mighty Civic and Embassy – classic movie palaces that exist with the glories of Technicolor and Cinemascope in mind – live for a film like this, the often talked about notion of "live cinema experience" inherent in Hero's big-top CMYK spectrum of sound, colour and fury. Loftier still, this is a spectacle that even encroaches on hallowed 2001 territory, perhaps because it deserves the 70mm treatment, but mostly because the television screen is the last place it should ever be seen.

There's actually a story and some dry subtext beneath all this seduction and visual entrancement; ancient pre-Communist China is the setting, The King of Qin (Chen Dao Ming) is our Chairman for the evening. Indeed, Maoism is the hemline that neatly threads the entire impetus of the character's motives, either for or against this ultimate ideal. The singular drive of the protagonists – Nameless (Jet Li), Broken Sword (Tony Leung), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), and accessories Sky (Donnie Yen) and Moon (Zhang Ziyi) – is to assassinate a ruthless Dictator. Subsequently though, it's all overruled by the moral obligation of a political slogan any Third Century BC copyrighter would be proud of. In Miramax's version however, "All Under Heaven" – the meaning of which is obvious enough – becomes "Our Land"; three words scribed in the sand becomes two in translation; Socialist flag bearing becomes faux-patriotism crossed with consumable democracy.

The real jolt behind the film isn't polemical, though. Propping up all the colours of the rainbow and that mark of staunch nationalism is the exciting stuff. The martial artistry. The jabbing and floating and somersaulting, all of which are imperative to the very fabric of wu xia – particularly the surreal notion that people back then could fly, even if they weren't plugged into The Matrix. That fact, of course, belongs to the mythology of the genre. Overindulgent wirework has accepted status in Hero; in Charlie's Angels, it just looks stupid. It's still all incredibly over-the-top, but works because it is punctuated by sheer skill (Jet Li vs. Donnie Yen especially, in an sublime rematch), a flashback framing device (any combat is a recollection and therefore an embellishment – like the aesthetic of the film) and context that doesn't wander off course. That other popular movie about things that crouched and hid did one such thing by proposing that "Jane Austen" could make love and do martial arts. She could on both accounts, just not quite as we know it.

Any display of confrontation in that Ang Lee film was also truncated for action's sake; fight scenes, in particular, that pandered to choice Western tastes in fast cutting and accelerated imagery. No thanks to the Tiger and the Dragon, the appropriation of Eastern martial arts then forced its way into the Hollywood lexicon – a trilogy of bondage and world-ruling machines, or the Killing of William just two examples in the exploitation of Yuen Wo Ping and his sweatshop of martial artists. Initially, Zhang's bearing on the contest between two fly-kicking individuals flirts dangerously close to the above cliché (the Tan Dun soundtrack is awfully familiar), but turns out to be an almost total subversion of the martial arts exchange – something like Monet-meets-John Woo without the ammunition. And with every lunge, parry, glide and pirouette a mark of compositional perfection – thrust forward in waves of cosmetic slow motion – even time and space is obliged to stand still in awe of this otherworldliness. It's here where the very notion of violence becomes lost in the visual translation; all that endemic hatred and sacrifice funnelled into combat as impressionistic, carefully refined performance art.

As Takeshi Kitano has proven with Zatoichi, a jolly old good time, it seems, is never entirely out of the equation. Zhang Yimou's Hero carries an air of elitism – it's high cinema, for sure – but as a deep, self-edifying plunge into that most Asian of film genres, it's almost impossible not to resist as pure escapism. His latest, House of Flying Daggers, has recently shown at Cannes, and happens to be another martial arts epic starring Zhang Ziyi – confirmation enough, that even a culturally repressed Third Generation Chinese filmmaker can have fun if he wants too.