BEIJING - Congratulations are in order for
Chinese director Zhang YiMo. His Kung Fu thriller
Hero sets a record for an Asian film in North
America, topping last week's box office with a haul of
US$17.8 million. But what makes it more commercially
successful than Ang Lee's Oscar-winning Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with similar themes? Chalk it
up to its big budget, all-star cast, ingenious shots of
beautiful scenery and dazzling displays of marshal arts.
For entertainment, it offers the audience something very
Oriental and very exotic, appealing to young moviegoers
who are watching it for the thrills. However, if a pair
of scissors were taken to the invisible safety line that
enables starring actor Jet Li to defy gravity, the story
would flop.
The film is based on China's first
emperor Qin, circa BC 221, who vanquished all other
warlords to unify China under his sole command. One
prince whose kingdom was gobbled up by Qin was
determined to reclaim his lost paradise. But his
conqueror was much too powerful. So what he couldn't
achieve on the battleground, he tried by assassination.
Enter the assassin/hero, a top-notch swordsman named
Jing Ke (Jet Li) who agreed to take on the job and
subsequently got his dagger within a foot of Qin's
throat. Qin jumped back in time to avoid being stabbed.
Jing Ke was reduced to shredded meat by the swords of
the palace guards. The day of the Chinese Jackal,
you yawned. Yes, but Zhang YiMo gives the legend a
special twist. While Bruce Willis knocks out people left
and right - all those victims are threats to his
contract - on his way to his target, the Chinese
assassin by contrast is a beacon of mercy. Sure, Jing Ke
leaves a trail of dead bodies in his wake. But his
victims are all co-conspirators who voluntarily give up
their lives for the cause. For example, Jing needs an
excuse to get near Qin. He goes to see a fugitive from
the emperor to discuss borrowing the man's head, as a
gift to open the doors to Qin. "It is yours for the
asking," the fugitive says and slits his own throat.
Just like that, as if he were lending out his donkey.
If this is not enough to move the audience,
Zhang tops himself. Instead of an explosive ending in
which the assassination attempt is thwarted either by a
dogged detective or a vigilant emperor, Zhang has the
hero give up at the last second. Does Jing get cold feet
at this crucial moment? Or does the emperor offer to buy
back his life with a king's ransom? Nothing of that
mundane sort. The audience is now treated to, alas, a
lecture of political correctness in the communist
flavor.
Emperor Qin sighs, and looks at Jing
with sympathy, "You just don't get it." The hero blinks.
It just won't do for a hero not to get it. He eases his
grip on the sword. "I don't?"
'I killed to
stop killing, burned to bring order' The emperor
then launches into a lecture on the importance of his
life to mankind, "If you kill me now, all the remnants
of those warlords will come back again to fight each
other. Who will suffer the most then? The multitude of
people. So you see, I killed to stop killing. I burned
to bring order. I conquered to unify the country."
Now the hero gets religion: he who kills the
most people is the biggest pacifist. The king who grabs
the largest piece of land does it for perpetual peace
and lasting unity. Thus convinced, the assassin
withdraws his sword from under Qin's chin, and, like his
fallen comrades, allows his own life to be sacrificed on
the sacred alter of "higher interests".
Director
Zhang provides a revisionist reworking of history that
is an insult to the collective intelligence of
historians. Now we know that according to Zhang, one of
the most blood-thirsty emperors in China's history was
the biggest hero of them all. After establishing his
absolute reign by sword and arrow, Qin went on to
vanquish the enemies in people's mind by burning books
he didn't like and burying alive more than 400 scholars
who dared to differ. That doesn't seem to bother Zhang.
He is telling us that regardless of how unification
comes about, and regardless of how it is maintained, a
unified frontier is better than coexistence of smaller,
different countries on the same planet. Perhaps then
Adolf Hitler should be given a role in the sequel - the
Fuhrer was a great unifier, too. Most of Europe was
"unified" by his Panzer tanks at one time. By the same
token, the Japanese Imperial Army was doing China a
great favor when it marched into the warlord-infested
country in the 1930s.
Of course, it may be
unfair to criticize Zhang YiMo for toeing Beijing's
party line pertaining to the Taiwan issue; the "hero"
coincidentally eulogizes a unified but blood-tainted
centralization system. Beijing is adamant against an
independence-minded government in Taipei. Unification by
any means is therefore holier than independence.
So director Zhang gets it and applies his ample
talents to advocate the cause of the motherland. He
takes the 2,200-year old story, kneads and prettifies it
for a visual banquet of political correctness. To say
Zhang is a political sycophant may be too harsh, but he
surely has plenty of political smarts. He enjoyed
international renown when his movie Red Lanterns
won top awards at the Cannes Film Festival many years
ago. But when the same event rejected his movie Not
One Less as a mouthpiece for the government in 1999,
he boycotted it. A Chinese film critic described his
decision as a "praiseworthy patriotic action".
Mao once sought independence of Hunan
province Smart as Zhang is about reality, he may
be surprised to hear that much closer to the present,
Mao Zedong, the last great unifier and "savior" of the
people, had a different opinion before he conquered the
Forbidden City. In 1920, when the 27-year-old Mao was a
frustrated nobody full of patriotic ideas, he wrote a
piece in a local newspaper calling for the secession and
independence of his home province of Hunan. "The final
solution to the construction of Hunan is in a Hunan
republic. I am against a greater republic of China but
for a republic of Hunan," Mao said in Hunan's Da Gong
Bao; the newspaper is still published in Hong Kong by
Beijing, the well-known Ta Kung Po. Every province for
itself, Mao argued, so that Hunan would no longer suffer
along with the rest of war-torn, corruption-stricken
China.
Would Zhang care to rationalize that,
too? No. He is too busy meeting with another
coincidence: the government was banning all Hollywood
imports (Troy, Harry Potter III etc) in
July when his latest production, House of Flying
Daggers, premiered across China.
With awards
like that, who needs Oscars?
In his latest
directorial exploit, Zhang even orchestrated a tasteless
- and those who know Chinese history and culture, would
say lewd - eight-minute song-and-dance at the closing
ceremony at the Athens Olympics. It then was shown on
Chinese television, creating a stir on Chinese Internet
forums and drawing protests from viewers. In Athens,
Zhang had ordered up a group of young girls clad in
bright red cheongsams (high-necked, close-fitting
Manchurian dresses) cut so revealingly high over their
thighs that it was a disgrace to the Chinese culture of
modesty. And he directed a five-year-old girl singing
Jasmine Flower, a 200-year-old song originating
in the brothels of the Qing Dynasty's Yangzhou City
(Commander-in-chief Jiang Zemin's hometown). Westerners
and most Chinese do not know the origins of the song,
long regarded as lewd and provocative: "What a beautiful
jasmine flower you are, so fragrant. How I wish to pluck
you from the tree, but I am afraid of being pricked by
thorns." (Translation: May I approach you?)
Embarrassed by the angry reaction, Beijing
authorities have since banned the Athens clip from
television reruns.
Li YongYan is an
analyst of Chinese business, politics and culture.
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