Wuxia Season: Hero (Dir Zhang Yimou, 1h39m, 2002)

Wuxia has been a long time coming to the West. Its influence is undeniable, of course, on Western cinema over the last quarter-century plus, from John Woo's enjoyable stint as the next big thing in action by way of Face Off (1997), Mission Impossible II (2000) and so on, to The Matrix trilogy (1999-2005), which melds wuxia's impressive kineticism and wire work, and Wu's bullet-fu to Japanese-style cyberpunk soul-searching. It even appears, with increasing commonality in teen and childrens' media-the Kung Fu Panda trilogy (2008-2016), and in the beloved Avatar: The Last Airbender tv series. Alongside this, there is China's own unexpected Wuxia boom, by way of Danmei and other genres of web-published writing, which runs the gammut between a remarkable queering of the genre and good-old-fashioned swashbuckling heroism, all of which are hugely popular in the West, alongside adaptions of these novels for Chinese (and via Netflix, international) audiences.

The cinematic adventures, though, have been here longest of all-though, given the release of most of the films we have discussed this season is largely the preserve of boutique DVD and Blu-Ray distributors, one wonders how much the genre has truly permeated into western cinema. There are, of course, outliers, the most notable of which is Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a masterfully made, if largely homage to, wuxia cinema. It undeniably broke the genre into the west, and in its wake came the film that truly typifies, even more than Crouching Tiger, where the genre is headed next, whilst pushing the technical and visual aspects of the genre to a new level, and in front of a wider audience than anyone dreamed possible when the genre was birthed into cinemas, over 50 years ago. That film is Hero, Zhang Yimou's spectacular tale of a lone assassin's twisting tale of a plot to kill the first Emperor of China.

By 2002, Zhang Yimou is already a household name in Chinese cinema: a key figure of its self-styled Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, a cohort graduating around 1982 and the first since the Cultural Revolution, like his peers, Yimou upended Chinese cinema, his first film, Red Sorghum, (1988) depicting the life of a young woman working in a distillery, winning the Golden Bear in Berlin, his third Ju Dou, a period drama set in early 20th Century rural China becoming the country's very first nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. His career in the 90s would go from strength to strength, most notably Raise the Red Lantern (1991), again nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, and To Live (1994), winner of the Cannes Film Festival, despite being banned in his native China, whilst more offbeat work like Keep Cool (1997) and Happy Times (2000) proved Yimou could make films on any scale and for any audience.

Hero, for its part, is nothing short of a spectacle-we begin with Jet Li's nameless assassin, having supposedly bested the best three assassins in the Kingdom, (Long Sky (Donnie Yen), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) and Broken Sword (Tony Leung)), transported to the Qin capital, to face the leader of Qin (Chen Daoming). From the very first moment, the film's scale, its grandeur, is apparent, the camera sweeping through vast crowds of soldiers, Nameless sometimes little more than a speck against these colossal swathes of figures, until he comes face to face with the king of Qin, and begins to recount the story of how he aquired these weapons. Thus, we are thrown into Nameless's first version of the tale, beginning with his duel against Long Sky, a spectacular fight that is part imagined, before the fight is joined in earnest, a spectacular mix of martial arts and swordsmanship, where Tan Dun's score punctuates the action to superb effect, before Sky is seemingly killled, and Nameless moves on to his next adversary, and the film's visual aspects leap up a notch, the film's colour palate becoming saturated by red

Here, Nameless encounters Flying Snow and Broken Sword, and it is here that the film begins to arrive at its key theme; both of them, and their apprentice, Moon (Zhang Ziyi) have taken refuge in a local calligraphy school, in the state of Zhao, with Nameless attempting to discover Broken Sword's swordstyle from his calligraphy. More is to come, however, as, following a dramatic and impressively shot scene that sees Nameless and Flying Snow fend off the arrows of the attacking Qin army, Nameless reveals his previous duel against Sky, and Sky's romance with Snow. Driven wild by this, both Snow and Sword have fatal lapses in judgement that leaves Sword dead at Snow's hand, and, following perhaps the most spectacularly done moment of the entire film, a perfect synthesis of aesthetic and fight scene, where Moon is bested by Snow, Snow defeated by Nameless, the film returning to the Qin capital, as the King proceeds to put his own version of the tale to Nameless.

Here, once again, the colour palate, and indeed the complete presentation of Flying Snow and Broken Sword changes, this blue-tinted version of the tale weaving a web of deception, in which the duo, and Long Sky have conspired with Nameless to get him within the Emperor's throneroom and within ten paces of the throne, only for Nameless to reveal all, in the film's final recounting of the story that reveals the true fate of the trio, Nameless, and indeed the King of Qin, the film's colour palate now fluid, moving across the story as needed, and often leaping into even more astounding visual imagery-a fight on a lake, a slowmotion sword fight-than before, before the film arrives at its true point, a brisk realisation, and perhaps underexplored idea that removing the King may not be the solution to the end of Qin's ambitions, and that indeed the Qin plan to unify the kingdoms may be best for all for them, a prelude to Imperial China.

Hero, undeniably, benefitted from the arrival, two years earlier, of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-without it, Miramax and Quentin Tarantino would likely never have come across the film, nor would wuxia cinema have been so popular. But it is Hero that feels like the crystalisation of decades of Wuxia cinema, taking the themes of the genre and its visual inventiveness to a whole new level for the 21st Century.

Rating: Highly Recommended.

Hero is available to watch online in the UK via Amazon Prime, and on DVD from  Miramax, and Criterion. It is also currently available to stream via Netflix and Amazon Prme, and available on DVD from Miramax in the United States.

Next week, we arrive in December, with a season dedicated to the legendary Akira Kurosawa, beginning with the tale of an alcoholic doctor, a gangster and the beginning of the greatest partnership in Japanese cinema, with Drunken Angel.

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