Wuxia Season: A Touch of Zen (Dir King Hu, 3h, 1971).

 

Five years is a long time in cinema. Directors have emerged from the underground and become household names in a shorter time, entire cinematic odysseys have come and gone, entire subgenres arrived, been subsumed into the mainstream and died in that time. Five years is a long time in cinema. Between 1966 with Come Drink with Me, and 1971, King Hu, the undeniable master of the first wave of Wuxia cinema would make two films and contribute to a third, the anthology film, (1970's Four Moods). Both of these films are icons of their genre-Dragon Gate Inn (1967) has become something of a stalwart of the Chinese film industry, remade twice (Raymond Lee's New Dragon Gate Inn (1992) and Tsui Hark's big budget reimagining Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (2011)), and made the central subject of Tsai Ming-liang's cinematic meditation about cinema, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, re-framing the film as an old cinema closes down as the glory of a past era.

And then there is A Touch of Zen; arguably the greatest wuxia film of them all, undeniably King Hu's grandest, and most ambitious and most artistically daring films, in which the relationship between an unambitious scholar and a female knight errant and fearsome swords-woman plays out against a colossal backdrop of palace corruption, as the all powerful eunuchs seek to capture and execute our heroine, for daring to stand against forces that seek to corrupt the Emperor, and as she is defended by a group of fearsome and highly skilled warriors. It would be the culmination of an era that would see King Hu leave the Shaw Brothers

 Against this, Hu explores the key themes that underpin wuxia from Zen Buddhism, in the benevolent form of the local Buddhist Abbot, to feminism and the female warrior that so often reoccurs in other wuxia films explored to the quick, to its stark depiction of the unravelling of the wuxia "myth", to its strong focus upon the Chinese ghost story, adapting the famous story collection Strange Scenes from A Chinese Studio. It is nothing short of a deconstruction of the nigh-godly warriors of classic wuxia cinema, a sense of the heroes and heroines of the genres becoming mortal, fallible and fragile human beings, all this whilst being the genre's visual masterpiece.

A Touch of Zen begins with our hero, and our heroine; Gu, played by Shih Chun, is a retiring and largely unambitious scholar, learning for knowledge rather than to improve his position. In comparison to the heroic introductions of, for example, Hu's two previous films, Gu is introduced to us, after the largely abstract opening scenes of a spider's web, an image that haunts the film in unexpected moments, and recalls Hu's love of ghost stories, via his paintings. It is here, among the artworks that he produces, e that he comes into almost immediate contact with the figure of a stranger (Tien Peng). Gu for his part is largely a bystander, only later gaining the courage to become heroic, to become a wuxia hero, only for the film to largely undermine and subvert this in its finale, as we shall see-like all of its key figures, Gu's narrative arc at once explores and subverts the wuxia hero-retiring until forced into action, then hopelessly out of time with the changing age.

In the earlier half of the film (it is worth noting that the film was originally released in two parts (1970 and 1971, the first half released whilst the second was in production)), Gu is a passive figure in his own life, berated by his mother, frightened of the nearby deserted house, and largely obsequious towards the figure of the stranger who keeps the true purpose of his own arrival in the village secretive. This is quickly to change, as arriving on the scene is the target of the stranger's hunt, the swords-woman Yang, (Hsu Feng, known in recent years as the producer of Farewell, My Concubine (Dir Chen Kaige, 1993), who promptly sets up resident in the village, and quickly comes into conflict with the stranger, and it is there that the film leans into its wuxia sensibilities most notably-the film proceeds, once the identity of the stranger and Yang, an escaped daughter of a man who dared to stand against the seemingly all powerful eunuchs of the Ming Dynasty court are revealled, to go into impressive wuxia fights.

Here, the style is refined further still from Hu's two previous film, the cinematography tighter, the fight scenes even more impressive and better choreographed, the flow of action masterfully edited, Hu's break with the Shaw Brothers and move to Taiwan and the Union Film Company allowing him to depict these fights and duels on larger, and ever more impressive scales. Yang is the film's narrative arc in miniature-it’s easy to draw parallels with her and Come Drink With Me's Golden Swallow-these are both tough, adaptable and utterly fearless warrior women, both having taken up the sword to defend their family, but Yang, the knight-errant is a far more complex character, and through her, the film begins to explore the role of femininity in this world. Despite his shyness, she and Gu begin to strike up a relationship, and through the consummation of this, Gu is transformed into a far more confident figure, as active in the growing battles, as the forces under the eunuchs step up their attacks, as she is.

All of this, though, for the middle third of the film, takes a back seat to this battle between the forces supporting Yang, and those supporting the eunuchs, and it is at this point that Hu's film truly shines-not that its arthouse sensibilities are anything other than a truly beautifully made, and unapologetically artistic film, confronting the archetypes and tropes of the genre-but it is this middle hour where the film is at its most breathtaking, best paced and most visually impressive. It is here that we get the film's iconic bamboo forest fight, its taut ghost house battle, in which Gu turns the superstition of the men under the stranger, with his whip-like sword, again them, and they are promptly massacred. It is also here, though, that the film begins to unpick the wuxia "myth", something that it has spent its opening two hours setting up.

This collapse, this deconstruction of the wuxia genre, to turn the otherworldly heroes of the genre into mortals, haunts the final hour of the film. We see an almost unstoppable warrior monk, clearly enlightened past the limits of normal men, deflect swords with his hands, only for the film to proceed to reduce this warrior-monk to a mere mortal, and its heroine, the no-nonsense warrior woman of so many wuxia films, to a mere woman, the final shot of the film stark in how low it has brought its heroes, how utterly it has destroyed the myth of wuxia. Hu would never make a film on this scale, with this assuredness, this sense of utterly mastering the genre he had helped create barely five years ago. A Touch of Zen stands alone, the high point of the first generation of wuxia, a film as breathtakingly artistic as it is a profound exploration of the worlds of warriors and heroes that the genre created.

Rating: Highly Recommended

A Touch of Zen is available to watch online in the UK via BFI Player, and on DVD from Eureka and Criterion. It is also currently available to stream via Criterion Player, and available on DVD from Criterion in the United States.

Next week, a change of tack, as John Woo's action chops bring wuxia up to date for the 1980s, with A Last Hurrah for Chivalry.

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