Last week’s movie night had me begging my friends to watch House of Flying Daggers, and I think we had pretty mixed reactions afterwards.
Zhang Yimou has an interesting approach to storytelling that will either thrill you or put you off entirely, and I’m afraid it really just comes down to personal taste. I personally thought it was wonderfully done, although I would probably have not spent so much time talking about the ensuing war during the first and second act and then dropping it entirely in the third.
In Hero, my favorite scene was the lake battle between Jet Li and Tony Leung, where they bounced off the water’s surface like bubbles. In House of Flying Daggers, there’s a thrilling chase scene where the actors shimmy up and down bamboo trees as if gravity only worked in the direction you happened to be facing.
It’s not all dancing in anti-gravity though: there are also two instances where Zhang Zi Yi and Takeshi Kaneshiro are standing completely motionless with their backs to the camera, and it’s easily the most emotional scene in the whole film.
Other times, the drama is mixed right in with the fighting, as in the climactic fight scene in the snow. Zhang Yimou explains that scene a bit in the House of Flying Daggers presskit:
The snow [in Ukraine] came very early this year – in October. It began to snow heavily when we were half way through a scene, and this worried me a great deal because if it snowed for much longer, all the leaves on the trees would be gone, and we would face huge problems with continuity. I had to make a decision, and after some thought I decided to shoot the scene in the snow. But because we had already begun shooting that scene, we had to make a lot of adjustments – to the script, the pace and so on. When I look at the way this sequence turned out, I feel enormously lucky. The snow created the perfect tone for the scene. It’s fate – someone up above decided to help me out.
I think the trick to enjoying this movie is to ask only the questions that have to do with how the characters feel for each other, because everything else has the same nonsensical, out-of-this-world feel of a fairytale. Zhang Yimou isn’t particularly interested in helping you suspend your disbelief either, so it’s really about understanding that it’s not supposed to make sense, and to enjoy the story for what it is.
If you can do that, you’re in for a hell of a ride.