It Cuts:
Tsui Hark's The Blade
review by Scott Svatos
digital production by Julian H. Scaff and Rebecca Lindsey Epstein
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It Cuts: Tsui Hark's The Blade review by Scott Svatos digital production by Julian H. Scaff and Rebecca Lindsey Epstein |
Tsui Hark's The Blade is remarkable for a Kung Fu movie. Monks and Manchus are replaced with hunters and nomads -- but this only affects the film's texture. Slow motion ballet is supplanted with something more frenetic and industrial -- but this is only a symptom of a larger condition. And, the film is told from the perspective of a woman -- but this is not as interesting as it sounds.
No, The Blade is remarkable for a much different reason. Namely, it is a "serious" Kung Fu movie. Or at least one of the few Kung Fu movies to emerge in a while that can be taken seriously. A serious Kung Fu movie, as a potential form, is not what one gets from combining The 36th Chamber of Shaolin with early Wim Wenders. Instead, it the yang opposed to the yin of watching Jackie Chan kick a shark's nose in First Strike. Both are true to the form, but with different temperaments.
The Blade tells the story of On, a young sabre manufacturer, who seeks revenge for the murder of his father. After losing his arm in a fight, On is forced to develop a special sabre technique using his remaining arm and employing a violent, spinning motion. Eventually, he meets and challenges the killer of his father, a man draped in tatooes who is rumored "to fly" and screams at his enemies for being too slow.
The "seriousness" of The Blade, then, comes from its engaging physicality. To be sure, the film is self reflexive and "over the top," but its viscerality never digresses into humor: Its tempo is relentless, its tone sharp and dark. Furthermore, while in the Once Upon a Time in China series, Hark used slow motion and long shots to focus on the dexterity of the performers and the complexity of the choreography, in The Blade, Hark begins with the same long shots of the action, but eventually draws the camera so close as to cause a blurring and distortion of colors and activity. His style ranges from a kind of mock verite to overtly stylized and almost surrealized inserts of faces and eyes bathed in colored gels. Indeed, burning with rage and scissored by rain, these images call to mind the cycled movements of Japanese animation. At its most sensationalized, hyperkinetic point, it is difficult in these scenes to distinguish between physical detail and abstract emotion. And this, foremost, is how The Blade gains its "serious" impactual leverage.
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