Absolutely bloody marvellous

Rating: 10/10 (1 January 2001)

First, I should say that I am not a martial arts fan nor a devotee of Kung Fu movies. I've seen maybe two Bruce Lees and that's about it. But I was encouraged to see this film from the reviews and I will probably see it again. I am told that its plotline is a common KungFu story, but it reminded me of Maxine Hong Kingston's semi-autobiographical The Woman Warrior, in which the daughter of Chinese immigrants to the US seeks refuge from her family's attempts to control her fate in her fantasy of becoming a character from Chinese myth, the woman warrior who saves her family by learning the martial arts as a mystical discipline. This film too is altogether women-centred--the first thing I noticed as the film opened was that none of the women's feet were bound, although they would have been at almost any period in Chinese history. So this is not history, but myth, myth in which a young woman (ZiYi Zhang) seeks to avoid a forced marriage by becoming, clandestinely, a powerful warrior. That she must do so outside the discipline of the training school leads, inevitably, to complications and excesses, but never are we led to condemn her search. It is an utterly beautiful movie, more a ballet than anything else, and the fight scene in the tree tops is absolutely not to be missed. The film is playing here in an IMax version as well, and while I haven't seen it, people I know who have were less enthusiastic about it than I: apparently the effects are so spectacular in this format that they overwhelm the film. I am, however, puzzled by the PG 13 rating for violence. The violence in this film is notional; I can remember only one splash of blood and there are very few apparent deaths. Younger children might have difficulty with a subtitled film and they might find some of the exposition a bit slow, but they certainly would not be harmed by seeing it.