A harmless fable with lovely colors

Rating: 5/10 (4 April 2006)

I'm perhaps biased because I don't like overusing unrealistic battle scenes in the manner some Hong Kong-China-Taiwan directors have been doing these late 10 years or so. It's OK: realism is not the goal of a the-making-of-a-nation movie. But even wearing a pair of reality-filtering glasses I cannot be unaware that repetition and exaggeration are part of the common lexicon of parody, and I don't think Yimou's intention was to sketch a parody. All the opposite, he's damn serious.
Even the fables we were told as babies, though unrealistic by nature, had some limits: they used an imaginary setting to convey a real-life teaching, but the stress was always on the teaching. Would you have the wolf blow off a dozen houses and hunt down a dozen piggies before being defeated? Or let Pinocchio's nose become half a mile long when he lies? And would you have Aladdin find three magic lamps instead of one? Just useless. So, for me 60 minutes of impossible fighting on a 90-minute movie is definitely a redundant thing.
Nor I do find interesting or provocative at all its simple moral "the ultimate good must tolerate some temporary evil": we've been living thousands, dozen thousands, hundred thousands of years of "ultimate good", is it not enough to consider it just as temporary as that evil which is supposed to justify it? People fight to impose their ideals of good to other people, there is nothing provocative in this, just inescapable. Perhaps, we might say, today it is much less inescapable and when armies export democracy there's a good deal of other reasons along with the "ultimate good".
Not much else to say. I don't know enough about the "martial arts" movie canon but I suspect this one just don't aim at being a super-mega-kung fu movie; as well as I know enough of the taoist principles to realize that here they have been used in a flat and shallow way, so this is not a philosophical movie either. Must we really conclude that this is a movie about heroism? I fear the answer is yes. But since I hold Yimou in high esteem, I hope the nameless hero is just a way to quote those nameless heroes who have died by the millions crushed by Chinese communism (this for what regards the "ultimate good" part), even though there are not enough signs in the movie to justify such an interpretation.
And it's OK, but I sincerely would have preferred if in the end Yimou had respected at least the complexity he seems to infuse in the king of Qin during the movie, by highlighting his grief for the rough and merciless mechanism that leads civilization forward cutting down the passions and the ideals of the individuals. All that is left of this issue is the nameless hero's hint when he whisper into the king's ears ("remember the people who will die"). What I liked most is the dual being formed by the actions of Broken Sword and Flying Snow, that well exemplifies the contradictory pulses which live side by side in everyone of us, a complexity that cannot survive to the final judgment of decisions.
So, a feeble-boned film, but what a fantastic skin! The movie is a real visual experience and stars those Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung who, for the habituÃ©s of oriental cinema, have a value added deriving from movies standing on a higher ground than this one (see "In the mood for love", "2046").