House of Flying Daggers [Import]

Here's one word that sums up this film: Beauty. The plot of "House of Flying Daggers" (original title: "Shi mian mai fu") is lacking, but in a way it's made up for with the intoxicating sets, costumes, and exquisite love story. Zhang Yimou backs away from the grandeur of "Hero" in favor of a more intimate story.

It's 859 A.D., near the end of the corrupt Tang Dynasty. A guerilla rebellion called House of the Flying Daggers (who are able to throw knives at great distances) has sprung up against the government. Despite the loss of their leader, the rebels are thriving. Deputy Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) decides to go undercover to infiltrate the House, and he tries to get the trust of blind courtesan Mei (Zhang Ziyi), daughter of the House's dead leader.

But soon he begins to fall in love with Mei, which jeopardizes his loyalties while Mei herself is experiencing confusion. But government officials want Mei dead because of her sympathies -- and even worse, they don't realize that Jin is undercover. To make things worse, Jin is not the only rival for Mei's love -- his best friend is as well.

Director Zhang Yimou apparently said that "Hero" was the warm-up to "House of Flying Daggers." It does seem more polished and fully realized, without the "Rashomon" storytelling. Instead of a war movie, it's a mixture of fairy-tale romance and beauty, and spies and guerilla warfare. The final half-hour is the stumbling block, where some plot threads come unravelled. Things get pretty confusing, and.

Zhang doesn't drop the ball as far as stylism goes -- color and exquisite details are in every frame. They have an almost intoxicating effect, and so do the action sequences. One of the most memorable scenes is Ziyi performing the "echo game," where she strikes drums in a particular rhythm with her flowing clothing. Not to mention a balletic, dreamlike fight in a bamboo forest, with the participants soaring and dipping like Cirque de Soleil dancers. It's all completely unreal, but there lies its beauty, like a painting of the sky that focuses on the sun and not the clouds.

This is entirely Zhang Ziyi's picture -- since her debut in "The Road Home," Ziyi has proved herself a wonderful actress. "House of Flying Daggers" focuses mostly on Ziyi, and she gives a truly exquisite performance, particularly as a blind woman -- watch her face. The two supporting actors, Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro, do a solid job in their roles, particularly Kaneshiro, who brings plenty of life to what could have been another cliched bad-cop-turned-lover.

"House of Flying Daggers" is worth seeing just to see -- it's visual ecstacy packed around a fairly typical love triangle plot and a slightly disappointing final half hour. But the sights alone in this intimate love story are exquisite.

"House of Flying Daggers" brings you a wonderful tale you can delight in, and the opportunity to watch a movie where the use of color is so impressive that it is almost surreal, poetry in motion. Notwithstanding that, I think that you probably won't like this film unless you are prepared to suspend your disbelief at least for 119 minutes, the duration of this movie. Personally, I did exactly that, and I don't regret it at all :)

The story is set in 859 AD, when a corrupt dynasty held power in China. There is an organization called "House of Flying Daggers" that is trying to change things, but the government won't allow that. Two officers, Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Leo (Andy Lau) are ordered to stop the rebels, and so they devise a plan to infiltrate the "House of Flying Daggers". They capture Mei (Zhang Ziyi), the blind daughter of the previous leader of the revolt, who had been posing as a courtesan. Jin rescues Mei from the jail, and tries to convince her that he would like to join the rebels, when in truth his objective is to destroy the "House of Flying Daggers". But even if everything started as a plan, will Jin be able to remember Leo's advice, "Don't fall in love for real"?.

I want to point out that I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. The story was great, with enough twists to keep you entertained, and plenty of outstanding fighting scenes. Chinese director Zhang Yimou made such a great use of the elements at his disposition (great actors + inspiration + music + choreography + use of colors) that many sequences seem directly out of a dream, and the spectator feels as if he were bearing witness to a real story that happened a long time ago. In a word, the results are impressive... Watch "House of Flying Daggers", and decide whether you share my opinion :)

Belen Alcat

I think Yimou Zhang has made the two most visually beautiful films I have seen in the recent years, with "Ying xiong" ("Hero") and "Shi mian mai fu" ("House of Flying Daggers" but literally translated as "Ambush From Ten Sides"). The common denominator is not the martial arts action couple with the Hong Kong wire work but Zhang's use of rich colors. I know that Akira Kurosawa pained a field of grass gold for a scene that ended up being deleted in "Ran," and for all I know Zhang painted all those bamboo trees green in this 2004 film. But Zhang has been paying attention to color for as long as I have been watching his films, which goes all the way back to 1991's "Da hong deng long gao gao gua" ("Raise the Red Lantern"). The man is an expert at creating scenes of spectacular visual beauty on a motion picture screen and this time he is really into blue and green big time.

This is a movie where you do not really care about the plot beyond its ability to move us from one beautiful set piece to the next. Mei (Zhang Ziyi) is the blind daughter of the former leader of the Flying Daggers, a secret group that is combating the corrupt Tang Dynasty of the 9th century in China. The name comes from the fact that they throw daggers, and there are some daggers that are followed by the camera in this film the same way George Lucas followed the X-fighters in the trench during the attack on the Death Star. Mei is a dancer at the Peony Palace, and Captain Leo (Andy Lau), a local cop, sends his young colleague Captain Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to investigate the mysterious blind dancer who is suspected of having ties to the Flying Daggers. While you know this is the beginning of a romance, because who could not fall in love with the beautiful and talented Mei, what matters is that we are up to the first spectacular set pieces, the Echo Game, played between Leo and Mei where the blind dancer shows she definitely knows how to play the game (and strike a pose).

The battle in the bamboo forest is the most impressive of these sequences, but I liked the choreographed battle in the field of grass with the two lovers encircled by swordsmen and the part in the final fight where it starts to snow. I understand there are homages in this film, but while I get the link to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" going back to the bamboo forest scene from "A Touch of Zen" is beyond me because I do not watch too many of these films. But, wow, the ones I have seen make me wonder why I am not watching at least one in a week and the answer is I know in my heart they cannot all be as beautiful as this one. What will Zhang come up with next? We cannot but wait to find out (he is currently filming "Qian li zou dan ji," which literally translates as "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles" and is apparently about a Japanese father her take his ailing son to China's Yunnan province to learn opera).

Granted, "Shi mian mai fu" has flaws despite its great beauty. The political backdrop of the film seems to matter at the start, what with the emperor being weak and the officials being corrupt and all, but all that really matters is that Mei starts off on the opposite side of Leo and Jin, who best laid plans are going to go astray in ways too tragic for them to forsee. That is because the story is an excuse to get us from one spectacular set piece to the next and the sides exist simply for one lover to cross over to the other. The swordplay is more stylized than I have seen in other films of this genre and seems to involve less wire work as well, which is fine with me, because I would rather see it used selectively as it is here. There is also a song that Mei sings early on where you need to pay attention because it will come back more poignantly later on. The film has an English audio track, but you are obviously advised to go for the sub-titled original audio track because dubbed always sounds dubbed and that means tacky. Gorgeous films do not deserve tacky audio tracks.