House of Flying Daggers English Movie
This stunning Chinese film transports us into a world of lush fields and thick forests, curvaceous bamboo groves and inviting poppy fields where danger lurks and love blossoms.
Shot in a panoramic fable-like arch of aching beauty, "House Of Flying Daggers" tells a naïve story in a manner that's constantly seductive and imperative.
We start in a beautiful brothel (full marks to the group of art directors who have recreated the hedonism of ancient China without tilting down on the titillating trapeze) where the beautiful but blind Mei (Ziyo Zhang) performs a series of dances and fights of bewildering exotica for two soldiers.
The alignment of dance and action is awe-inspiring. The glory and subtle poignancy that underline the grandeur are reminiscent of what Sanjay Leela Bhansali attempts in his cinema.
Cleverly, the surreal stunts and the choreographed action - decidedly the project's lynchpin - never overpower the central love story between the 'blind' prostitute Mei, who is martial-arts expert (Mei isn't really blind nor a prostitute, but shhh!) and the rakish soldier Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who takes upon himself the task of transporting her across some of the most dangerously devastating landscape that god invented.
The journey is booby-trapped with stunning stunts, all of the breathtaking and heart-stopping kind. Poetry blends into elemental bone-crunching action and the simmering stunts acquire a surreal bounce.
Where do we begin to wax eloquently on the specific action sequences?
Between the bout in the bamboo grove and the stint in the spatial flower field, we can't tell where the beauty of the landscape merges with the serenity of the storytelling even as the characters fight inner and outer battles with swords that slice the limb and the soul.
Director Yimou Zhang looks at the indelible bond between man and nature through the conflicts that occur when one challenges the other.
The plot moves stealthily from one choreographed marvel of dramatic action to another until we reach an operatic tragic finale to the love story.
In between we may not think much of the scriptwriter's somersaults of imagination. The character revelations are especially hard to digest.
But the plot derives its mesmeric strengths from the merger of muted natural beauty with the stress and strife that man and woman create in trying to come into a transcendental togetherness that overpowers all political and historical references.
Set in the distant past, "House Of Flying Daggers" is shot mainly in the great open outdoors. As the fragile-yet-indomitable Mei travels with her suspicious companion you cannot but wonder how the narrative remains so mellow even during spasms of heart-in-the-mouth stress.
Though lacking the deep thrusts of Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon", "House Of flying Daggers" is manoeuvred by a stirring inner beauty that articulates itself in a series of elegantly orchestrated action sequences.
You can't tell where the bloodshed ends and the ballet begins.
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