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House of flying
daggers
House of
Flying Daggers
Review :
Surreal stunts lynchpin of 'House Of Flying Daggers'
By Subhash K. Jha, Indo-Asian News Service
Film: "House Of Flying Daggers"; Cast: Ziyi Zhang, Takeshi
Kaneshiro; Director: Yimou Zhang; Rating:
***
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.
In the film, the spurned date (Thurman) uses her superpowers to
teach her errant boyfriend (Luke Wilson) lessons in anger
mismanagement.
This seemingly asinine date movie is cleverer than it seems to
be -- the plot turns the "Basic Instinct" premise on its head.
The obsessive woman is akin to Glenn Close but
far funnier since she moonlights as supergirl.
Alternating between saving the world from sundry missiles and
saving her heart from shattering into pieces, Thurman goes from
the ridiculous to the sublime all in one long
shot.
She is a delight to behold if not quite a pleasure for her
petrified boyfriend to hold.
See the film to watch an enormously skilled actress fitting into
modes of outrageously inventive pedestrian situations.
You can't call "My Super Ex-Girlfriend" anything more than an
oddball take on the old adage, "Hell hath no fury like a woman
scorned." But this is nonetheless an enjoyable
scorn job.. 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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