What hath Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon wrought? Nothing less than the American breakthrough of a whole genre of films at precisely the time that genre left its adolescence and reached full artistic maturity.
Time was you had to stay until very late at night to watch Chinese films (“Kung Fu Theater!”), raw stories of Shaolin temples destroyed by gangs of martial arts proficient and nunchakus-wielding or qiang-thrusting or sai-throwing gangs. Your hero often survived, but just barely, the only remaining member of his school, and it’s rare but efficient fighting method. Survived to recover and take on, usually single-handed the entire martial arts army of his school’s enemy. It was a sort of quest, a test of honor. This is the wuxia story.
You know wuxia. Perhaps you’ve seen Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, or Ronny Yu’s The Bride with White Hair. If so, you’re already a Hong Kong martial arts film devotee. But if not, then Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the Zhang Yimou films that succeeded it – Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Curse of the Golden Flower – are all examples that have noticeable American releases. The form even has reached the parody level, as all genres do when their conventions become recognizable by a general populace: Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle. (Maybe a good choice for Film Club next year?)
Tonight’s film, The Banquet or, as it’s being renamed in America, The Legend of the Black Scorpion, has all the earmarks of traditional wuxia – a superior martial arts skill, a magical force such as the ability to move swiftly up walls, over water or through trees, the ability to control a variety of objects as precise weapons, and highly defined sense of honor even when faced with villains.
But The Banquet has one other interesting characteristic; it also falls into that oddball genre of “Shakespeare adaptation,” uniting it with such disparate films as Ten Things I Hate About You, She’s the Man, Forbidden Planet, and West Side Story. The Banquet is a retelling of Hamlet, a young Emperor’s son is studying far from home (not at Wittenberg) but at a school for artists. When the Emperor is murdered, his brother ascends to the throne and sends troops to murder the prince. He survives and returns to the palace. In this story it is not his mother who has married the new Emperor as it is in Hamlet, but his former girlfriend. Trouble ensues.
Beautiful trouble. The Banquet may be one of the most beautiful films you ever see. It’s the kind of movie you walk out of actually wondering who the cinematographer is and whether you can buy a poster to hang on your dining room wall to make the room look better. Top quality Asian movies have looked great for years – think about Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, or Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou, or Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host – and Feng Xiaogang’s film is no exception.
So, beauty. Shakespeare. Wuxia. This film has it all. Enjoy The Banquet. It’s a feast for your eyes.
R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser
