Mythmaking: 'Hero' & 'Vanity Fair'

Commonweal, Sept 24, 2004 by Richard Alleva

The Chinese movie epic, Hero, is more than spectacular; it is elemental. Watching it, I felt regret that Wolfgang Petersen had landed the job of directing Troy, though I respect Peterrsen's crafts-manship and like most of his film. But if anybody is ever going to put The Iliad or The Odyssey on screen in true Homeric style, it will have to be Zhang Yimou, director of Raise the Red Lantern, Shanghai Triad, and now Hero. This is a film-maker who does with the camera what Homer did with words: he portrays men and women not as "personalities" but as human forces coexisting with inhuman forces--wind, water, air, animals, earth. When, in The Iliad, Achilles drives the Trojans into the sea and then battles the sea itself, we gasp, but what current Western moviemaker could put such a moment on film? Eighty years ago, a D. W. Griffith or a Sergei Eisenstein might have succeeded, but after decades of increasingly domesticated and refined realism, the pores on a handsome actor's face are treated by our cameras with greater awe than is shown to sun or tides or sky. Oh, we have a surfeit of films that prop up love stories with pretty back-drops and, for disaster and action movies, computer generated images slash flame and firepower across the screen while the theater loudspeakers roar us into submission. Since we know all too well where the acting leaves off and the machines take over, this breeds an aesthetic cynicism within us even as we cower in our seats. Zhang Yimou employs plenty of CGI, too, but his special effects so decisively lift us onto a mythic plane that they become signs and wonders rather than stunts. We enter a dream, not a contraption.

The plot is a detective story solved by the intended victim working in collaboration with his would-be murderer. To the first emperor of China comes a nameless magistrate-warrior. He has reputedly slain the very three assassins who have kept the emperor in perpetual fear of his life--Broken Sword, Sky, and Flying Snow (the last a beautiful female warrior). Nameless explains to the emperor what stratagems he used, and the film flashes back to the passions and bloodshed these devices unleashed. We witness a miniature Othello drama with an Iago-like Nameless setting the lovers Broken Sword and Flying Snow against each other (though the ferocious Flying Snow is certainly no vulnerable Desdemona). But then the emperor, drawing on his own knowledge of the assassins, refutes Nameless's account with his own speculation of what might have taken place. This implicates Nameless in the conspiracy against the throne. Then Nameless tells the emperor the truth about his connection to the assassins, and this third story defines the magistrate's quest.

If all the above, with its contradictory testimonies, suggests Rashomon, forget it. Rashomon tells us that factuality is impossible because subjectivity rules humanity. To the contrary, Hero's three narratives successively climb toward knowable truth. Nevertheless, an ambiguity does shadow the climax. Of the five central characters--the emperor, nameless magistrate, three assassins--who is the true hero? He who acts ruthlessly to promote unity and prevent future chaos, or he who sheaths his sword as a lesson of peace to generations to come?

The story may contain inherent psychological implications but Zhang does not present it psychologically (at least not to my Western perceptions). The aims of the characters may be human but their acts, as staged and photographed, are closer to earth tremors or tidal waves. When the emperor's soldiers launch thousands of arrows at a calligraphy studio where the assassins are staying, the missiles look like swarms of locusts. This may recall Olivier's Henry V at first, but when Nameless and Flying Snow sweep the arrows aside with only their swords, they seem less like warriors than demigods such as Rama or Gilgamesh.

But other scenes push beyond myth and magic into near abstraction. When Broken Sword and the emperor duel in a palace room amidst hanging curtains that blow in the wind, Zhang's Australian cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, makes the green of the draperies look like a mist that will swallow up the combatants. Amazingly, this visual effect neither turns the scene arty nor drains it of its excitement, but it does suggest that none of this violence has anything to do with the real violence that destroys people and desolates the earth. It is more like watching a hurricane battle a twister.

The duelists often fly through the air, thereby recalling Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But Ang Lee's movie had characters that remained charmingly human amid the romance and intrigue. Their flying seemed not sheer magic but an overflow of their elan. I loved those stunts but suffered a slight jolt whenever they began, as if the characters of a novel were trying to launch themselves into legend and myth. There's no such jolt anywhere in Hero because the action is mythic from first to last, never novelistic, never worldly.