Category: 1993

The Bride With White Hair (1993) – Review

Brigitte Lin (Lian) and Leslie Cheung (Zhuo).

Ronny Yu is probably best known in this country for directing horror movies in America, particularly Bride of Chucky (among the most popular of the Child’s Play sequels, not least of which because of the voice performance of Jennifer Tilly as the bride) and Freddy vs. Jason, the crossover between Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. However, he’s worked on different types of films, including Phantom Lover (perhaps my favorite version of “Phantom of the Opera”) and Fearless (not to be confused with the 1993 Peter Weir film starring Jeff Bridges, this is a combination of docudrama and martial arts film starring Jet Li). My favorite of his, however, is The Bride with White Hair, based on the novel Bai Mao Nu by Yusheng Liang (also inspired the 1982 film Wolf Devil Woman).

Elaine Lui and Francis Ng as the Wushuang twins.

In 17th century China, Zhuo (Cheung) is sitting alone in the freezing cold on a mountain, guarding a red rose. A group of men from the emperor show up, wanting the rose for the emperor, who’s ill, since the rose supposedly will heal him, but Zhuo fights them off. As he tells us in a voiceover introducing the flashback that makes up the bulk of the movie, the rose is meant for someone else. As a boy (played by Leila Tong), Zhuo was brought up to be the leader of the Wu Tang Clan* (which led the Eight Big Clans of China), but though he was skilled enough (when his master throws a sword at him, Zhuo catches it easily even though he was playing with a grasshopper at the time), he was never interested enough, or cold-blooded enough, to be the leader. Even when the evil cult the Clans are always battling – led by psychotic conjoined twins Ji Wushuang (Francis Ng and Elaine Lui) – attack a village near clan territory, Zhuo’s first instinct is to help a pregnant woman and her husband caught in the crossfire. He’s also drawn to Lian (Brigitte Lin), a woman raised by wolves (in the early part of the flashback, we see her playing a flute, which soothes the wolves the young Zhuo is afraid of) who has become an assassin for the evil cult (she uses her hair as a weapon). When Lu Hua (Yammie Lam), daughter of a general with the Wu Tang Clan, and who has been in love with Zhuo since they were younger, sees Zhuo with Lian, she shoots Lian with a poison arrow. Zhuo takes Lian back to the lake where she lives (he had followed her there before, and she attacked him), and gets the poison out. Zhuo and Lian then fall in love, but the enmity between the clans and the cult, as well as the twisted desires of the twins (the male twin lusts after Lian) threatens their relationship.

Lu Hua (Yammie Lam).

The original novel apparently concentrated more on the swordplay than the relationship, but Yu wanted to bring out the love story. To that end, he gives the movie an operatic tone, and treats the love story in an adult way; there’s nothing coy or voyeuristic about the sex scenes, but they feel organic, as does the love story. Cinematographer Peter Pau (who also worked with Yu on Phantom Lover, as well as with John Woo on The Killer and Ang Lee on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) uses familiar elements of the genre – low-angle shots, zooms, and slow motion – but in an imaginative way, and not just for the fight scenes. Cheung is more subdued here, but it works for him, and he’s also convincing in the action scenes. Lin had proved her mettle in action scenes in such films as Peking Opera Blues, and she does so again here, but she also retains an air of mystery, she accomplishes a lot with just the expressions on her face (as when she’s starting to develop feelings for Zhuo and is taunted for it by the twins), and she and Cheung have great chemistry together. There was a sequel to this, The Bride with White Hair 2, that takes up right from where the first one left off, but while it has its good parts, it doesn’t measure up to the original. Of all the films that came from Hong Kong during this time period, outside of John Woo’s best films, The Bride with White Hair is perhaps my favorite.

*-The Wu Tang Clan is a martial arts group that’s appeared in several works of wuxia fiction and films, including the 1983 film Shaolin and Wu Tang, which is where the hip-hop group took its name from. Click here to go back whence you came.

Reel 68: More Modern Fairy Tales

In this episode we continue our theme of Modern-Day Fairy Tales, even though in one case it’s not necessarily set in the present day. So let’s just call it a present-day telling of a fairy tale and leave it at that.

And that’s where we start this time around, with 1993’s The Bride With White Hair,  directed by Ronny Yu. This is a Wuxia film with a kind of Romeo and Juliet overlay, as our main characters find themselves trying to balance fate, duty and love. In addition, it’s a film that definitely has overtones from Western film sensibilities. It might be a little hard to follow at first, but if you stick with it, you’ll be well rewarded.

From there we move to 2011 and Hanna, directed by Joe Wright and starring Saoirse Ronan in the title role. This film is lodged in the present, with some of the fairy-tale elements coming from its overall structure. There are also a couple of scenes which explore it a little more overtly.

This film was the basis for the Amazon Prime TV series of the same name.  The TV show, of course, had to run a slightly different story arc, because it has to sustain the basic setup over several years. I think the series did manage to do it while remaining faithful to the basic premise. Some characters had to naturally change to make this possible. But I do think it works. What say you?

COMING ATTRACTIONS: 

In our next episode, we look at a pair of films where, for lack of a better term, Alternate History is going on. In those histories, a few iconic people get to meet one another. First is Insignificance, from 1985 and directed by Nicholas Roeg. From there it’s on to One Night in Miami… a 2020 film directed by Regina King. By the end of these films, you wish all of the events depicted had actually happened! Join us, won’t you?

Reel 34: Epic Altman

In which we take nearly six hours of film and reduce it to about eleven minutes of synopses and and hour or so of scintillating discussion.

Robert Altman’s work had a lot of “trademarks” that delineated his films: overlapping dialogue, huge casts, multiple storylines and a way to subvert whatever genre he was working in. And in this episode we look at a pair of epic-length films which do nearly all of these, but there’s an interesting difference between the two.

In 1975’s Nashville, Altman’s multiple storylines all manage to converge on a single time and place. Then we go to 1993 and Short Cuts, where again all the stories take place in a single city, but the stories almost-not-quite intersect but still manage to remain on parallel tracks, even as the thing that ties them together is an outside force which affects each of them differently.

Sean and Claude have some great discussion in this one. Enjoy!

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

For Reel 35 we return to the world of Martin Scorsese, specifically his views on Christianity. We start with The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which is mostly remembered nowadays for the controversy it stirred up, but it’s really so much more. Then in the second half it’s 2016’s Silence, which has an interesting premise and an ending that will simultaneously depress you and give you hope. Join us, won’t you?

Reel 22: Southern Stories

Typically, when a film is set in a southern state, we get a lot of rednecks and yahoos behaving badly. That’s not to say that there isn’t any bad behavior in the films reviewed in this episode, but it’s not the focus of the films.

In fact, both Dazed and Confused (1993) and Ruby in Paradise (1993) offer a look at smaller towns in the south. Dazed and Confused, directed by Richard Linklater, is a view of small-town life in an unnamed Texas town in the summer of 1976. Victor Nunez’ Ruby in Paradise spends most of its time in the Florida Panhandle during the sleepy off-season. Dazed is fun and bittersweet, and Ruby is a warm look at a relatively late coming-of-age story, told through a feminist lens. In fact, Ruby in Paradise could have been paired with 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore for an interesting compare-and-contrast. (We suppose we’ll have to find another matchup for Alice.)

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

In our next episode, we’re taking a look at three different versions of Little Women (with a nod at the fourth) and examining each one’s approach to the story.

Reel 9: SorkinFest Part IV–The Credited Rewrites

We’re closing in on the end of SorkinFest as we get to Part 4 of our five-part series looking at the work of Aaron Sorkin. And this time around we’re looking at a couple of films that Sorkin had a public hand in writing–or, more accurately, re-writing: 1993’s Malice, starring Nicole Kidman and Alec Baldwin, and Moneyball, the 2011 film starring Brad Pitt and Philip Seymour Hoffman. 

These two films couldn’t be more different in their subject matter or their approach to storytelling, but Aaron Sorkin has a few tricks up his sleeve that have you realizing that, even when he isn’t the primary writer, he’s going to manage to put his stamp on the film anyway. 

NOTE: I (Claude) accidentally put in the code for an older episode in the space below. My apologies if you were confused.

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