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).
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.
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.
