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I almost feel guilty for rushing in to discuss the film's content, subtexts etc when there is so much that could also be said about the form - but maybe the stuff about the form is either obvious or hard to articulate or both. In terms of use of colour, Hero is almost unsurpassed (let no-one ever question again that red is the universal colour of sex). The way that the narrative is structured is both clever and graceful, and there's some nice stuff going on there about fictionality that avoids falling into the cliches most people on Barbelith will be overfamiliar with by now. Fantastic casting and cast (finally someone's figured out how to make Jet Li's blankness into a virtue), far too many memorable moments to mention (but I#ll break that rule for Nameless catching the cup of water on his sword, soooo good).
But it's the political content of the film that sticks with you - partly because the godlike Tony Leung puts in such an amazing performance as Broken Sword that you leave the cinema basically thinking about one individual's political/moral philosophy, and whether you agree with it. So I'll dive right in...
SPOILERS all over the place from here on in, obviously.
The big troubling unwieldy problem at the heart of this movie is that two different ideologies (broadly speaking, pacifism and nationalism) are fused together into one philosophy which is espoused by Broken Sword.
It's very tempting to focus only on the first half, the pacifism. At various points the decision(s) not to go through with the assassination is presented as the result of growing sick and tired of violence: the ultimate aim of the warrior being to lay down his sword (as revealed in Broken Sword's 20th variation of the word 'sword'), Snow coming from a land that has no swords, etc. Obviously that is *part* of it, and there are several points during the film in which we're given incredibly inspiring images that validate pacifism or non-violence: it's hard to feel that Nameless does the wrong thing when he turns the King's sword away right at the moment he does it (even if we might come to disagree later when we think about the consequences), partly because it's a very strong image of mercy and compassion. Celibate Mink has already mentioned the calligraphy students going back to their work as the arrows fall, and there's also the fact the repeated instances of people deliberately losing fights, allowing themselves to be stabbed, culminating in Broken Sword's death - which is a kind of extreme non-violence because he doesn't even block Snow's attack, doesn't even defend himself, let alone strike back. Then finally, there's Nameless standing calmly as several hundred arrows are fired at him. Message: the non-violent idealist will always lose (and die) in the short term, because hir opponents will never show the same kind of mercy (and Nameless knows this, describing himself to the King as a dead man as soon as Nameless decides not to kill him). But in the long term the ideal for which they died may come to pass, so sacrifice is a wondeful thing, yada yada yada.
BUT.
Renouncing violence may be a part of Broken Sword's deal, but it's not the main reason why he decides not to kill the King. We know this because when Nameless really pushes him - look, come on, tell me why the King musn't die - Sword tells him two words: "Our Land." Peace is what he's after, but less important than the personal peace that comes from not being an assassin anymore is the peace that comes from China being 'unified' - ie, conquered. Because this view is being put forward by Tony Leung, it's very seductive - but I'd argue the argument is rigged slightly by having Flying Snow and (initially) Nameless oppose his vision of 'Our Land' in a manner that's very territorial and literally provincial - they want revenge of Qin in the name of their own province... Thus the film presents 'Our Land' as the big picture, which only the King, Broken Sword and Nameless (in that order) are capable of seeing.
But the big picture is only as big as China's borders. After Sword dies, and just before she kills herself, Flying Snow says: "No more struggle - now I will take you home, to a land without borders." The big question for me is, how conscious is the film of the tension between that ideal and the final shot of the huge Great freaking Wall of China, built by Qin to protect 'Our Land' from everybody else? I'd love to believe that the contrast is deliberate, but I think it's equally possible that we're being invited to think of the "land without borders" that Snow & Sword go to when they die as being equivalent to the united China without internal borders that is eventually established.
(There's a few other moments where I can't work out whether the film is disrupting its own dominant message - like when the King shocks Nameless by saying he might not stop with just uniting China, which might be a reference to China's own recent imperialist expansion - eg, Tibet. Oh, and I have no idea how much we're meant to sympathise with the King when he says something like "only Broken Sword understood me, everyone else just criticises" - it seems awfully close to that whole "don't question the President during wartime" thing, but equally the way it's delivered there could be some undercutting...)
I agree with Cameron's analysis of the film's message, but have to disagree with the idea that "we" as Western viewers have any distance from it. The idea of "Our Land", the unified nation state in which internal differences are either put aside or suppressed so that external threats can be overcome, is sadly almost ubiquitous in the West, and one might even go so far as to ask whether or not Hero's success in the USA is a reflection of how attractive that idea is to many Americans today... |
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appreciated dudes