Chinese movies are cool, everybody knows that. And Japanese too, actually but this is another story. The issue here however will be, why Hero was such a good movie and why there are still stupid people that laugh in the cinema. But let’s take the things from the beginning.
I wanted to see Hero for a long time but it only opened in England last week, so I saw it two years after my Greek friends. I was really looking forward to it but I was not sure what to expect. It was dubbed as the new big thing á la Crouching Tiger – Hidden dragon, which I adored, and therefore I was excited. I wasn’t sure where the similarities lied, however, so I was also a bit sceptical: why repeat a successful recipe and in essence create a second best Crouching tiger? I was not sure…
In the beginning of the movie I could only see the similarities: the style, the fight scenes, the lonely warriors. And I didn’t mind. But I was clearly not engaged in the storyline. I caught myself thinking of the last line of Crouching tiger, that has haunted me for years: Hold your last breath to meditate and leave this world peacefully, she said. And he replied: I spent all my life meditating and now I want to use up my last breath to tell you I love you. Heartbreaking, I would say, but then again I am a girl, what do you expect?
Then I thought how when I was younger I never understood the ars gratia artis motto: I was always looking for a message, I could not see the beauty in the means not the goal… And while I was watching Hero’s stunningly beautiful fight scene between Snow and Moon in the forest with the falling leaves, I said to myself: I don’t care if there is no message here, this is beautiful. But happily, I was surprised very soon. As the story progressed this movie proved to be much more than beautiful images, not that this would have been bad.
The story was complex in the more primitive and profound way: it consisted of numerous parallel realities and the stunningly beautiful dream within a dream trick. And it all worked amazingly well, in a movie that had so much diversity: it was a pseudo-historical drama with fight scenes and complex love stories on top of that. In the three alternative stories of the way Hero defeats the notorious assassins Snow and Broken Sword that are lovers, we see unfolding before us all the range of emotions a couple can ever experience. In reality number one, the couple is not speaking for three years: she has cheated on him and they are both lost inside their pain. In order to hurt her, he sleeps with his loyal servant. And he yells at her: I know you saw us, I wanted you to see us. And she kills him. This story is red. In the second alternative, they are happy together, in love and in total harmony. They are both heart and soul into a common cause and when they are asked to decide between them who will get sacrificed for it, they go together, simply because they cannot live apart. But before they get there, she wounds him with her sword, she wounds him just enough so he is not the one that will go and fight and die. And she goes. And she dies. This story is blue. In the third story, they are still in love. And they did start with a common cause. But they drifted apart. And they do not understand each other anymore. He has deviated from the thing that was uniting them and she is hurt and does not understand him. She feels he betrayed their ideals, and along with them their love too. When they fight because she always uses the sword not words, he lets her kill him and she yells, why didn’t you defend yourself? His reply –so you can finally believe that I love you- comes as a slap in the face, to her and to us. And then in a very Grecian tragedy kind of way, she embraces him and kills herself with the same sword. This story is white… I was not expecting all this from Hero, I did not expect to see the concentrated story of every doomed love story, portrayed so accurately and beautifully: you fall in love and then you betray. Most of the times…
This trick with the couple and the three alternatives, reminded me of Run, Lola, Run. And the movie within a movie theme, that reached another level of complexity when inside the white story, we go one step further and see the past of that story too, reminded my Talk to her. Almodovar seems always relevant for me, especially when we are discussing complexity and ultimate stylisation. He is the absolute king of obsessions, his movies have the simplest messages, but he adores complex, idiosyncratic style, which he perfects religiously with every new movie he makes. And this to me is the essence of art these days: are there any new stories to be told? Are there any genuinely new ideas? No… All we have to play with is style, and this is the true essence of ars gratia artis that I said before: art is the way you chose to convey the same messages that are in the centre of human interest century after century after century… Variations on a theme, games with style. You can say it with a story of two men in love with two women in a comma, you can say it in a story of Chinese warriors, you can even say it with a frantic German girl running like mad under techno sounds to save her boyfriend from the mob. The story is the same (or similar or limited in any case), what are the storylines that made history? Boy meets girl and Good against evil. Am I forgetting something? I don’t think so…
This leads us to the last point I wished to make: the people that were laughing in the cinema… Why? Because the actors were doing the (really well-known by now) flying fight scene… How funny, indeed. I bet they laughed in Matrix too… What can I say? Just that it was so annoying. So annoying. So disrespectful and so egoistic: it totally ruined some moments for me and this was awful. But I guess those people just didn’t get it. Maybe they came for the fun of it all and I am the one ruining it for them with this text full of speculations about non-existent messages in a movie that was merely a very simple movie… Right?
You tell me…
October 2004
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