film, eyeballs, brain

2008 saw the release of two Chinese historical action dramas by two major Hongkong directors not previously known for the genre: one, the first half of a four-hour epic; the other, a re-edited version of a 1994 original. It’s probably safe to say at this point that Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux (2008) is a better film than John Woo’s Red Cliff, Part 1 (Chi bi) — unfair, yes, because only the first part of Red Cliff has been released. But as befitting genuine auteurs, both films are in fact not unlike their respective directors’ previous work: the first, smeared and aleatory; the second, blood-spattered and bromantic. The latter is surely the most spectacular of Woo’s films though; it is unfortunate that it feels rather inert.

Red Cliff is based on the 3rd-century historical text “Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms”, and I am unclear, unfortunately, as to whether the general plot line would be familiar to its Chinese audiences. This may explain why the exposition, at times, is curt and compressed when, to a non-Chinese viewer like myself, one thinks it should linger, if only to clarify people’s relationships with each other. Instead, Woo chooses to dwell lovingly on the blossoming friendship between the two main characters — that, and numerous shots of hundreds of soldiers marching in formation, as if to say, “Look, someone paid for this!” (Red Cliff is the most expensive Chinese-financed film to date.)

Cao Cao, the ambitious commander of the Imperial Army, has decided to wage war on two warlords he has deemed disloyal to the Han Emperor. Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), chief advisor to the southern Chinese warlord Liu Bei, decides to negotiate an alliance with the other warlord Sun Quan (Chen Chang) against Cao Cao. The young Sun Quan, no doubt somewhat confused by the pesky jade bead pendants swinging constantly before his eyes, can’t make up his mind about surrender or war. Kaneshiro’s character then sets off to persuade Zhou Yu (Tony Leung), the commander of the regional army, to join with him — and convince Sun Quan — in fighting Cao Cao. (Sun Quan inevitably agrees, after a tough-love tiger hunt where he ostensibly regains his manhood.)

Leung and Kaneshiro’s first movie together was Wong’s Chungking Express (1994), though they shared only a few seconds of screen time. I was reminded of this in an essay by Amy Taubin (reproduced in the Criterion release of the DVD), who writes that Leung — who she describes as having “the most soulful set of peepers in contemporary cinema” — walks straight into the camera when we first see him in the Wong film. Leung doesn’t appear until an hour into Red Cliff, but Woo is completely aware of Leung’s star power; as in Chungking Express, we’re coyly introduced to Leung via a closeup of his eyes. (It was at that point, I think, that sharp intakes of breath were suddenly heard from Barb and Valerie.)

In a sequence that is pure Woo, Zhuge Liang and Zhou Yu play Dueling Zithers — this, after they deliver a foal together — and, through their musical performances, gains deeper psychic insight into each other’s manly compatibility (and military strategies), if you will. It’s all a bit of an inadvertent hoot — it’s literally two men making beautiful music together, all shot in gauzy candlelit closeups — until one remembers that Woo has long liked this kind of masculine dialectic in the narrative, where cop and hitman (or in this case, military strategist and viceroy) discover their similarities despite their apparent antagonisms.

Despite all the costumes, it’s still, at least thematically, a Woo film on the surface. The problem is that Woo’s brotherly dyads work best in his movies when left as they are, i.e., limited to two, without the peripheral clutter of various generals and, quite frankly, women. It’s that tension that made The Killer (1989) the masterpiece that it is; it’s that dynamic that made even Hollywood filler like Face/Off (1997) worth watching.

And that is where the positive similarities to his oeuvre ends (despite an obvious reference early in the movie to his 1992 film Hard Boiled). Red Cliff is an exciting movie, but it feels inorganic and artificial, an overproduced extension of the lesser films he directed during his Hollywood stint. Contributing to this is the overuse of CGI — notably in an overhead shot of Cao Cao’s fleet, with tens of thousands of ships seemingly cloning-stamped all the way to the horizon.

The main problem, I think, is that Woo seems to be trying hard to put his stamp on relatively unwieldy (and unyielding) material. One gets the sense that Woo doesn’t know exactly what to do with his actors; all of them are extremely nuanced performers, but squeezed into roles that do not require much emoting. The actor most associated with Woo, the excellent Chow Yun-Fat, was an amalgam of Tetsuya Watari and Alain Delon; he occupied the screen with a suave, physical grace (particularly in 1991′s Once a Thief) that matched Woo’s cool aesthetic. But Leung and Kaneshiro simply do not have the same physical qualities — during the fights they’re more or less relegated to the sidelines — and so this coolness is replaced instead with brawn and gristle.

Woo’s movies take flight when he goes — to use a bad pun here — ballistic, and yet Red Cliff seems strangely hampered by the sword-and-sandal, mano-a-mano combat epics that came before it: Alexander Nevsky, Braveheart, Gladiator, Hero, and, rather oddly, The Fellowship of the Ring. Particularly the latter, actually, in the scenes when the Generals of the larger-than-life alliance are recruited: there’s even a Gimli-like figure, an irritable juggernaut who sports eyebrows to match John Rhys-Davies’s. Picture Kaneshiro with a bow and arrow, jumping on an elephant, and the comparison becomes clearer.

The hallmarks of a Woo film, of course, are the action scenes. Woo, after all (along with Ringo Lam), pioneered what we think of as the Hong Kong action aesthetic. In terms of action sequences, Woo excels in cramped interiors — hospitals, hotels, warehouses, gangsters’ mansions, restaurants — and intersecting diagonal planes of death. Tables are there to be overturned and hidden behind; every plate glass window is meant to be shattered by bullets or bodies hurled through it. People dodge behind doors and corners and, failing to do so, leap across spaces with both pistols blazing. (In this respect Woo is actually closer in spatial stylistics to Wong, who has made peeking around doorways something of an art.)

Woo’s exterior action scenes, in contrast, tend to be one-on-one showdowns, and tend to pale in comparison with the precise arrangement of bodies in architectural space in his interior scenes. (See Jean-Claude Van Damme go head-to-head with a motorcycle in the underrated Hard Target from 1993, or its bad parody (involving two motorcycles!) in the 2000 Tom Cruise vehicle, Mission: Impossible II.) This is perhaps why there’s a paradoxically constricting sense to the scenes of mass battle in Red Cliff. They’re gorgeously photographed — blood and mud splatter in fetishistic high-definition detail, and slain soldiers fly through the air in balletic slow motion — but they simply don’t fill up the screen or use the entire material surroundings the way Woo used to do. Despite the physical immediacy of Red Cliff‘s violence, one almost longs for the abstracted violence of bullet trajectories, for random death from above. One wishes for a banister somewhere for someone to slide on.

I am still eager to see the battle of Helm’s Deep Red Cliff, Part 2 once it’s released in 2009, but my anticipation for Red Cliff, Part 1 was certainly a lot higher than my excitement for the sequel. It may be Woo’s triumphant return to Hong Kong after his tenure as a hired gun in Hollywood, but Red Cliff is too large a canvas for the criminal intimacies Woo has always loved.

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