Hero or Anti-Hero
By I think that Ezra Klein has it right, and Elbert Ventura quite wrong, on Hero, the new film from Zhang Yimou. If you haven’t seen it, go now. The Ventura review contains several spoilers, and any discussion of the political impact of the film will be somewhat spoilerish.
The film is set during the time of the unification of China by Qin Shi Huang Di, about 220 B.C. Hero is somewhat ambivalent regarding the figure of the Emperor, but I won’t give the show completely away. Ventura opines:
Compounding the shame is that such blind praise has been lavished on a conspicuously lifeless film. Unabashedly riding the coattails of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero replicates that movie’s Western-friendly approach to the wuxia genre, but without Lee’s fervent humanism. Hero cost $31 million, a king’s ransom by Chinese standards, and Zhang wants all of us to know it; the legion of extras and grandiose sets all but bludgeon you into submission. Shot by Christopher Doyle, one of the best cinematographers working today, Hero may be too aestheticized and solemn for its own good. Yards of flowing fabric, heavy handed color-coding, fashion-plate poses, and the incessant resort to portentous slow-motion end up suffocating the humans in the frame.
Whatever complaints one has regarding the political aspects of the film, Ventura is dead wrong on its aesthetic merit. He seems to have stepped in the point without noticing it; “bludgeon you into submission.” For my money, the film is stronger than Crouching Tiger, in some part because Zhang is simply a more careful artist than Ang Lee, and in some part because of its relatively complicated political message. The narrative structure is certainly a good deal more complex and interesting than that of Crouching Tiger, and the humanity of the figures comes forth in a more subtle manner. This is not to say that Hero is a more “human” film than Crouching Tiger, because the interpersonal relationships it showcases can’t match the interaction between Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh. Overall, however, I found it a stronger film.
As for the political message, get over it. Even agreement with the rather simplistic way that Ventura portrays it does not detract from the aesthetic quality of the film. We needn’t agree with the politics of a film in order to find it admirable. More importantly, I don’t think that Ventura gives the film a fair shake. That Zhang Yimou has a qualified appreciation for one aspect of a tyrannical regime does not make him a fan of the CCP, or any other group of tyrants. The history of Iraq and Afghanistan should remind us that even a brutal regime is better than no regime at all. I don’t see the message of Hero as vastly more pernicious than a fair appraisal of this observation.