Wu Xia: heaven or hell? part 1, from the Middle Kingdom to the Hermit Kingdom

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Category: Essays

The Restless: the Korean way into "wu xia"?

It would be hard to find a genre that fits the stereotype of “Asian cinema” better than the Wu Xia Pian (in Chinese, literally: “films of martial chivalry”). This floating world of flowing silk robes, flying swordsmen and women, wandering about rivers and lakes (called Jiang Hu, another word for the realm of martial artists, gravity-defying sword saints and other palm-blasting vagrants) seems to offer the perfect mixture of eroticism and exoticism that appeals and corresponds to popular representations of the East. One could even go so far as saying that it comforts a certain idea of “Asian cinema”, however abstract or fragmented this (mis)conception can be: the wu xia genre is both attractively foreign (the flying around and other oddities unknown to non-Chinese audiences) and legible (a kick's a kick, after all) . It is no wonder then, that the genre has been paid particular attention by Western critics and audiences and has even been partly assimilated in the visual vocabulary of Hollywood mainstream movies, from The Matrix to Charlie's Angels. It is common fare, these days, to hire Hong Kong choreographers to bring some extra layers of kinetic sophistication lifted straight out of classic wu xia films for the sake of spicing up action sequences a bit, or more prosaically for the “cool” of it.

The question is: what does Korean cinema have to do with all this Wu Xia Pian stuff? Not much, at first sight. The genre, in opposition to the idea of a coherent, transnational “Asian cinema”, seems strictly Chinese. And it is not the recent production from the People's Republic that will contradict this apparent geographical restriction. Chinese cinema has indeed churned out an impressive series of big-budget costume epics in the wake of Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee, who breathed new life into a genre that Hong Kong seemed to have exhausted, with his record-breaking Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000). Zhang Yimou did not fail to notice the phenomenon, and proceeded to direct Hero (2002), The House of Flying Daggers (2004) and now Curse of the Golden Flower. He Ping's Warriors of Heaven and Earth (2003) followed, then Chen Kaige’s The Promise (2005), Stanley Tong’s The Myth (2005), Tsui Hark's Seven Swords (2005), Fen Xiaogang’s Banquet (2006), and Jacob Cheung’s Battle of Wits (2006). John Woo is not going to miss the train either (Battle of Red Cliff).

 

Korean actress Kim So-Yeon in Tsui Hark's Seven Swords

The list (non-exhaustive) clearly shows how China has reinvested and reappropriated the genre... with various fortunes: from the best (Hero, despite its odd political message, and the recent Banquet, despite the heavy-handed semi-philosophical dialogues) to the worst (the very disappointing Seven Swords). But what appears under closer scrutiny, simply by looking at the credited cast and crew, is that these Chinese productions are in fact, co-productions, projects that include thematically as well as physically, Korean (and Japanese) elements. Of course, this reflects the recent changes on the map of national film industries. Seoul has become a capital of world cinema, and has redrawn the frontiers of local industries by contributing to (and sometimes creating) joint film ventures. With these projects (The Promise, Seven Swords), a fantasy has become reality: Asian, or at least East Asian cinema has begun to exist, in the guise of wu xia pian, perhaps the first type of a transnational style. Whether the films are good is another matter entirely.

Wu Ji/The Promise, with Korean heartthrob Jang Dong-Gun,
Hong Kong actress Cecilia Cheung and Japanese actor Sanada Hiroyuki:
a "pan-Asian" disaster

If Korean actors and actresses have found a place in this typically Chinese genre, it is less because of their talents than because they are “hot” exports, and major commercial assets in China in particular. It is hard to deny the marketing appeal/impact brought by Jang Dong-Gun in The Promise (this guy always comes in handy: I have heard him speak Japanese, Thai, Mandarin, English. etc. in a variety of international productions), Kim So-Yeon in Seven Swords (in which Hong Kong actor Donnie Yen was playing a Korean character) or Kim Hee-Sun in The Myth, all of whom are young and attractive people whose hallyu-propelled popularities certainly came into play at the time of the casting. But Korea does not export its starpower unilaterally. Producers did not think twice about having Chinese Zhang Ziyi in a wu xia of their own, Musa.

The French poster of Musa, called La Princesse du Desert.
The emphasis is clearly put on the female lead, for obvious reasons.

Despite what the surge in big-budget epics would seem to suggest, the Korean film industry's relation with the wu xia genre does not date back to the post-2000 hallyu/pop entertainment boom, and the wu xia was not born with Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Based on an ages-old literary tradition of chivalry knight stories (among which the Ming Dynasty classical novel, The Water Margin, is probably one of the best examples), the first film of the genre, The Nameless Hero, was shot in the studios of Shanghai in 1926. The wu xia knew its golden age with the rise of the Shaw Brothers Studio productions and their star director, King Hu (Dragon Gate Inn, which was not actually produced by the Shaw Brothers, and Come Drink With Me, most notably) in the 1960's. That is when a young Korean filmmaker made his appearance in the British colony...

End of part one. Proceed to part two 

Come Drink With Me: an absolute classic.