the new york times, January 2, 2003

Film on Ruthless Dynasty Delights China's Leaders
[image] A scene from "Hero," in which the director Zhang Yimou shows a
pragmatic side by taking a sympathetic view of Emperor Qin.

By JOSEPH KAHN

SHANGHAI, Jan. 1 — Qin Shihuang's fearsome exercise of power 2,200 years ago
has been compared to the actions of Napoleon and Stalin, and his bloody
legacy remains a raw wound in today's China.

The Qin emperor was a military adventurer who unified the country for the
first time by subsuming six warring states and began to build the Great
Wall. Ruthless, he imposed absolute order by executing those suspected of
disloyalty. Modern artists approach the subject with caution, in part
because Mao Zedong saw the founding emperor as an inspiration and the
Communist Party still views the ancient leader as a pointed allegory.

So when Zhang Yimou, China's best-known and arguably most talented director,
chose the Qin court as the setting for his big-budget martial arts epic
"Hero," expectations were high. The director of "Raise the Red Lantern" and
"To Live," Mr. Zhang has often explored the emotional whiplash inflicted on
common people by China's tumultuous history. He has also infuriated the
Beijing government and found himself blacklisted, while delighting many
critics.

But "Hero," despite its complicated subject, has delighted Beijing's
mandarins, who are submitting it as China's nominee for best foreign film at
the Academy Awards. And it has infuriated some Chinese critics, who have
panned Mr. Zhang's plot for promoting a philosophy of servitude.

"'Hero' does not have the courage to present the massacres Qin Shihuang
ordered in the name of peace under heaven," said Tou Jiangming, writing in
The Sat-China Weekly. "The history so often questioned by modern thinkers is
ignored by Zhang Yimou."

Or as a critic using the pen name Bu Tong put it in The Beijing Youth Daily:
"Zhang Yimou's movie has a deep servility inside. He tried to understand
what the world looks like from the ruler's standpoint."

This is a little like Fellini suddenly promoting Victorian values. Most of
Mr. Zhang's earthy films view the world through the powerless, people stuck
in anonymous villages who rely only on inner dignity and intense passions to
guide them through a world that takes them for granted.

"Hero" is something new. Mr. Zhang, 51, set out to prove that he could make
a Hollywood-style blockbuster that appealed to both Chinese and foreign
audiences, while retaining his artistic touch. He may have succeeded.

But he did something else new as well, whether because he needed government
support to produce a film of unprecedented cost and scale for China or
because he wanted the police to do more to help him fight rampant piracy: he
made a movie that those in China's propaganda apparatus are thrilled to
promote. After its premiere in mid-December in the Great Hall of the People,
the deputy director of the state film bureau, Zhang Pimu (who is no relation
to the director), called it "artistic, entertaining and thoughtful."

The $31 million production has an all-star cast of Jet Li, Tony Leung,
Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi. It has aerial martial arts choreography like
that in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," the runaway success directed by
Ang Lee. Miramax backed "Hero" and will release it in the United States
early in 2003.

Like Mr. Zhang's early films, "Hero" is lyrical. From the lakes of
Jiuzhaigou to the forests of Inner Mongolia, Mr. Zhang mixes spectacular
natural scenery with his own cinematic vision, producing a colorful slide
show of fine art.

The moment of truth in the story, written by Mr. Zhang and two others, comes
when Jet Li, playing a nameless assassin, makes a gravity-defying assault on
the king of Qin. (The king has not finished subsuming all rival states and
creating the Qin empire.) The assassin decides, with a split second to
spare, that his highest calling is to abandon his personal quest and let the
king unify China. The written Chinese characters "Tian Xia," all under
heaven, are the movie's coda.

The king of Qin appears as a misunderstood leader who dispatches his
black-armored cavalry to slaughter his neighbors but suffers quiet agony at
the pain he must inflict for the common good.

Mr. Zhang's king even sheds a tear for his converted assassin when, with a
flick of his wrist, the king orders his execution.

The historical Emperor Qin left little evidence of his compassion. He
replaced feudalism with a merciless monarchy. He killed Confucian scholars
and burned their books.

The emperor's ruthlessness left him few admirers until Mao. "Please don't
slander Emperor Qin Shihuang, sir," Mao wrote in a 1973 poem. The Communist
leader praised the emperor for suppressing Confucian orthodoxy, which Mao
despised for its intricate morals.

Today, Qin's rule is not a forbidden subject. But it remains sensitive,
particularly after Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou's peer, covered the same
historical ground as "Hero" in his 1998 film, "The Emperor and the
Assassin."

Mr. Chen portrayed the emperor as a Shakespearean tyrant whose brutality
covers inner shame. The opening scene is of Qin soldiers exterminating a
family. To disguise his bastard birth, the emperor does away with his
father.

Though the censors allowed it, Mr. Chen was roundly criticized for
neglecting the emperor's full record — his unification of the nation and the
building of the Great Wall.

Mr. Zhang has offered varying explanations as to why he took a more
sympathetic view. In interviews surrounding the national release of the
film, Mr. Zhang initially disavowed any ideology. "The only test of a film's
success, especially a martial arts film, is whether it can keep the
audience's attention for 90 minutes, not its metaphysics," he said.

But he also explained that he aimed to break the mold of martial arts
movies. Too often, he said, they center on the hero avenging a master's
death. He wanted his hero to have transcending values. "I wanted to write
about people with warm blood," Mr. Zhang said. "People who have faith and
ideals."

So what are these ideals? Mr. Zhang quoted a well-known phrase attributed to
a Song Dynasty official named Fan Zhongyan: "One should be the first to
worry for the future of the state and the last to claim his share of
happiness."

Mr. Zhang has not commented on the movie's metaphor for modern politics. But
Tony Leung, the Hong Kong actor who plays a peace-loving warrior in the
film, made the connection. In an interview with B International, a Hong
Kong-based magazine, Mr. Leung said he applauded the message of "peace and
human kindness" in "Hero," then reflected on the Beijing government's
suppression of a democracy movement 13 years ago.

"During the June 4 incident, I didn't join any demonstrations, because what
the Chinese government did was right — to maintain stability, which was good
for everybody," he was quoted as saying.

Mr. Leung later said that his comments had been taken out of context and
that he was speaking from the perspective of his character in the film. "My
interest is in making movies, not politics," he said.

Mr. Zhang has never been a dissident. But until recently he seemed to enjoy
flirting with the limits of China's artistic tolerance. "Red Sorghum,"
"Raise the Red Lantern" and "Ju Dou" were all set in the pre-Communist era.
They were all banned domestically after they were made, though all have
since been released. Censors objected, most likely, because they portrayed
China as violent, backward and capricious and suggested that the condition
was not merely a byproduct of its pre-Communist politics.

In "To Live," Mr. Zhang extended the theme to Maoist China. The 1994 epic,
which won the Cannes Palme d'Or award, is the tale of a couple tumbling
through successive historical calamities of China's civil war, the Great
Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. It has never been legally shown
here.

But over the past eight years, as China's economy became more prosperous,
Mr. Zhang's films became less provocative. In "Not One Less," which he
directed in 1998, a young village schoolteacher goes to great lengths to
retrieve a student who ventures into the big city to find work. The
teacher's success depends on a soft-hearted official who runs a television
station and takes a Rockwellian shine to the peasant girl.

Recently Mr. Zhang has also accepted some official duties. He directed
movies to promote China's bid to be host of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and
its entry to stage the 2010 World Exposition in Shanghai.

He said in a recent newspaper interview that he no longer cares what the
critics say because he gets attacked no matter what he does.

"Only one film I've done in my life has not been attacked," he said of his
promotional movie for the Olympics competition. "And that's only because
Beijing won."

(http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/02/arts/02ARTS.html?pagewanted=1&tntemail0)

 

____________________

Matthias Arnold M.A.
Digital Resources
Institute of Chinese Studies
University of Heidelberg
Akademiestr. 4-8
69117 Heidelberg
Germany

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