Kelly WandThe Assassin
September 16th 2006 01:53
A bunch of Shaw Brothers flicks have slunk out on DVD. By modern standards, I guess they are kind of crude. Any of you guys who have grown up in a world where there has always been a Playstation will be bored by everything besides the gory grand finales. Which is a shame. There is a tremendous amount of beauty hidden in the convoluted plotting and frantic dialogue. Sometimes it takes a couple of viewings to see it because you spend the first run through desperately reading subtitles. Sometimes, the dubbed track (when provided) is actually preferable simply because there is too much text to read. It tends to depend on how faithfully the text follows the original. I have seen some Asian films where the dubbed track bears no relation to the original text at all. It seems like someone is making it up as they go along. (See Hong Kong Legends recent release of Mr Vampire where all the mysticism is changed to yuppie property development psycho babble.)
I could have picked any of these Siren/Celestial Pictures re-releases to review. The Heroic Ones. The Master. The Magic Blade. They are all pretty fantastic. Instead, I have just found a second hand copy of the Assassin and, since I have never seen it before, it seemed a good place to start. Director Chang Cheh is famous for his bloodshed and action. His heroes wear white to show up the red. They are men with ideals who want to live fast and die young. Their obsession with men who prefer the company of men doing masculine things may suggest something else to some viewers; particularly when you see how much make-up the boys all seem to be wearing!
Jimmy Wang Yu (star of The One-Armed Swordsman) sees the sword play school he studies at betrayed and destroyed. He is a working class boy who tells his girlfriend his dreams of glory. Instead, he is forced to become a lowly butcher. He tells his beloved that he doesn’t want to become like her father, a drunken burden too old to continue to work his trade. His girlfriend tells him he thinks too much. She’d rather live poor and snog the bugger. For our hero, Existential angst is strangely preferable to an extended game of tonsil hockey.
Finally he accepts the task of assassinating the Han premier but first takes a couple of days off to make a dishonest woman of his beloved. “In these three days we have known more happiness than others do in a decade” he proclaims as he heads out the door.
It’s all desperately romantic in a weird and fucked up kind of a way. It’s a Chang Cheh film so you know that it is going to end badly for our Jimmy but you know it is going to be spectacularly heroic and poetic. Oh, you didn’t know that? Ah, well. I’ve given the game away again.
Never the less, why don’t you give one of these films a go next time you go a renting? There is so much dreary shit that’s hitting our screens at the moment that you owe it to yourself to search out something different.
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