November 14, 2013
Fight and Love With a
Terracotta Warrior – Hong Kong, 1990
In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, few film collaborations
were more respected and more highly anticipated among patrons of art house
cinema than those of director Yimou Zhang and actress Li Gong. Their pairings
began with 1987’s groundbreaking film Red
Sorghum and ended with Shanghai Triad
in 1995, the year in which their personal relationship reached its unfortunate conclusion
as well. Six of their collaborations are fairly well-known, for they found
audiences both inside and outside their home country. However, for every
genre-breaking film they made about the plight of women in both modern and
ancient China, there are at least two or three movies featuring Li Gong that
did not play at film festivals or art house cinemas worldwide. These films run
the gambit from supernatural thrillers (Semi-Gods
and Semi-Demons) to period comedies (Flirting
Scholar), and from contemporary dramas (Mary
From Beijing) to historical films (The
Great Conqueror’s Concubine). Some of these films did not receive positive
world of mouth, and I imagine that others were deemed inaccessible to
non-Chinese audiences. In fact, I can imagine a studio executive looking at
Gong’s 1990 film, Fight and Love with a
Terracotta Warrior (a.k.a. A Terra-Cotta
Warrior) and being at a complete loss as for a way to market it.
Fight and Love with a
Terracotta Warrior, which stars, but was not directed by Yimou Zhang, is a
bit of a head-scratcher. For the first fifty minutes, it is a straightforward
drama about a good man named Tian Fong Mong (Zhang) who is loyal to China’s
utterly ruthless first emperor. The film takes an interesting turn when Mong
meets and falls for Winter, one of the emperor’s concubines. She is played by Li
Gong. Through a plot device that works surprisingly well, the second half of
the film transports viewers from B.C.E. China to 1930’s China. Here we meet a
young actress named Lily, again played by Li Gong, whose life is soon
endangered by her association with a group of relic hunters disguised as a film
crew and looking for the Emperor’s mausoleum. It is of course Mong’s job to
stop them.
Li’s two characters are like night and day. Winter is
depressed by what life has reduced her to, suppressed by rules and traditions,
and suicidal. Lily, on the other hand, is bubbly, energetic, materialistic, and
slightly egocentric. She speaks in a high-pitched voice that seems designed to
make her sound simultaneously more appealing, yet also less intelligent. I
suspect that Winter is the kind of character audiences expect to see Li Gong
play on the silver screen. However, as I watched the film, I got the sense that
she was having much more fun playing Lily.
The film was released at a time in which the subject of the
first emperor was of renewed interest in China. The Mausoleum of the First Qin
Emperor had been designated a World Heritage Site just two years earlier, and
films would continue to question whether the first emperor, credited with unifying
China, yet using extremely draconian methods to do so, was a figure that should
be praised or loathed. This cinematic exploration can be seen in 1996’s The Emperor’s Shadow, Kai-ge Chen’s The Emperor and the Assassin (1998), and
Yimou Zhang’s 2002 film Hero. Fight and Love with a Terracotta Warrior
begins like many of these films, and thus it lulls viewers into a false sense
of confidence, for the film is not about Mong’s inner struggle between his
loyalty to the emperor and his disgust and shock over the emperor’s brutality.
Instead, the film is about his loyalty to both a place and a woman he swore to
protect.
The film will remind some of Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk till Dawn, yet the narrative
thread in Fight and Love with a
Terracotta Warrior is much stronger and more consistent. The film also owes
a lot to the conventions of mummy films, movies in which tombs are places with booby-trap,
and long-dead figures can magically come to life. Its soundtrack reflects the tonal shift of its
two halves, expressing the seriousness and tragedy of Mong and Lily’s forbidden
love and the slapstick, comic nature of certain aspects of the film’s second
half. In addition, its dialogue reflects the changes that take place concerning
our perceptions of historical figures. In one scene, Mong rattles off the names
of people who were important during his time, yet Lily does not recognize any
of them. She then mentions the only name she can recall, that of a general who
tried to assassinate the emperor. It says something that he is now regarded as
a hero.
Sadly, like many films from Hong Kong and China, Fight and Love with a Terracotta Warrior
has not been preserved well. The only available DVD is clearly not a remastered
version, and heavy distortion can be seen throughout the film. In addition, the
film’s white subtitles are often too small and dark to be read clearly, and
they occasionally change so quickly that even a speed reader would have trouble
keeping up with them. There are even a few moments in which subtitles appear on
the screen despite the fact that the actors are not speaking. It is as if the subtitles
were made using an early version of the script and someone didn’t notice that
these lines had not made the final product. However, at least the translations
are accurate grammatically.
Fight and Love with a
Terracotta Warrior is a dramatic, silly film that works better than it
probably should. Credit for this goes to the film’s cast; its director,
Siu-Tung Ching; and its writer, Pik Wah Lee, all of whom take the film’s
subject matter very seriously and work their best at making it seem as
realistic as humanly possible. Gong Li shows an array of acting range, and
Yimou Zhang demonstrates that he could easily have had a successful career in
front of the camera. The film will never be confused as one of their seminal
collaborations, but it is both fun and heartfelt. It is a must for fans of
Zhang and Gong and, I suspect, a decent piece of mindless entertainment for
other people. (on DVD)
3 and a half stars
*Fight and Love with a
Terracotta Warrior is in Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles.
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