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Rating: If someone had told me I would go, alone, to see a martial arts film, I would have declined the invitation as I am not interested in a genre predominantly based on all-out brawls and redundant acrobatics of a violent nature. I changed my mind, however, driven more by curiosity than by anything else, when I discovered it was a film directed by Zhang Yimou.
An excellent director, first and foremost, who after gifting world cinema with works of an almost impeccable poetics and structure (Raise the Red Lantern, The Road Home, The Story of Qiu Ju, Not One Less, etcetera with ellipses), ventures into a genre known under the term "Wuxiapian", our "Sword and Sorcery", which cannot help but arouse a hint of amazement to satisfy. The result is, as expected, special. Starting from the meticulousness of the details, an evergreen feature of the oriental filmmaker that becomes evident in the preparation of the scenes, so to speak, more serene. The choice of colors, predominantly fresh and skillfully mixed, capable of giving the scenes, even the action ones, an appealing lightness, almost unusual.
The elegance and mathematical grace that pervade the sequences, shot mostly against a backdrop equipped with landscapes between the fairytale-like, the romantic, and the epic, are astutely and masterfully constructed. It cannot be denied that some scenes brush on implausibility (take the knife that divides the blood drop or the beans that slide between the eardrums) and yet can very well be concealed by the poetic, fabulous, and at some points metaphorical structure present throughout the entire work. The story is based on the dissolution of a dynasty, attacked by various sects of rebels, whose most eminent figure is in the title of this fascinating glimpse of the East. Two knights of the dynasty, skilled in combat and the use of weapons, infiltrate a luxury brothel to discover important elements of the organization de quo. A mainly blind dancer, played by a highly skilled Zhang Ziyi, far from the romantic role in "The Road Home," will become the object of desire of both guards who, between extraordinary battles and unexpected twists, will discover painful plots.
The camera seems to fly through the versatile hands of Yimou who, among acrobatic convergences and situations even on the edge of credibility, delivers some textbook sequences. Mention should be made of the execution of the "dancing echo step," where the aforementioned Ziyi, accompanied by percussion of irresistible mechanical precision, performs a sensational dance, and the battles in the bamboo forest and in the poplar (?) forest, which take on the precision of perfectly aligned natural walls. Yimou's refined technique, which undoubtedly makes the difference, is that of structuring the action scenes and, so to speak, of violence as if they were elegant choreographies, which paradoxically are devoid of any explosive charge, necessarily weighed down by the colors and used in elaborations of the genre.
Overall it is an essential film, refined, very well constructed and why not, with those implausible incursions that do not detract at all.
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