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Conspiracy theories
Zhang Yimou’s Hero
BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
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Everything in Zhang Yimou’s Hero takes place between, and around, two figures: a powerful king (Chen Daoming) and a swordsman, known only as Nameless (Jet Li), who seeks to assassinate him. Nameless comes to the king’s palace under the pretext of having eliminated the king’s three most dangerous enemies, the protagonists of earlier assassination attempts: Sky (Donnie Yen), Broken Sword (Tony Leung), and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung). Disbelieving Nameless’s first version of events, the king probes deeper, and through a process that resembles the elaboration of a conspiracy theory, something like a truth emerges. I hope it’s not giving away too much about the outcome of Hero to note what every Chinese viewer knows from the start: that the king in the film will go on to unify China in 221 BC, will name himself the first emperor, and will build the Great Wall. He will also standardize the written Chinese language — a feat anticipated in a dialogue between Nameless and the king. Broken Sword, who is not only a master swordsman but also a great calligrapher, knows 20 ways to write "sword," Nameless says, whereupon the king, finding here a needless profusion, declares that he’ll mandate a single form of writing. Yet in what may be taken for one of the film’s ironies, it’s through contemplating and deciphering the 20th and most obscure character for "sword" that the king will prove he’s no tyrant but a sage worthy of rule. The Great Wall doesn’t appear in Hero; it may be the film’s structuring absence. Built to keep out invaders from the north, as a title at the end of the film reminds us, the Wall is the ultimate defensive strategy, its construction the ultimate paranoid gesture. Is Hero a critique of paranoia, or does it participate in a paranoid world view? The question can hardly be discussed within the scope of a newspaper review, which is, after all, bound not to reveal too many late-film plot turns. What I can say is that though Hero has been widely criticized in China as an apology for authoritarianism, Zhang has managed, I think, to make a film about power without succumbing to power. The key to this success is his treatment of power as a game. The rules of the game are established early: no one may come closer to the king than 100 paces, but having killed one of the king’s enemies, Nameless may advance to 20 paces away, and having killed two, he may advance to 10. As these rules indicate, the confrontation between Nameless and the king is plotted entirely in terms of space. The element of time is discounted. And so it goes for the rest of the film’s action (most of it narrated in flashback). The two "battles in their minds" that Zhang shows — between Nameless and Sky in a chess pavilion and between Nameless and Broken Sword over a mirror lake — are fantasias in which time is non-existent. Nameless charging at Sky, his airborne body disrupting the pattern of raindrops hanging in the air, is one example — an extreme — of Zhang’s efforts throughout the film to neutralize time. By structuring the narrative as a series of alternate versions of events, the director highlights the optional, unreal nature of time, proposing an equivalence among the infinity of paths by which Nameless might have reached the king. The prodigious visual work of Hero — whose production design, costumes, and cinematography (by Christopher Doyle), splendid as they are, are rendered almost irrelevant by the layers of digital special effects applied over them — helps evacuate time from the film, stylizing the narrative as a game. The much-noted "beauty" of Hero — a little repellent because it’s so nakedly intended to stun the viewer — has no justification other than to decorate a space of fantasy, to commemorate a disappearance. But Zhang’s calligraphy of the body is primary: Broken Sword’s long hair rhyming with his brush filled with red ink (in shots intercut with the elaborate dance of Flying Snow and Nameless as they repel the arrows of the king’s archers); Flying Snow swirling as she dies. As the king concludes: "Swordsmanship’s ultimate achievement is the absence of the sword" — an absence that, at the end of the film, we see inscribed, literally, on the palace gates.
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