E-Mail This Article to a Friend Full House Zhang Yimou plays Daggers to the hilt BY PETER KEOUGH
	House of Flying Daggers Directed by Zhang Yimou. Written by Zhang Yimou, Li Feng, and Wang Bin. With Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau Tak Wah, Zhang Ziyi, and Song Dandan. In Mandarin with English subtitles. A Sony Classics release (119 minutes). At the Boston Common, the Fenway, the Kendall Square, and the Circle/Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.

So you think Ang Lee knows bamboo? After the astounding duel in the bamboo grove in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it would seem no one could surpass Lee in this set piece of Hong Kong martial-arts films. But Zhang Yimou really knows bamboo. His bamboo-grove battle, one of many spectacular climaxes in his masterpiece House of Flying Daggers, transcends the genre. It’s a glorious ballet of flying, slithering and twisting bodies, of rapturous color and rigorous, if impossible physics.

Such a tour de force seems obligatory for Zhang following the bravura of his less-than-satisfying Hero. Unlike that picture, however, his latest is as brilliant in its conception and its cohesion as it is in its production numbers, and more convincing in its emotional power. Integrating color, image, rhythms, set design, character, plot, and music into a symphonic whole, he has made his epic statement on the themes of individuality, responsibility, love, freedom, and fate. In short, life and art as he knows it.

In many ways, 10th-century China feels a lot like our own time. A corrupt central empire struggles to maintain its tyrannical grip. Fanatical factions respond with terror and assassinations. One such group is the House of Flying Daggers. The Tang Empire recently killed its leader, but there’s no time for complacency. Leo (Andy Lau Tak Wah), captain of a local squadron of deputies, tells his subordinate Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro), the mediæval Chinese equivalent of James Bond, that an unknown new leader has arisen, perhaps even more formidable. Jin must go undercover to seek him, or her, out.

Their lead is Mei (Zhang Ziyi, who as Zhang’s new muse succeeding Gong Li seems to have inspired him to a new level of achievement), the blind dancehall girl who’s new at the Peony Pavilion. You almost expect swinging saloon doors, and the film does take on the quality of a deranged Western at this point, perhaps one directed by Josef von Sternberg; it’s just one of the generic mutations House of Flying Daggers will undergo along the way. Jin doesn’t have to stretch too far to impersonate a drunken playboy, and his immodest advances on Mei provide Leo with the excuse to nab her. Leo tests her credentials as a dancer by insisting she play "the echo game," a Busby Berkley–like extravaganza involving pebbles and drums and a mile-long scarf that made me laugh out loud at its sheer audacity and perfection. Together with the baroque sets and costumes, which are as multi-hued and glowing as a stained-glass window, it’s overripe beauty that seems impossible to endure or sustain.

And so it proves. The function of color in this film is more subtle and rigorous than the color coding that Yimou use in the Chinese-box structure of Hero. As Jin, who describes himself as being "as free as the wind," progressively limits his choices and defines his identity in the course of acting on his loyalties and his desires, the film’s palette diminishes, until in the end the white of a universal snowfall prevails, and an image out of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

Until then, the play of colors and conflicts and the choreography of bodies, weapons, and robes dazzle and exhilarate. The convoluted plot, more coherent than that of Hero but equally cryptic, seems Borges-like in its labyrinth of deception and revelation. As the secret agent, Jin appears to have the upper hand in knowing what’s what, with poor Mei the unwitting patsy, and with his matinee-good looks and raffish, confident smile, he’s easy to identify with and accept as a guide. But when he proves to be in the dark and must question his preconceptions and values, we do also. Unsure which side to sympathize with, ignorant of the source of each deadly, superbly orchestrated ambush or uncannily accurate missile, we’re dazed by the deadly, kaleidoscopic shenanigans and eager for more.

The final resolution might be a little disappointing in terms of its mystery, but as an emotional and even spiritual experience, the film lingers, gleeful and melancholy. It’s the same melancholy that underlies Crouching Tiger and Hero, the same indifferent embrace of experience and resignation to fate. The victor in the bamboo duel is unimportant; the beauty is all, and that too must fade to white.