Bride With White Hair, The (1993)

Posted on Feb 13, 2002 under Fantasy, Martial arts |

Directed by Ronny Yu
Written by David Wu and Ronny Yu
Starring
- Brigitte Lin
- Leslie Cheung
- Francis Ng
- Kit Ling Lam Elaine Lui

I recently read of some film professor who was delineating the differences between the narrative media. Despite the popular identification, movies are not really similar to novels, he said; probably the single other media most like film is poetry.

He didn’t provide any examples, but I can: The Bride With White Hair. The first word that came to mind when trying to describe it was “lyrical.” The entire enterprise is focused on evocative tableaus, rich and filling visuals, strong and true emotion, and a devotion to atmosphere that knows few peers.

“I am ready to rock, Master.”

Sure, the plot’s stretched a little thin — but what were you expecting, a novel?

Our story proper is actually a flashback, told ten years after the fact by ex-Wu Tang fighter Zhuo Yi-Hang (Leslie Cheung, looking like he just came off a three-day bender), now a hermit atop a mounting, guarding a fabled flower which is said to bloom only once every twenty years, and to give eternal youth to whoever eats it. He even kills three emissaries from the ailing emperor. Why is he so steadfastly guarding this flower? Cue the harp runs and the wavy picture dissolve…

Way back, Yi-Hang was a well-trained but somewhat irreverent youth of the Wu Tang clan. Though loved by the Clan Master (Fong Pao), he was one the hit list of the Second-in-Command Pai Yun (Lok Lam Law), largely because Yi-Hang was favored to be the Master’s successor, and Pai Yun wanted his own daughter Lu Hua to have a chance at that position (even though tradition forbade it).

“Pack it up, we’re moving the show to Vegas!”E

Also notable in his youth, Yi-Fang once stole a goat and in his escape was pursued by wolves — but was rescued by a young girl on a hillside, who played a pipe that the wolves mysteriously obeyed.

Fast-forward to adulthood (i.e., ten years before the prologue). Yi-Fang is in his prime as both a fighter and a rabble-rouser, and he already looks like he’s suffering from a heavy hangover. He’s got a well-developed sense of justice, though, and a semi-disrespect for authority that still has him on Pai Yun’s bad side. He’s also got a love-hate thing going with Lu Hua (Kit Ying Lam).

Meanwhile, some poor people have managed to get ahold of some Imperial provisions, and are in the process of satisfying their hunger, when the Emperor’s troops move in and start carving them up. Who can save them? How about Wolf Girl (Brigitte Lin), a wire-assisted kung fu fighter with a whip that can cut a man in half. She makes short and brutal work of the attacking soldiers, and then she accidentally meets Yi-Hang, who is helping a refugee husband deliver his wife’s baby. There’s that [ooh! ooh!] electric spark between them — so much so that Yi-Hang surreptitiously follows Wolf Girl back to her cave lair and watches her bathe — and she doesn’t kill him when she catches him. It must be love.

Cutest damned feral child I ever did see.

But the course of true love (even true kung fu love) can’t possibly run smooth, because it turns out that Wolf Girl is a trained assassin for the Ji Wushuang, an upstart clan dedicated to challenging the standard Eight Clans (including the Wu Tang) — and led by a male and female twins (Francis Ng and Elaine Lui) conjoined at the back! (That’s like they put a big sticker on the video and said, “Nathan, you need to watch this!”) The twins are super-duper fighters with magical abilities, and the male one has the extreme hots for Wolf Girl. (The female one just likes making snarky remarks.)

Ah, star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of the tracks.

To make matters worse, Yi-Hang is chosen reluctantly as the leader of the Wu Tang troops for the coming conflict — which means that when the Ji Wushuang sneak attacks, he’s out there kicking ass until he confronts Wolf Girl. After some aerial hijinx, he finally drops his sword, unwilling to fight her — and then Wolf Girl takes a poisoned dart to the back from Lu Hua.

Yi-Hang gets her back to her lair, and what follows is the sensuous “poison-sucking” scene, followed by more general, ah, physical activity. Yi-Hang is tired of the constant warfare and position-jockeying; Wolf Girl is tired of being under the thumb of the Ji Wushuang. Maybe they should just run off together. Just as soon as they discharge their responsibilities…

**Um, the poison wound was on the other shoulder, Romeo.**

Yi-Hang makes a vow to always trust Wolf Girl, which just had me cringing, because whenever someone says something like that — every damned time — you know that they’re just setting themselves up for the trickeries of Fate. Because what happens? Wolf Girl goes through hell to get out of the Ji Wushuang and be free to love Yi-Hang, but she gets set up to take the blame for an almost-complete massacre of the Wu Tang (which the survivors also blame on Yi-Hang for trusting that damned Wolf Girl).

So much about this movie is worthy of praise. Set and costume design purposely turned away from the normal course of shooting on-location in mainland China, and instead used gothicized sets to build a visual identity that supports the larger-than-life characters. The emotional core of the movie — the tension between love and trust — is a mix of the conflicts at centers of Romeo & Juliet and Othello (not the plots, just the emotional conflict). Impressive visual tableaus are so consistently breathtaking (an early scene of young Yi-Hang training takes place entirely in silhouette against an orange sunset sky) that the hyperbolic wirework and magic seem to be in their natural setting.

Yes, there are flaws. Thanks to the concentration on scene-level lyricism and elaborately-staged tableaus, the linear quality of the plot is compromised; it seems a strangely short plot to fill a ninety-minute movie, and loses some momentum by being pretty.

“I told you to pick up more Clairol!”

But if that’s the worst criticism, then it’s still ahead of most movies. There is much to enjoy here, and it needs to be enjoyed as it is presented sumptuously to your eyes, without the “Hey, wait –” impulse.

Deserving of praise. See it.