An influential martial arts film and an acknowledged influence on Ang Lee's amazing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, King Hu's A Touch of Zen opens with young scholar Ku Shen-chai working at his portraiture stand in a small frontier town. He lives with his nagging mother in a supposedly haunted, rundown house at the edge of the abandoned Ching Liu estate. One day, a stranger named Ou-Yang Yin asks for his picture to be painted, and then suddenly leaves. Soon, another stranger -- this time a beautiful woman named Yang Hui-Ching -- suddenly moves into the complex next door. The presence of these strangers has an increasingly unnerving effect on Ku, and he rightfully comes to believe that the entire town is involved in some bizarre political intrigue. After a night of passion between Ku and Yang, Ou-Yang Yin stages a surprise attack on the compound, which Yang surprisingly thwarts with dazzling aplomb. Yang reveals to him that her father was an honorable general executed due to the nefarious doings of the powerful Eunuch Wei. With the aid of General Shih and Lu (who pose as the town's blind beggar and herb vendor respectively), Yang was spirited away first to a monastery where she learned martial arts and then to Ku's remote corner of China. Ou-Yang Yin, Eunuch Wei's henchman, has in turn vowed to pursue her to the ends of the earth. As Ou-Yang Yin rallies Wei's army to the walled estate, Ku -- having spent a lifetime researching military history -- devises a brilliant strategy to crush the siege and win the heart of this most unusual woman. Though his plan works, he fails to win the loyalty of Yang; she flees into the night as Ku slept. After searching desperately, Ku finds her in the same monastery where she learned kung-fu. Now a Buddhist nun, she hands over their child to him and sends him packing. Realizing that Ku is in danger, Yang and her mentor -- a saintly abbot -- then set out to protect him. Suddenly out of nowhere, Hsu Hsien-Chen -- the profoundly evil army commander of Eunuch Wei -- confronts the abbot and an all-out battle between good and evil ensues. Screened at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival and winning a technical prize, this was the first Chinese language film ever to win a major western film festival award. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Review
One of the finest Chinese-language films ever produced, King Hu's sprawling epic is at once the apogee of the Hong Kong marital arts films and a meditation on human nature. Structured in a manner more akin to Chinese opera than to the Aristotelian three-act structure, Hu's plot line doesn't unfold so much as it evolves. Hu envisioned the narrative progress under a trifurcated thematic rubric based around human consciousness -- the first part being superstition, the second politics, and the third religion. The first two-thirds of the film establishes A Touch of Zen as a masterful genre picture. This film provides some of the best, most inventive, action scenes committed to film. At one point, Yang races up a bamboo grove and then lunges at her enemy from above. Though Hu used few special effects other than hidden trampolines and deft editing, the scene is both thrilling and thoroughly believable. Yet A Touch of Zen's last third is where King Hu shows his true ambitions and where the film rises above genre. Erstwhile main characters Yang and Ku all but recede completely from this section of the picture, giving way to an apocalyptic clash between two supernatural forces. Not only is this sequence breathtaking, but Hu manages to give it an appropriate Miltonian heft without seeming cheesy. The final 20 minutes of the film depart from the material world completely into hardcore metaphysics as the head abbot gains enlightenment, resulting in one of the trippiest endings since 2001. A brilliant montage of the tortured souls, the film's denouement veers into the realm of experimental film. Though little known in the States, A Touch of Zen is one of the handful of films that can be described as an unqualified masterpiece. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Cast
Hsu Feng - Yang
Pai Ying - Shih
Tien Peng - Ou-Yang
Roy Chiao
Credit
King Hu - Director, King Hu - Editor, King Hu - Screenwriter, P'Ou Song-Ling - Book Author
Although filming began in 1969, A Touch of Zen wasn't completed until 1971[1] and has a running time of over three hours, making it an unusually epic entry in the wuxia genre.
The story is largely seen through the eyes of Ku (played by Shih Jun) who is a well meaning but unambitious scholar and painter, with a tendency towards being clumsy and ineffectual. A stranger arrives in town wanting his portrait painted by Ku, but his real objective is to bring a female fugitive back to the city for execution on behalf of the East Chamber guards. The fugitive, Yang (played by Hsu Feng), is befriended by Ku and together they plot against the corrupt Eunuch Wei who wants to eradicate all trace of her family after her father attempts to warn the king of the eunuch's corruption.
One of the unique aspects of the film is that Ku is a non-combatant all the way through the film and only becomes involved when he sleeps with Yang. Upon doing so, he is no longer the naïve bumbling innocent, but instead becomes confident and assertive, and when Yang’s plight is revealed, he insists on being part of it – and even comes up with a fiendish "Ghost Trap" for the East Chamber guards. This is plan to use a supposedly haunted site to play tricks on the guards to make believe they are prey to the undead. In the aftermath, Ku walks through the carnage laughing at the ingenuity of his plan until the true cost of human life dawns on him.
After the battle, Ku is unable to find Yang, whom he is told has left him and does not want him to follow her. He tracks her down to the monastery of the saintly and powerful Abbot Hui Yuan (Roy Chiao), where she has given birth to a child by Ku and become a nun. She tells Ku that their destiny together has ended and gives Ku their child. Later, when Ku and the child are tracked down by the Hsu Hsien-Chen (Han Yin-Chieh), the evil commander of Eunuch Wei's army, Yang and Abbot Hui come to Ku's rescue. In the ensuing battles, Hsu is killed and Yang and Abbot Hui are badly injured (the latter bleeding golden blood). The film famously ends with the injured Yang staggering towards a silhouetted figure, presumably Abbot Hui, seen meditating with the setting sun forming a halo around his head, an image suggesting the Buddha and enlightenment.
The film has been hailed for its cinematography, editing, and special effects, as well as its unusually thoughtful approach to the genre, with its strong thematic focus on Buddhism. The film makes strong use of symbolism throughout and is famous for its "abstract," open-ended finale. The motif of spiderwebs is often used to symbolize the tangled and sinister nature of the East Chamber and the evil Eunuch and the manipulative nature of Yang. Elsewhere, the film employs a dark, moody tone which enhances the sense of fantasy. Images of nature, the sun, and the use of lens flares are associated throughout with Buddhism and Abbot Hui's convent. The final battles between Hsu and Hui, which involve a number of mystical events, have been interpreted as a battle between Good and Evil or as a parable about Buddhist religious virtues, the evils of worldliness, and enlightenment.
