Hong Kong auteur Kar Wai Wong helmed this highbrow costume drama, which is packed with moving performances, stirring music and hypnotic images. Shot in Mainland China, the complex tale follows a group of itinerant swordsman-for-hire, all with bittersweet tales to convey about virtue lost and love shattered. The director lowers the volume on the action segments in favor of crafting a captivating and introspective character study.
The film's imagery is its most striking asset, creating an impressionistic sense of both vastness and intimacy that frequently overwhelms the characters and their problems.
Leave it to Wong Kar Wai to take a straightforward martial arts tale and weave its characters into one of his movies about soul-searching, love, isolation, and longing.
Through the poetic prose of the dialogue, the gorgeous photography, and the pitch-perfect performances, the abstract ideas become tangible and concrete.
One of those rare movies that can be enjoyed strictly for style and atmosphere, it is difficult, demanding, maddening, beautiful, astonishing, surreal -- and a masterpiece.
This controversial art-house swashbuckler is fine, peopled with characters from the classic Louis Cha novel The Eagle Shooting Heroes despite a cast that includes eight of the biggest stars of the Hong Kong cinema.
April 29, 2007
Dean McKenna
Super Reviewer
It's like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - on acid.
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