"House of Flying Daggers"

The director of "Hero" comes out with a follow-up so heroically seductive you may just faint into its arms.

Editor's note: We originally reviewed "House of Flying Daggers," which opens Friday, when it played in the New York Film Festival.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Oct. 7, 2004 | When Ziyi Zhang glides into her first scene in Zhang Yimou's optically and operatically intense Tang Dynasty romance "House of Flying Daggers" -- in her rustling brocade robe and breezily tinkling golden headdress, she doesn't do anything so mortal as walk -- the movie stops, momentarily, almost before it has really begun.

Ziyi Zhang's character is Mei, a blind warrior girl masqerading as a dancer in a brothel. She's about to perform for Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a local deputy who has come, undercover, to arrest her. Jin, lounging against a floor cushion like a bored frat boy, beckons Mei closer so he can scrutinize her, as well as intimidate her. He asks why her name is so simple, when all the other ladies in the establishment go by elaborate flower names. Mei fixes him in her sightless gaze -- her face is a bisque oval whose very contours suggest the unmappable shape of intelligence -- and tells him, neither haughtily nor modestly but in a tone that confirms the absurdity of the question, "I don't want to compete with those ordinary girls."

With that line, Ziyi Zhang throws down the challenge that "House of Flying Daggers," a martial-arts movie that owes more to Bizet or Puccini than to Bruce Lee, meets with supple and spectacular grace: This is a plush, enveloping blanket of a picture that nonetheless feels essential, boiled down to to its barest emotional elements. It's an epic of the heart.

"House of Flying Daggers" fits nicely into the slipcases of both romance and action-adventure, if you feel the need to categorize it. But as a piece of filmmaking, it's as crisp and as slithery as a piece of silk, weaving its way around and through multiple genres as it blurs and softens any hard divisions between them. As "House of Flying Daggers" unfolds, you're barely aware of the story's dramatic boning, the corsetry that keeps it in shape. To seduce us, it uses the most basic tools -- color, sound, movement -- often all at once. Its color palette alone -- from candy reds and yellows, to autumnal russets and golds to, finally, the muted shimmer of icy whites and grays -- demands complete surrender to its sensual vocabulary.

But the picture isn't an empty spectacle. The beauty of "House of Flying Daggers" is so lulling that by its climax, we're barely aware of the way its dramatic texture has become denser, more intense. The finale of "House of Flying Daggers" has the emotional potency of silent film. Everything around the actors -- the sound, the colors, the lush scenery -- is still firmly in place, yet it may as well have dropped away. The actors, and the web of feeling that connects them, are all that matter. Their faces become the only reason for the screen to exist.

Ziyi Zhang's Mei can't be called the anchor of "House of Flying Daggers" -- that's too clumsy and clanking a word for what she does, and it undermines both her delicate beauty and her lithe strength. It's more accurate to say she's the stem around which "House of Flying Daggers" wraps and twines. Mei is hiding out at that brothel -- it has the sugared-nipple name of Peony Pavilion -- because she's really a member of the House of Flying Daggers, a secret, Robin Hood-like outfit that roams the countryside defending the poor and disenfranchised and thus enraging the local power structure.

The leader of the House of Flying Daggers has recently been killed by the local deputies, but the organization continues to thrive. One of the deputies' senior officers, Leo (Andy Lau), has sent Kaneshiro's Jin, an unreasonably handsome soldier whose sex appeal is far more lethal than any sword he carries, to the brothel to ensnare Mei. Leo and Jin hope she'll lead them to the House of Flying Daggers' lair so they can vanquish the group once and for all.

Jin botches the capture, and Leo steps in to complete it. Mei nearly defeats him in a spiraling, whirling duel: Though she's unable to see, she's a masterful, agile fighter. But Leo subdues and captures her, bringing her back to headquarters, where he threatens her with torture unless she reveals the secrets of the House of Flying Daggers.

And then, suddenly, a stranger swathed in black rescues her from her cell. It's Jin in disguise -- his motives become clearer as the story winds through its numerous interlocking twists and turns -- and the two of them escape through the forest. Although they both resist it, they fall deeply in love.

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