I remembered a better movie.
Not a different movie, exactly. The Echo Game still rules. The bamboo sequence still has the clean, stupid pleasure of watching beautiful people defy physics with perfect posture. Zhang Yimou still knows how to make color feel like choreography. I came back to House of Flying Daggers expecting the romantic cousin to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero.
What I found was a very pretty movie that keeps mistaking complication for depth.
The plot is trapdoors stacked on trapdoors. Mei is blind until she isn’t. She’s the previous Daggers leader’s daughter until she isn’t. Leo is the corrupt police captain delivering her to the imperial general until he isn’t. The fake rescue Jin runs on Mei is itself a fake rescue Leo and Mei are running on Jin. Mei belongs to Leo until she falls for Jin over the course of a three-day road trip, at which point the mission stops being a mission and becomes a doomed triangle the movie insists has the weight of legend.
By reveal three, I’m not rethinking these people. I’m waiting for blood in the snow. And the snow was an accident.
An unseasonable early snowfall hit the Ukrainian shoot before Zhang had finished his exteriors. Leaves still on the trees. Rather than wait for the thaw, Zhang rewrote the ending around it, putting the final confrontation in yellow autumn leaves against fresh white snow. The movie’s most famous image exists because the weather refused to cooperate.
That accident is the best thing that could have happened to this thing. The visual register breaks, which gives the ending a discipline the rest of the movie keeps dodging. Up to that point, Daggers has been flying around in greens and golds, borrowing some of Hero’s chromatic logic without quite earning its severity. Then the snow arrives and rejects all of it. The first three acts decorate. The last twenty minutes get down to business.
The snow does the dramatic work the romance has been too impatient to do. Jin and Leo start on white ground. By the end, the ground is red. Yellow leaves above them, white snow under them, blood spreading through the whole shebang. For once, the movie stops telling me the feelings are enormous and simply gives me an image large enough to hold them.
Mei has known Jin three days. She has waited for Leo three years. The land doesn’t care which love should count more. That’s the one idea in the film that finally hurts. Mei pulls the dagger out of her own body to throw it. She chooses the man she loved for three days over the man she waited with for three years. For forty seconds, House of Flying Daggers becomes the romantic tragedy it has spent two hours trying to announce itself into being.
I prefer Hero because it is more ambitious than Daggers ever tries to be. I prefer Crouching Tiger because it is the more disciplined all-arounder. Daggers gets paired with both, and I think that pairing has been doing it a too much of favor for twenty years.
Still: the snow saves it, the bamboo sequence holds up, and the Echo Game still crushes. But the movie I remembered was mostly the ending, pretending backward that the first hundred minutes had earned it.