A Touch of Zen (1971)

Political intrigue dominates the first couple hours or so of A Touch of Zen.  Eventually, it takes a turn away from resolving this.  This might make the story inconclusive on paper, but the film's ending makes sense given what it does outside the script.  It always feels as though the politics take a backseat to a grand, essential ideal served by the characters' actions, consciously or unconsciously.

It takes several minutes before we see or hear a human being in A Touch of Zen. It opens with spiders on their webs, followed by majestic, almost sanctimonious shots of mountainous landscapes. Then, the ruins of an abandoned war fortress.  Humans aren't rendered insignificant in A Touch of Zen's world, but they do have a limited, determined place therein.  They have to share space with inky black shadows and shafts of light passing through mist.  Non-human presences hold their positions throughout the film, sometimes at the expense of intruding humans.  The characters struggle to abide this as they navigate sloping topography and contrasting planes of action, gravitating to where they can be at ease.

The characters spend the first hour making self-conscious attempts to be unobtrusive.  They struggle against heavy vegetation, worry about intruding on the territory of angry ghosts, and speak in deferential terms when they talk to people from outside their own families.  Meanwhile, one of the villains, Ouyang, walks into people's homes uninvited.  There are those whom the law protects but doesn't bind, and those whom it binds but doesn't protect.  Ouyang represents the former at the expense of the latter.  The villains are cosmic criminals, imposing rules which obscure an full understanding of humanity's position in the world.

When we see the fighters gracefully jump about and yield to the flow of the action as if dancing, we can see how their mastery makes them freer.  When the protagonists face off with government officials in a bamboo forest, they gain the upper hand by utilizing the environment while their enemies try to cut the bamboo down.  The strongest fighters' discipline allows them to tap into immense power.

A Touch of Zen's rich colors and incidental portrayals of natural beauty evoke the spiritual fulfillment.  The film's most breathtaking imagery is precipitated by the appearance of Buddhist monks in the final act, the wisest and most powerful of all the characters.  Their leader, Abbot Hui, has a seemingly supernatural influence over others.  The film sets him against the sun, and when he exercises his power, he steps aside to let rays of sunlight shine past him.  His power comes from his awareness of the environment and how people exist in relation to it.

King Hu's notes on the film also explain that he intended for the film to be critical of the use of secret police forces.  Even though A Touch of Zen floats above politics, they still feel like a vitally pressing issue because of how much they threaten to get in the way of its heroes' paths to peace and enlightenment.

What's more, the film condemns not only the actions of corrupt public officials and secret police forces but also the credulity and respect people offer them, and the readiness with which they're offered. The main character, Gu Sheng-Tsai, is a scholar who only wishes to be a school teacher.  However, much to his vexation, people won't stop pestering him to take the public service exam (an exam required for those who wanted to become public officials in China until the 20th Century).  Gu’s mother insists that becoming a public official is the highest honor a man can achieve.  Part of the reason it’s easy for the authorities to abuse their power is that people accept such beliefs as a matter of course.

Again, the film's climax and the result of the final face-off isn’t as conclusive as you might expect.  But this is because it anticipates only dead ends on the path it follows until then.  It suggests that the only solution is for the characters to accept a major paradigm shift.

The original version of this review is posted here.  The version that appears here is substantially modified.