Hero (2002)

This film follows a dialogue between a king, later revealed to be Qin Shi Huang, and a nameless hero.  Nameless is an officer of the law who has killed two conspirators against the king's life, Long Sky and Flying Snow.  He claims to have eliminated a third, called Broken Sword.  The king has invited Nameless to speak with him, both as a reward and to find out more about the conspiracy.  

But the information Nameless and the king review about the conspiracy starts to contradict itself.  Conflict emerges not just between Nameless and the king, but between the conspirators regarding what they should do.  Originally, Sky, Snow, and Sword all wanted to assassinate the king, but at some point Sword changed his mind.  The reason why he did this, and the inability of the other conspirators to accept his decision, are at the core of why the stories unravel.

The fights in Hero are often more like ritual than conflict.  Many wuxia films portray their fights as elegant, but Hero takes it to another level.  Fighters will go in knowing they're going to die, or stop fighting once they feel their point has been made.  The king understands the moral character of his enemies from facing them once in combat, without ever speaking to them.  He rejects one narrative of what happened because it depicted Flying Snow and Broken Sword as too petty and emotionally manipulable, and he is convinced they must be dignified and disciplined. 

Each flashback is dominated by a single color: red, yellow, blue, or green.  Meanwhile, scenes within the kingdom are dominated by gray, mostly taking place inside stone structures portrayed in symmetrical compositions.  Hundreds of soldiers of Qin will appear on the screen, moving and chanting in unison.  One fight takes place in a forest covered with bright yellow leaves, which the characters spin into whirlwinds as they battle.  The characters travel into the desert, where sand blows over the dunes, and to a lake whose water remains perfectly still, except for ripples induced by a fight between Nameless and Broken Sword.  

What I've discussed so far is not anything so out of the ordinary for genre films like Hero.  I don't want to argue that Hero is unique.  Rather, like Patrick Tam's The Sword, it takes many of the same devices as other wuxia films and distinguishes itself simply by the creativity and craftsmanship of its high-concept setpieces.  It's also interesting as an example of a stylistic movement's quirks--in this case the post-cultural revolution "Fifth Generation"--being worked into a highly commercial film.

The king, like everyone else, is portrayed as a legendary and noble figure, and although the film depicts his kingdom as rigid and devoid of color compared with the rest of the world, it's still beautiful.  The king defends his actions by arguing that there will be no more war once every land is united under his rule, and the film ends with passages of text celebrating the use of the term tianxia to refer to China.  This term literally means "under heaven" and is translated in most subtitles for Hero as "One Sky."  All the lands depicted in the film share the same sky, and ultimately the same sovereign.

These elements of the film lead some to accuse it of authoritarianism, of defending the far-reaching rule of some notion of the Chinese nation.  Some American critics found it similar to Triumph of the Will.  But maybe this is just a sign of its commercial ambitions and departure from realism, responding to the embrace of the Fifth Generation's films by Western audiences.  How many American movies could also be compared to Triumph of the Will?  There are, after all, Chinese critics who have said Zhang's films are too Western.

In any case, the film's themes are more interesting than this characterization gives it credit for.  For one thing, there's something suggestive about its treatment of true and false stories with equally unreal spectacle.  Everyone is such a larger-than-life figure that any story you tell about them, true or false, would be spectacular.  Hero leans into artifice, but doesn't see it as deceptive.  It's natural for intensity of passion and principle the characters carry.  The characters are both martial artists and ordinary artists.

The characters do not see these drives as something to abandon in their effort to determine the truth.  On the contrary, they are indispensable.  What they accept as true is what people are willing to put their lives on the line for.  Words by themselves are cheap.  At the film's climax, two characters attempt to convey some point to others, and they do so by surrendering their swords to mortal enemies. 

The film is a dialogue between the king and Nameless, but at the end, just as real trust develops between them, the film suddenly becomes cynical.  For the whole film, the king is confident and larger-than-life.  But in his final scene, he isn't.  He expresses confusion and hesitation for the first time as a crowd of bureaucrats shouts at him, demanding that he do something he doesn't want to do, and found his kingdom on a lie.  

This ending is comparable to John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  In that film, the rule of law is revealed to have been established by extralegal violence, and preserved by hiding the fact that such violence ever occurred.  One could easily understand the film as critical of the things it sets forth as founded on violence and deception.  But it can also be read as propagandizing violence and deception, as evidenced by the fascist Claremont Institute's use of the film in their program for training sheriffs.  Hero is in a similar position.