Cannes Film Festival 2011 – Day 4: Wu Xia

Walking out of Peter Ho-San Chan’s Wu Xia in the best screening room in Cannes – the Soixantième, situated in the gods of the Palais with an amazing view over the bay to the line of upmarket hotels beyond – I overheard one American critic calling it ‘the second best film of the festival so far’. My first reaction was, ‘It’s not that good’. But since then I’ve realised it’s actually the best film I saw in my four days on the Croisette. Talk about underwhelming.

Wu Xia (which I think is Chinese for ‘law’ but is being released over here as Swordsmen) is part of the bang-on-trend genre of relatively big budget martial arts extravaganzas that borrow from Oriental philosophy, Chinese mythology and the idiom of 1950s Hollywood, and in which flying warriors do battle in operatic set pieces while taking time out to mumble meaningful soundbites at each other over stewed rice.

In fairness to Wu Xia, it’s actually right at the top of this genre. Our hero is Donnie Yen’s Liu Jinxi, a humble paper maker who finds himself thrust into the village spotlight after accidentally killing two wanted criminals. Enter master detective Xu Baijiu (Taksehi Kaneshiro), who suspects that there might be more to Liu than meets the eye.

As Xu probes deeper into the case, he makes a disturbing discovery about Liu’s past – a past that is soon careering back into the present to fuck some shit up. With his family threatened and his honour at stake, Liu must become the man he used to be and fuck some shit up right back at them.

The quick guide to Wu Xia goes like this: kung fu yes; everything else no. With action choreography by the masterful Yen, the film kicks all kinds of ass in three or four brilliantly staged fight sequences. The best of the lot is a really clever piece of cinematic manipulation in which Liu kills those two criminals, only for the audience to revisit the scene later on in the company of Xu, who expertly reinterprets whatever it was we thought we saw. It’s a smart comment on subjectivity as well as a showcase for some fantastically tricksy special effects which reposition Kaneshiro in a scene we have already witnessed.

Other highlights include a rooftop chase that evokes genre daddy Crouching Tiger, which culminates in a claustrophobic battle in a cowshed.

But about that ‘everything else’. When the fighting subsides, what we’re left with is one of those slightly soapy, overwrought Chinese films whose dramatic camera flourishes and massive sets are meant to evoke a sense of scale and grandeur, only to uneasily recall the campy wackness of Busby Berkeley.

Thematically, Wu Xia wants us to think deeply (or rather, wants us to think that it is thinking deeply) about the nature of justice, and its claim to override every instinct, including our humanity. In practice, it means Kaneshiro acting like a bore while talking to himself.

Wu Xia is fun and silly and occasionally astonishing. Donnie Yen is great, although some of his co-stars are prone to overacting. And it’s another in a long line of kung fu films with terrible roles for the ‘little woman’ at home. If we’re calling this the best Cannes has to offer a week from now, I think we’ll all be disappointed.

Still to come, The Tree of Life and Martha Marcy May Marlene. In the meantime, follow our live reactions on Twitter.

Cannes Film Festival 2011 – Day 4: Wu Xia (text) by Matt Bochenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.