- English name：Swordsmen
- Broadcast time：July 4, 2011
- Starring：甄子丹（Donnie Yen）、金城武（Takeshi Kaneshiro）、汤唯（Tang Wei）、李小冉
- director：陈可辛（Peter Chan）
Introduction
Today let’s take a brief introduction of a famous Chinese movie named “Wu Xia”.The film Wu Xia is a kung fu movie in terms of genre, yet it includes other elements like suspense, romance, violence, etc. While trying to tackle some thought-provoking themes in the film, Director Peter Chan also employs quite a few fashion elements closer to the taste of modern moviegoers, so Wu Xia has a distinctive style of its own, at least from the appearance.
The veteran Hong Kong director fulfils his long-cherished hope on the big screen – restoring the living conditions of the ancient people: how they ate and worked, the adulthood ceremony, adding an adult into the pedigree, and even the ancient condom, all of which Peter Chan zealously explores in detail. The director discards the impressionistic style of imagination, and unfolds the pictures of the agrarian society in the early twentieth century with a simple and unsophisticated way.
According to Peter Chan, the first half of the movie was inspired by Dr. House, which brings about suspense and scientific explanation of fundamentals of martial arts.
The two scenes, Donnie Yen fighting with two thugs and Takeshi Kaneshiro restoring the crime scene, are full of contrast and suspense, which can be called the most creative and intriguing sections of the film. The story-telling method is far more innovative than the consciousness of explaining fundamentals of kung fu movements with science.
Apparently, Wu Xia does not lay emphasis on telling the story of jianghu, the imaginary world of swordsmen, but on demystifying the concept of “martial arts science.” Director Peter Chan tries to explain with his own words why masters of martial arts can fly over the eaves and run on the walls, and why the fist of a tiny little man can claim the life of a giant. By doing this, the director not only fulfils his own martial arts dream, but also unravels the mystery of martial arts for the general public.
In the film, the detective played by Takeshi Kaneshiro has the fantastic skill of restoring the crime scene in detail, which many moviegoers feel “incredible.” While in reality, about a thousand years ago in China, there was a team of official workers similar to the modern medical examiners who were engaged in judicial examination works in government offices of various levels, and they were indeed capable of restoring the crime scene from all the minor details.
They could tell the gender, age and profession of the dead from the bones and hair of a highly decomposed body; they could determine whether the dead was poisoned to death by some sort of toxic; they could decide a person was “real death” or “apparent death” through the various signs displayed by the body; they could infer whether the dead had committed suicide or been murdered by a tiny drop of blood on a tree branch… In the feudal society when science and technology were not so developed, the evidence they provided made up for the defect that the bureaucrats handled the cases with their subjective assumptions and easy credence to oral confession, and it had profound and far-stretching influences on modern medical jurisprudence.
Plot
In the late Qing Dynasty, Liu Jinxi (played by Donnie Yen) was a papermaker who lived peacefully with his two sons in a remote town. His peaceful life was about to be broken by a detective who broke in.
Xu Baijiu (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) came to the town to investigate the death of two robbers. The two people who seemed to have died accidentally in Liu Jinxi’s self-defense reaction turned out to be the top ten fugitives with strong martial arts skills. How could an unarmed villager kill them? Xu Baijiu, who is well versed in martial arts, determined that this was not an accident. Liu Jinxi must have special skills to kill people invisibly. As the investigation deepened, Xu Baijiu discovered that he was closely connected with 72 Disha, the most brutal and evil organization in the world. And the leader of 72 Disha, his martial arts were even more unfathomable and unmatched.
The more Xu Baijiu studied Liu Jinxi, the more he felt that he might not be such a sinner. Xu Baijiu began to believe that “he was either a master of disguise or he really turned over a new leaf.” In order to finish the investigation, Xu Baijiu constantly attacked Liu Jinxi, trying to force him to resist with martial arts, but he always failed. Liu Jinxi was seriously injured in the process, forcing Xu Baijiu to waver in his suspicion of him. Just when all the evidence made Xu Baijiu’s inference seem absurd, solid information came that Liu Jinxi was Tang Long, and he was the second in command of the 72 Disha. Tang Long, a bloodthirsty master in the past, suddenly woke up from his sins one day and decided to start a different life with a new identity.
The news about Tang Long’s whereabouts soon reached the leader, who could not accept Tang Long’s betrayal and threatened Tang Long to return to the organization, otherwise he would massacre all the villagers. At the same time, Xu Baijiu was leading a team of elite soldiers to arrest Liu Jinxi. These three unstoppable forces gathered in the town, and the inevitable battle was about to break out.
The road to redemption was stained with blood, and Tang Long’s fate fell into the hands of Xu Baijiu who was struggling between love and law.
Key words
功夫 gōngfu:a kind of fighting styles that have developed over the centuries in China.
香港 Xiānggǎng:one of the two Special Administrative Regions of the People’s Republic of China, the other being Macau.
金城 武 Jīnchéng Wǔ: a Japanese actor and singer of mixed heritage – his father is Okinawan Japanese and his mother is Taiwanese.
