Shame on me for never seeing this before.
Esthetically, this has everything I have always loved about Hong Kong films, and in fact it epitomizes the style of what I term the golden age of HK film. The cinematography is energetic and extreme, the special effects are a bit creaky, but usually covered up by vigorous and fanciful editing, and the story logic is a bit sparse, but the tale moves so quickly that you won’t care.
A young man (the late Leslie Cheung) works as a (less than competent) tax collector, wandering the countryside to retrieve the silver that businessmen owe. In the area he has just entered a mysterious and beautiful woman (Joey Wang, whom I’ve been desperately in love with lo these eleven years) seduces bad men, who afterward wind up dead in fairly icky ways. The woman clearly dislikes doing this, but has no choice. The man, having no money of his own to spend, stays at a haunted Buddhist temple where he meets a bearded swordsman committed to killing ghosts.
Of course the young man and mysterious woman meet, and fall in love, and of course she is a ghost. Many, many twists and turns ensue, and ultimately the young man and the swordsman travel to Hell to save her spirit so that she might be reincarnated.
If you think that sounds crazy, I am leaving out the androgynous evil tree spirit, the thousand year old evil, the zombies in the attic of the Buddhist temple, and the proof that ghosts can in fact do it. And that ain’t all, either. (Should I mention the Taoist rap number? Probably not.)
The paucity of logical coherence (aided, no doubt, by the poor subtitling on my disc) adds to the movie, however. It plays out like a dream, with factors jumping in and out of the story for no apparent reason. This makes the supernatural aspects of the story more acceptable, at least to my mind, and made the love story all the stronger.
It seems like I am making fun of the film, but I’m not. It’s a wonderful movie, and quite moving, but you should never approach it as you would a Hollywood movie. Check your cynicism at the door; leave your tendency to nitpick special effects at home; be prepared to roll with seeming narrative lurches. All of this should be standard operating procedure if you’re a fan of HK films.
Chinese culture seems, if movies made from classic Chinese literature are any indication, to have long been obsessed with releasing repressed sexuality, and often linking that release with death. That is partly the case here. Though the relationship between the Cheung’s character and Wang’s is one of love, lust is also a strong component. There are two sequences that get Wang topless or nude (teasingly unrevealing sequences, since this is not a Category III film), in which she displays all of her assets to Cheung’s character while he can do nothing to act.
In short, goofy to Western eyes, but quite good, quite moving, not really scary.