cbsreview #1: HERO

First, a parody. In a public square full of Chinese, one Westerner called another, "Hey you", and half of the Chinese looked. The one who was called heeded, "Who, me?", and the other half of the Chinese looked.

Second, an analogy. In his short story A King Listens (Under the Jaguar Sun), Italo Calvino tells the tale of a paranoid king brought to paranoia by the power of his throne and his hearing. From where he seats he agonizingly listens to the sound of vengeance - a cry, a moan, a weeping resonance of anger and suffering - emanating from the walls and dungeons of his imposing castle, making him a virtual prisoner of his ear.
-------------

The film Hero proves the joke's on me. The Chinese peoples of ancient times put signification in their names in the same level as martial arts - as a discipline - itself. In this film the lead character (Jet Li) goes by the name Nameless, an apparent reference to the theological line that the Great One shall have no name, an apparent underscoring that in the naming of a Chinese, there should be no room for the blandness of a Westernized Hei Yu and Hu Mi .

But in this vein it would have been far-reaching to say, Go ahead and title this film Nameless Film if it is the Great One, for it is not, though in the company of Western movies in a very weak year Hero could be there up high compared to any film of any genre.

Up high is precise. The film soars, literally, by way of a number of previously unseen fights and flights, an excelsior of images, bodies and arrows galore. Think of the fight scenes in Matrix and Crouching Tiger, in combination, and add a little more grace and a little more steps in the symphony of their routines, and they should give you an idea of how Hero's characters tested each other's resolve and martial arts skills.

But unlike most martial arts movie, and verily like The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hero has a story - despite pronouncements of moviegoers simply drowned by the picture perfection of every scene. And that, to me, is the movie's setback: The cinematography, the color treatment, the fight scenes, the locales, are all bigger than the movie itself, thus making the story, despite itself, an ignored feature.

Here's the story, in capsule: The King of Qin, like Calvino's King, has not known sleep in the wake of three assassins going after his life. Broken Sword, Flying Snow, and Sky (my favorite character) are ruthless fighters vying for the King's blood and in their race thereof met instead a different enemy and fate: the Nameless, their deaths.

The Nameless himself has a different agenda and this is where the movie gets to be ingenious and original. Nameless kills all three assassins (with trickery in the case of the lovers Broken Sword and Flying Snow) to be able to be near the king - within 10 paces, as the latter himself says by the latter part of the movie - just so he could kill him himself. As they sit within 10 paces of each other in the palace, Nameless tells the king of his encounters with the assassins, shown flashback to depict the scenes on how he finished them. The issue with the lovers gets to be complicated when he comes up with different versions of the encounters, each encounter characterized by different fight scenes, different genesis of the fight, a different hue of the screen - red, yellow, blue, and white - each color symbolizing a meaning that you, yes you, are better off to determine. Which color signifies truth? Half-thruth? All out lie? (These changes, these different versions, somehow remind me of some proverb that a flame's identity depends upon the object it burns. To my mind, Nameless has different objectives in every version he narrates.)

Martial Arts, like any logus, any study, are a discipline. In one scene where Nameless and Flying Snow try to save the art school from the King's warriors - fending off thousands of flying arrows with lightning agility and impeccable moves - Broken Sword is shown inside doing a calligraphy, matching the intensity of those saving the school. The strokes of calligraphy art, he later says, are comparable to the cadence of swords.

But as in most movies of this genre, we are told of the virtue of honor, personified and revealed mostly towards the end of the movie by Nameless. Wherefore, watch this movie and find out Hero's heroic version of honorable.