Awaited ‘Shadow’ awash with Chinese ink
I feel like I have waited a long time for Zhang Yimou’s latest epic tale “Shadow,” and expected an intricate Three Kingdoms romance and conspiracy, married with gorgeous ink-brush painting. Instead, I found a Shakespearean tragedy framed in Chinese landscapes.
The stylistically exquisite movie premiered at the 2018 Venice Film Festival, where the director received the Glory to the Filmmaker Award. The China premier followed shortly after, just before the National Day holiday in the first week of October. Its USA release will be early 2019.
Zhang is known for both artistically stunning movies like “Red Sorghum” (1988), “To Live” (1994) and international blockbusters like “Hero” (2002) and “House of Flying Daggers” (2004). His last movie “The Great Wall,” in which Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal fight monsters side by side with Chinese stars Jing Tian and Andy Lau, opened in China at the end of 2016.
“Shadow” has taken close to 600 million yuan (US$86 million) so far, below the Chinese blockbuster mark of one billion yuan but rather high for such an artsy film, shot in the style of Chinese ink-brush painting; predominantly monochrome, except for occasional blood letting in stunning red.
Domestic reviews have been mixed. Some call it a long-waited visual treat by the master of color, while others complain about the same issues as many of Zhang’s recent movies — sacrificing storytelling for style. Both are true.
“Shadow” takes place in the Three Kingdoms period (220280), a chaotic sixty years filled with battles, ambition, romance and conspiracy. The protagonist, the commander of the state forces, hides in a secret room, crippled by his old wounds. His double, a commoner who looks exactly like him, appears in front of the king and his followers, while sharing a bed with his wife.
It is a story full of potential drama, conflicts and struggles, yet the formal style has stolen all the drama, rather than delivering it.
I don’t think a good movie needs to be all about telling stories. After all, what stories haven’t been told since the Skladanowsky brothers started making moving pictures in the 19th century?
But, I do believe movies need drama, whether it is apparent conflicts or more intricate struggles within.
Even Chinese scholar paintings, most of which are landscapes, are not accurate in scale, but are striking because the painters released their personal ambitions, tranquility or depression through trees, flowers, mountains and water.
Art historian and collector Zhang Yanyuan (815-877) once wrote that “an accurate depiction of a subject requires resemblance in appearance, and that depends on the capture of its soul.”
The best scholar paintings are never static in the frame, but are filled with soulful conflicts and drama within nature or between man and nature.
A cinematographer in his early career, Zhang has again shown his striking aesthetic sensibilities in intricately designed sets and costumes where each freeze frame is like an ink painting. He once said that he wanted to shoot an entire movie in this style, and that it would have to be raining all the time to capture the atmosphere.
And so he did.
The characters, all wearing robes painted with landscapes, move through rice paper screens filled with calligraphy. They are not only performers in the drama, but also elegant presenters of paintings.
The constant rainfall not only adds an ink-painting filter to the entire movie, but also helps to create a moving Taichi diagram.
It is not only spectacular but also more in tune with the idea of and female and male, as well as static and moving. The slow-motion of kungfu, choreographed as beautifully as dancing, is something unseen in film before.
In “Shadow” I have seen the best of Zhang Yimou’s aesthetics combined to depict a Western soul, and I can’t help hoping for a unique Shakespeare adaptation shot in such style, or better, an Oriental soul inside a beautiful landscape frame.