I went to the Brattle Monday and checked out Ashes of Time Redux
By any measure, it should have been one of the best Hong Kong films ever made. Filmed at the height of the early 90s martial arts cycle, featuring an all-star cast (two golden sky kings! Both Tony Leungs! Maggie! Brigitte Lin Ching Hsia right before she retired! ), source material from one of the great wuxia novels (Jin Yong/Louis Cha’s Eagle Shooting Hero), Christopher Doyle behind the camera, Sammo Hung Kam-Bo doing the action choreography, incredible mainland scenery and Wong wrapping the whole thing up with his unique style, Ashes of Time had all the ingredients for a true classic. To say the end result falls short of that potential understates the matter. Big time. While it’s, at times, stunningly beautiful and filled with moments of real genius, it’s also a confusing, shambling beast of a story. I’ve seen it thrice now and I’m still not sure what’s going on half the time. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not the biggest stickler for coherence, but this tests even my patience. I think the frustration comes from the fact that it positively flirts with sanity, but never fully seals the deal.
There’s also the question of the fights. This is, ostensibly, a martial arts story. By some definition, it also contains some martial arts sequences. Choreographed by Sammo Hung, one of the genre’s greatest talents, the fights in this film are so stylized they didn’t even need to feature humans. Bits of cloth, animated by a fan and occasionally punctuated by a sword jab would have produced much the same result.
It’s not all bad.
As I mentioned, the film is a stunner. Each shot is exquisitely framed and you could probably fill a book dissecting the use of color in this film. It doesn’t hurt that the fillm features a half-dozen of Hong Kong’s biggest stars at the time. Hong Kong in the 1990s had movie stars, of the old school style. They all owned the screen and that’s nowhere more true than in this film. Everyone has their moments.
Seeing Leslie Cheung was especially poignant as I hadn’t seen him in a film since he took his own life in 2003. I was never a huge fan of Cheung’s, but he was such a presence in Hong Kong’s popular culture it was still a stunner to lose him when (and the way) we did. That reaction bubbled back up to the surface seeing him at the height of his powers.
Summing it up, new version or no, not much has changed in my relationship with Ashes of Time. I still find it a fascinating, but imperfect and ultimately confusing film, impossible to ignore but equally impossible to like.
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