King Hu’s 1971 film A Touch of Zen – now available on a Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection – belongs to a genre known as wuxia. For those unfamiliar with the term, wuxia films might most accurately be described as flying Chinese swordfight movies. They are typically period fantasies that involve gigantic, melodramatic emotions, a lot of fancy costumes, and periodic swordfight scenes wherein the fighters – in a fit of magical realism – are able to fly, bounce, or trip lightly across water. The term wuxia means “martial hero.” Wuxia films go back to the dawn of Chinese cinema, but they experienced a stylistic heyday in the ’60s and 70s when colors were brighter, editing was faster, and melodrama was the most melodramatic. Of this era, A Touch of Zen may be the pinnacle, which makes it one of the most significant of all wuxia films.
At 180 minutes (an unusual feature in wuxia films), A Touch of Zen grows slowly, allowing its plot and characters to breathe, but to remain frustratingly oblique. The anticipated swordfight scenes are a long time coming, and often don’t offer the usual cathartic climax that a Western audience might expect. Despite its extended running time, A Touch of Zen is also surprisingly difficult to follow, and it takes a long, long time to explain itself, its plot, its characters. Overall, it functions better as an opera – that is, a story told through large and aching emotions – than it does a traditionally structured fable. The movie takes innumerable breathers to ambitiously insert love stories, flashbacks, Zen monks, rumors, hearsay, political suspicion, and double-crossings, none of which seem to be immediately related to the central story. At least not at first. Sometimes these things will eventually tie together. Sometimes not.
Union Film
The main character for the bulk of the film is a vaguely peaceful, non-fighting bachelor named Gu (Shih Chun), a modest artist and overall dippy dude who is a vague disappointment to his long-suffering mother. Gu eventually, through a protracted set of circumstances, finds himself joining forces with a framed fugitive named Miss Yang (Hsu Fang) and her motley gang of protectors. Yang has been on the run for a long while, and a final confrontation with her pursuers is inevitable. Gu, Yang, and all the rest must eventually use their wit, swordplay, and haunted house theatrics to fight and/or scare off the wicked magistrates that would apprehend and murder our heroes.
After this plot concludes, there is still a good 45 minutes remaining. There is then a subplot about the fate of a newborn child, introduced late in the game, and a final extended confrontation between one minor character only seen in two previous scenes, and a bad guy whom we hadn’t met yet. The very ending is a fight-punctuated sermon on Zen philosophy, peace, and enlightenment. It feels like the third act of a different movie, only serving as the fifth act here.
Union Film
Although based out of Taiwan, it’s hard to think of a film that is more patently Chinese than A Touch of Zen. Epic by dint of its size alone, this film incorporates small social elements of every fact of classical Chinese mythology. I know little about Chinese theatrical traditions, but the characters all feel deeply archetypal in the commedia dell’arte sense. They all fulfill a very specific function. The naif, the warrioress, the betrayer, the villain, the doting mother, the wise sage. And while that final 45 minutes is a frustrating departure from any sort of traditional plot, and seems to deliberately jettison the main characters, it feels like the very soul and lifeblood of the movie. These larger-than-life figures from ancient traditions are being tied into the concrete moral life of real spirituality, thanks to an all-seeing monk who had been watching over us this whole time.
Wuxia films have a strong fanbase all over the world, and filmmakers like Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou, and Quentin Tarantino have taken a lot of their stylistic cues from wuxia films from this era. Indeed, Lee and Yimou made their own modern wuxia films with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers respectively. There may be something irresistible about the size and classicism of the genre that will certainly attract a certain audience. A Touch of Zen requires patience – and perhaps some preexisting enthusiasm – to get through. If you’re not yet familiar with the genre, then this may not be the best introduction to wuxia films. It’s one of the giants of the genre, but it needs to be worked up towards. For fans, however, this new edition may be something of a miracle.
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
