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Nov 20, 2008 3:43 PM CST |
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House of Flying Daggers, the new martial arts film by Chinese director Zhang Yimou has been our for a while now, and it’s recently “gone wide”—which translates to its playing in some 1200 theaters nationally. It’s received mostly good to great reviews. It’s a wonderful film – certainly the most enjoyable film of the last year. Then why is it doing such mediocre business at the boxoffice? Why is it a film that doesn’t have any buzz? Why is it trailing Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a film with which it is invariably compared? To date, House of Flying Daggers has grossed some $10 million domestically. That’s very decent for a foreign film, but it’s not that phenomenal when you look at the per screen average: $1,461 per screen, per week. That’s roughly 200 people going to see the film in each theatre where it’s playing each week. By comparison, the per-screen average of a film like Meet the Fockers, still the number three film after five weeks in release, is $3,446. House of Flying Daggers is a very beautiful and very accessible film. It’s a fairy tale. The extraordinarily talented Zhang Ziyi plays Mei, a blind courtesan, who is really a member of the Flying Daggers. This is a group of assassins who are waging guerilla warfare against the corrupt government. The film is full of amazingly choreographed fight sequences and moments of extraordinary poetry and sentiment. Zhang Yimou, who is a great filmmaker, went through several periods in his career. From films like Juduo and Raise the Red Lantern, his films became increasingly political, especially in his daring history of modern-day China, To Live. But these films ran squarely into government censorship. Yimou was prevented from traveling. He learned his lesson and after a few sentimental films like Road Home, he tried his hand at his first martial arts film, HERO. Miramax Films, which bought the rights to Hero for the United States, sat on it for almost two years before releasing it—to a big success. House of Flying Daggers is a more accomplished, better-made film than Hero. But what makes its modest performance at the box office interesting is that perhaps it is too Chinese. What made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon such an enormous hit was not only its stunning choreography or quasi-mystical storyline. It was as rooted in Chinese martial arts films as it was in the narratives of American gunslinger westerns. Ang Lee, who is born in Taiwan but educated in America, is not only talented but a gifted assimilator of idiom. For proof, take a look at his adaptation of The Hulk or, for that matter, his version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. What Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon gave us is something strange, foreign, exotic—yet very familiar. What House of Flying Daggers gives us is something beautiful and removed from our own experience. We have to reach across the divide to relish the experience. It’s a strange phenomenon, particularly in a country like the United States which, on one hand, is so diverse in its ethnic groups and their respective cultures. Yet it is also homogenized—mostly from years by television, which delivers only the familiar—that we need stories told to us on our own terms, in our own particular vernacular. This even applies to a film like Hotel Rwanda—a film which I respect enormously. Nevertheless, even this film filters the tragedy of the genocide in Rwanda and the bravery of one individual, through distinctly Anglo-American narrative traditions. It may have been financed independently, but it is still a Hollywood movie. What makes it work is that they are so much like us. The ramifications of this disconnect from characters and films which are other than our own, and which speak to us on their rather than on our terms go beyond films. The failure of an accessible fun film like House of Flying Daggers to communicate to a mass audience can also reflect the failure of the audience to understand and appreciate the lives, issues, crises, catastrophes of others who are unlike us. Would the Asian tsunami have evoked so strongly our enormous emotional response if there had been no American or European tourists on those beaches? The lukewarm response to ongoing crises and genocide in Darfur gives the answer. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.
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