Notes on: House of Flying Daggers (2004)🎥🎞
Revisiting a wuxia / romance masterpiece 20 years later
I recently rewatched House of Flying Daggers (2004) on the big screen (in 35mm). It was gorgeous. I had already seen it and written about it in another life and already appreciated it as one of my favourite modern wuxia / romances. Even having seen this before, and having fallen in love with the gorgeous imagery in Zhang Yimou’s body of work, I couldn’t help being once again overwhelmed by the powerful visuals in both interior and landscape shots.
When I really like a movie, I can usually count the things I dislike about it, or, as a thought exercise, the things I would change if I could that might improve it. In rare cases there are none. This is not one of those cases but I can only count a few, making it nearly perfect in the genre.
On the technical side, there are 2 scenes where the colour grading or the lighting changes sharply. This is very obvious in the snow-fighting scene, where at some point towards the end we have a cut and all of a sudden it’s much darker and desaturated. Perhaps this is on purpose to symbolize the passing of time, which is beautifully done earlier in the same fight sequence with the snow appearing mid-fight, but in this case I honestly don’t think this is intentional due to the continuity of the fight. So, perhaps, it was shot much later in the day, or in different weather conditions, resulting in very different lighting and then they had to make do. There’s another scene in a wheat field where the colour grading is sharply different, almost overexposed compared to the rest of the movie. This is minor since there’s no sharp change in the same scene and again this could also be intentional but my radar briefly went off and took me out of the immersion.
On the narrative side, I hear and read a lot of people noting the plot is too convoluted; I find the story easy to follow but complex enough to provide some interesting twists here and there. Notably, the twist around Andy Lau’s character Leo is pretty effective. When Leo and Xiao Mei meet up in the bamboo forest though, there are a few lines of painfully expositional dialogue from Leo doing a recap of their history together that I felt there was no need for. Thankfully this is only very brief.
Lastly, everybody’s eyebrows and hair are amazing with the only exception being Andy Lau’s whig, which is very distracting next to Takeshi Kaneshiro’s natural look. But you guessed it, here we are 100% nitpicking, and one could argue this is in line with wuxia tradition.
Watching this in 35mm in a packed theatre at the TIFF lightbox was truly amazing and I upgraded my original rating from 4 to 5 stars, with the first appearance of Flying Daggers into my 4 favourites on letterboxd displacing Suspiria (1977). Let’s see how long that lasts.