32. The Bride With White Hair (1993) - Dir. Ronny Yu
Asian film directors are able to create worlds, situations, characters and action traditionally limited only to animation. One of the greatest examples of this phenomena is Ronny Yu's The Bride With White Hair, starring the late Leslie Cheung and the incredibly gorgeous and talented Brigitte Lin Ching Hsia. Like the classic Romeo & Juliet, The Bride With White Hair is a tale detailing the doomed relationship of two lovers from warring political factions. The film is made of visual and poetic dualities; it is both a beautiful, touching and poetic romance, and a tragic, violent, and gruesome action film, often at the same time. Ronny Yu, Peter Pau, the cinematographer, and David Wu, the editor, craft a world that is visually dark, yet alluring, violent, yet peaceful, and so full of visual imagery that it can easily cause vast sensory overload. From the opening scene of a swordsman protecting a flower whose power might restore his lost love's humanity, to the climatic bloodshed of action, every moment of this film is worthy of framing and displaying.
Leslie Cheung plays, Zhuo Yi-Hang, a Wu Tang student who is fed up with the traditions and "pleasantries" of his martial discipline. He doesn't want to be involved in the day-to-day politics of the jiang hu, and lives, instead, for romantic adventure. Brigitte Lin plays, Lian Nichang, a top assassin of an evil cult hell-bent on the total destruction of the various martial schools. Leung and Lin have a link in their past, and are drawn closer to one another while also manipulated byu the political corruption of their warring schools. Zhou, a romantic at heart, wants nothing more than the love of Lian, however, the more realistic Lian knows that this love cannot be. She ultimately becomes so full of rage and hatred, stemming from and directed towards her brain-washing cult, that she becomes the spirit of lost love incarnate, the Bride With White Hair, a hateful, beastly woman destroying all who stand in her way, including the only person who ever loved her, Zhou Yi-Hang.
After seeing Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China for the first time, I needed more, and I will be forever grateful to the video store clerk for suggesting this film to me. I could not have asked for a better follow up to Tsui's mind-blowing epic. Upon repeated viewings, The Bride still stands up, and I am often surprised at just how effective it is. There is a magical quality at work in the film, a magic that Ronny Yu never quite found in any of his other Hong Kong productions, and a magic lacking from many other films of the era. The film seems to exist completely in its own world ,and we the audience are some how privy to view this world through the eyes of the director.
Ronny Yu generously opens up the window to his imagination and allows us a glimpse of the greatness within. The Bride With White Hair is a superior genre film, and a film that transcends genre conventions and boundaries. It contains moments of hard-hitting action, a musical interlude, sadness, depravity, violence, and elements of horror all, wrapped around a narrative of passionate romance. It is a film that would be perfectly at home on the DVD shelf of an avid kung fu junkie or an admirer of art house cinema. This is one of those rare films that really does get everything right, and a film that Ronny Yu should be eternally proud of.
