MIRACULOUS FLOWER (1981)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

I only watched MIRACULOUS FLOWER once before now, and had a vague memory that it was close to being as bizarre as WOLF DEVIL WOMAN. I didn't watch it back then with a mind to analyzing its mythic contents, though. So when I placed the film under the myth-microscope, I had to ask myself a salient question. In my review of WDW, I expressed the notion that, had the film been more symbolically coherent, I could have judged to be a high-mythicity film, Might the same criterion apply to FLOWER?

In fact, I placed this film under the microscope twice, for after viewing a dubbed version and making my preliminary conclusions, I also came across a subtitled copy and watched that one as well. I found the latter version added a few details that confirmed my conclusions: that even though Chang Ling provided the story for FLOWER, it was apparently shaped in part by scripter Godfrey Ho (at the time, not yet known for being a schlockmeister) and given stronger form by director Feng Ho. Sometimes that's just the way creativity works, in that even genius needs a helping hand.

Chang's character starts out with the name Ah-Shuang Leng but I'll call her May since that's the name she ends up with. May lives her first eighteen years moving from place to place with the woman she believes to be her mother. Later it's revealed, in best "lost child" fashion, that May's caregiver is her nurse, who saved her from the destruction of her family. As the nurse dies in an isolated hideout, she tells May that she must seek out a mysterious being called the Happy Fairy in order that May can realize her destiny. The nurse also tells May to take along the nurse's walking-stick, and to burn it when she learns her true history.

May isn't too bright at this point, for she drags the corpse of her "mother" with her, thinking all that Mom needs is a doctor. The subtitled version left out some scenes where she encounters some villagers who tell her how stupid she is not to recognize an dead body. After burying the only parent she's ever known, May chances across an itinerant scholar nicknamed "No-Dust" Shueh because he's fastidious about keeping his clothes clean of even tiny smudges. May travels with the young man until he reaches his father's estate, and they part. However, when May beds down for the night in a nearby stable, she happens to hear some warriors planning to attack the Shueh residence. May hastens to Young Shueh's house, and when the warriors attack, they're easily repelled.

Young Shueh's father, Shueh the Elder, is so grateful he offers to adopt the footloose girl, and she accepts. Thus she's on hand to witness another attack, this time by the boss of the warriors, Lonely Walker. Walker and Elder Shueh discuss how the former has been endlessly seeking the last of the May Family, and he accuses the elder of treason, so they fight. The elder is defeated but a masked mystery swordsman appears and defeats the villains before departing. Elder Shueh doesn't recognize his savior, but May knows it's Young Shueh. She forces him to admit that he secretly trained himself in kung fu, and May blackmails him to teach the skills to her. In the ensuing months he does so, and the two of them become close enough that Elder Shueh suggests that his natural son and adoptive daughter might marry.

Up to this point May has been well and truly diverted from any greater destiny, but a strange female intercedes to remind May of her nurse's prophecy. May leaves the estate with the walking-stick of her nurse. While staying at an inn she has the occasion to use her new fighting-skills to incapacitate a drunken rapist (who could represent the Dark Side of Male Sexuality).

When May journeys to the mountainous realm of the Happy Fairy, she meets a strange old anchorite who claims that she's destined to kill him for having slaughtered the Family of May. May doesn't know what he's talking about, since she's always had the family name of her "mother." She forges on till she finds a bridge over a deep gorge. Here she's attacked by a masked robber who throws her walking-stick into the gorge and knocks her out. The strange woman seen earlier-- none other than the Happy Fairy-- appears to drive off the robber. When May comes to, she's filled with self-pity for losing the stick, and tries to jump into the gorge to kill herself. The Fairy talks May into becoming the Fairy's servant for a year, after which she can still kill herself if she likes.

For the next year the Fairy subjects May to a lot of peculiar torments, which seem nonsensical but are standard kung-fu practice for building up the spirit through adversity. While putting May through these rigors, the Fairy also narrates the story of the slain May family, and May finally begins to connect the dots. She also finds out that one of the attackers gave the family advance warning, which was the only reason May escaped the carnage.

A year later, of course, the Fairy challenges May to take the big leap off the bridge, and though May declines at first, she finally does jump. But her adversities have given May enough spiritual power to save herself, and she recovers her mother's stick as well. Having finally accepted her family history, she obeys her nurse's injunction to burn the stick. But inside the wooden casing is a sword, the winsomely-titled "bowel-cutting blade," the very item that the enemies of the May Family wanted to get hold of. This bounty is the real reason why Lonely Walker kept searching for the last escaped May, to obtain the sword. Yet this revelation also means Elder Shueh was complicit in the deaths of May's lineage.

May doesn't need formal sword-training to take on a bunch of her family's killers, first at a waterfall, then on a snowy mountainside. Then she's confronted by Young Shueh, who is in a sense both her brother and her potential lover, and who seeks to protect his father. She gets past him, but upon reaching the Shueh estate, she's filled with remorse, since she can't help thinking of the elder as her real dad. She's so filled with emotion that she kowtows to Elder Shueh, bruising her forehead-- and yet she still engages him in combat. Young Sheuh joins the fight, but the Happy Fairy shows up to direct May's attention to her real quarry-- a certain enemy who's been hiding in plain sight.

There are a lot of kung-fu films that are more visually arresting than FLOWER, but not that many that combine so many of the tropes so beloved in Chinese/Taiwanese entertainment-- colorful, operatic characters and settings; torturous familial conflicts, ethereal magic combined with blood-and-guts, and loads of skullduggery and hidden motives. Chang Ling acts up a storm here, both in the dramatic and kinetic senses of the word. She only does a little hand-to-hand fighting in the rapist scene, but her skill with sword-fu is phenomenal. I don't subscribe to the Joseph Campbell theory of "the hero's journey" as representing an insuperable pattern, but it's interesting to see that the creative people behind this now obscure Taiwanese film conformed to the basic premise of the Campbell formula, long before it become common coin in STAR WARS analyses.