MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*
Otherwise known as JACKIE CHAN'S HAMLET! Okay, I'm the only one who calls TO KILL WITH INTRIGUE by that name but given that this obscure Taiwanese flick predates Jackie's jolly image, I could justify the name just on the basis that this has to be Chan's grimmest, most morose role up to this point in his career.
However, one of INTRIGUE's scenes made me think of the key HAMLET scene in which the hero renounces Ophelia, possibly (as some critics speculate) after he's made her pregnant. In INTRIGUE, young nobleman Shao (Chan) meets with Qian (Yu Ling-long), a maid in his father's court, and tells her to take a hike, despite knowing that she has a bun in the oven. Not too much later, he bursts into the court, telling all of the guests celebrating his father's birthday to get lost too. The guests leave, and Father Lei yells at Shao. Shao says he did it all to keep innocents out of harm's way, and he removes an item from his tunic: a dismembered hand with the image of a human-headed bee drawn upon it. Shao doesn't say how he came by this curious oracle, but he claims it's the calling-card of a gang of kung-fu bandits, the Killer Bees, whom Lord Lei attempted to wipe out. While the lord is conferring with his son, wife, and retainers about the incipient attack, four guests return to the court-- only to drop dead. A strange one-handed man shows up (maybe a cutesy reference to Jimmy Wang Yu's One-Armed Swordsman?) and demands the return of his hand. Shao flings the dead hand to the probably dead man and the latter bounds away.
Then the attack by the Killer Bees begins in earnest. Armed men appear on the estate-walls, and into the courtyard five coffins appear. The coffin lids shoot off, and up spring the assault's leader and four cohorts, all attired in flower-masks, as if seeking to conflate death and fertility. The leader is Ting Tan-yen (Hsu Feng), a beautiful woman wearing a half-mask over her lower face, and after swearing vengeance, she engages Lord Lei in sword-combat. A melee breaks out, but the Lei family is overmatched. Ting kills the hero's mother and father and easily beats down Shao's weak nobleman-fu. However, he manages to get a sword to Ting's throat. She invites Shao to kill her but only after she shows him the facial scar beneath her mask, a wound she got from Shao's father when she was still a child. Doubt, the curse of the Melancholy Dane, causes Shao to hesitate, and Ting knocks him out.
When he awakes, he sees Ting from behind and thinks it's his lost love Qian. Ting tells Shao that she spared his life so that he'd suffer as she suffered the loss of her family. Shao can do nothing but go looking for the woman he spurned, even for reasons he thought beneficent.
A disconsolate Shao stays at Jin's house. Ting shows up, twisting the knife by telling Shao his friend's gone off with his lover. Then she calls Shao a "beast," which just so happens to be what Qian called Shao when he gave her the kiss-off. Shao hallucinates that Ting is Qian, embraces her, and summarily beds her. It's not clear if Ting is aware he's mistaken her for someone else, though there's no question she could've stopped Shao if she'd wanted to. After they've had sex and Shao's passed out, he mumbles Qian's name and Ting runs off, jealous as hell. (I admit Hamlet didn't do quite this much bed-hopping, though a fellow named Freud claimed that he had a certain ambivalence about his mama.)
Then Shao pays the price for a grudge against Jin, as three paid assassins break in on him. He fights them and he kills one, but the other two knock him out. Fourth Dragon, an older noble, shows up and tells his assassin-employees that they assaulted the wrong man. He pays them off but when they want to murder the unconscious Shao, Fourth Dragon drives them off. He has Shao brought to his home, apologizes, and tells Shao that Jin ripped off the cargo that Fourth Dragon's guard-escorts were protecting. Slightly later, Ting shows up again-- "I am your shadow," she mocks the anguished hero-- and though she won't tell Shao where Jin and Qian are, she tasks him with not even having the filial piety to bury his slain parents. Further, she says, they were buried by none other than his recent benefactor, Fourth Dragon. Shao, unable to find his lost love, sublimates his desires by pledging loyalty to a "second father," joining the Dragon's guards. Does Fourth Dragon take the place of Lord Lei, the father whose virtue became suspect? The clan of the assassins attacks the guardians, and Shao leads the fight against them, calling himself "Fifth Dragon." But the assassins really start losing when Ting Tan-yen joins the battle, without explaining why she interceded. She leaves Shao in the care of Fourth Dragon for the time being but later persuades him to let her take Shao to her own domicile.
On top of all these sturm-and-drang incidents-- Shao finding a new father to replace the dead one, or having his life preserved by the woman who killed both parents-- Fourth Dragon meets the governor, to whom his life is forfeit for losing a precious cargo-- and it's none other than the robber Jin, who is ALSO the head of the assassin-clan. Basically, everything Jin has done has been to advance his clan's power in the region, and he even takes credit for eliminating the Lei family. This may have been an overreach on the author's part, since Jin doesn't seem affiliated with the Killer Bees, who aren't mentioned or seen again after the opening fight. Jin fights and kills both Fourth Dragon and his aide, and then proceeds to his estate, where he uses honeyed words to persuade Qian to marry him. She agrees, wanting to protect her child and grieving because she's been told Shao is dead.
Now, thus far INTRIGUE hasn't had anything like Hamlet's ghostly father, or even the Devil whom Hamlet half-suspects of having sent the paternal apparition. However, there is a slight sense of passing into another world when Shao is taken to Ting's estate. Ting heals Shao but won't let him leave if he can't beat her in kung fu. He practices continually, but he's unable to up his game. He challenges her anyway, and she punishes him in various ways, which reminded me of the ordeals heroes would undergo from goddesses. (Admittedly the Classical deities didn't make their acolytes swallow hot coals or suffer having their faces burned). Finally, in contrast to the majority of chopsockies, Ting realizes Shao can't equal her. She feeds him a drink mixed with her own blood, and this empowers him so that he can now destroy Jin and save Qian, even though Ting's implicitly condemned to a loveless existence.
I admit that Shao's quest for vengeance isn't responsible for the deaths of almost all of the principal characters, as Hamlet's quest causes the fall of the Danish court. However, a few times the English translation criticizes Shao's inability to tell good from bad, which is closer to Hamlet than most martial-arts heroes ever come. Shao's overly trusting friendship with Jin makes it possible for the evil plotter to end the lives of the Fourth Dragon family, and (maybe indirectly) those of the Lei Family too. It is a major error when Ting's Killer Bee allies just disappear. In a plot-sense Jin's assassin cult more or less takes the place of the recrudescent bandits, even though Ting clearly does not connect the two in any way when she cuts a bloody swathe through the assassins to protect Shao. While INTRIGUE was no more than a bump in the road of Jackie Chan's ascension to international success, it does deserve to be better known as one of the few kung-fu films to possess some psychological depth. I haven't seen all the films in Hsu Feng's repertoire, but I doubt any other role she played came close to that of the tormented Ting Tan-Yen.
No comments:
Post a Comment