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LAST HERO IN CHINA (1993) Ok, so it's 1993 and you're Jet Li. You've made three of these Wong Fei-hung films for Tsui Hark, and things are starting to run down a bit. Once upon a time, twice upon a time, three times upon a time... You look around and who do you see but Wong Jing, a man who's never met a successful idea of someone else's that he didn't like and couldn't rip off. Before you know what's happened, you find yourself dressed in a red chicken suit fighting a giant cockroach. Don't laugh, one day it could happen to any one of us. This is the first of a series of four films Jet Li made with Wong Jing between 1993 and 1995 (the others are New Legend of Shaolin, High Risk and My Father is a Hero). Although Tsui Hark's Film Workshop was continuing to turn out Wong Fei-hung films at the same time, Wong Jing temporarily swallowed the franchise here, appropriating the star, Yuen Woo-ping as action director, Jingle Ma as cinematographer, and of course, the Wong Fei-hung theme music. All the elements of the visual style are here: blue light and dry ice in the exteriors, canted angles, and action sequences based on extravagant wire work and quick cutting. Wong Jing adds his preference for low angles, as well as giving his wide angle lens an extensive workout. Much has been written about Tsui Hark's use of the famed Cantonese folk hero, Wong Fei-hung, as a figure of Chinese nationalism, negotiating the transition to modernisation and westernisation, while still preserving the cultural strengths and nationalist traditions of China. Wong Jing, on the other hand, can't resist the temptation to take the piss. You can see where this is coming from. The villains enjoy a crude belly laugh and care only about making money out of sex. In other words, men after Wong's own heart. Wong Fei-hung, on the other hand, is a rather prissy hero intent on preserving the purity of his culture. Wong Jing figures that the purity of Hong Kong culture is based on the capacity to do anything for a cheap laugh and a quick buck. The good news is the way that the story suggests more human frailties for Fei-hung, and works in gags to freshen up the formula based on martial skills. (My favourite is the running joke about the guy constantly on the verge of death who refuses to divulge a secret because he knows that second-tier characters in movies always die as soon as they unburden themselves and exhaust their narrative function.) The bad news is the prominence of comic relief guys who take up so much of the first half-hour of the film. One of these figures is named Ah So, and has extremely prominent buckteeth. We'd be facing a major racial incident if the film hadn't been made by someone Chinese. So, let's enjoy the spectacle of the HK action cinema hedging its bets. For those of you who want more of the same from Jet Li, there's enough fancy arse-kicking (some of it performed from in front of the guy getting kicked) to keep you happy. For those of you who no longer care to take this with a straight face, there are the populist pleasures of down-market humour to suggest that cultural heroes are also human, and that cultural traditions need to make room for the earthiness of the body as well as the abstractions of the spirit. Anyway, I guessing that's how Wong Jing explained it to Jet in order to get him into the red chicken suit. MIKE WALSH Mike Walsh is senior lecturer in screen studies at Flinders University in Adelaide, where his specialty is Australian documentaries - this means that he can save Hong Kong cinema for when he's goofing off. His fine essay "Hong Kong Cinema 2001" recently appeared in Metro and was reprinted in the booklet for the 3rd annual Hong Kong Film Festival in Australia.
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Images from the Jet Lee (Li) Homepage |
