It's just like a man's rhyme. The ringing of the sword, the crunch of the bone, and the unfathomable love of life. A person wakes up to take care of the family and bring small, but good to society. His house is warm and he doesn't need doors. There are vegetables, meat and rice on the table. Sons play in the yard, and livestock lazily chew grass. Elementary, but such a tangible life envelopes from the very first frames. Everything moves by itself, measuredly, habitually - food is prepared, clothes are washed, the sun crawls across the sky, a river flows. The voices of people merge with the melodic chirping of birds, the protracted moo of a cow, the rustling of wind in the thick of foliage. Soft natural tones are shed in the frame with harmony, calmness and blissful awareness that "every little fly in this whole choir is a participant, the place knows its own, loves it and is happy."
I want to desperately believe that you can live like this every day: work humbly, take food and shelter with gratitude, take care of loved ones and just be kind to others. But Donnie Ian was not invited to the lead role so that he would straighten paper or pick up noodles from soup. Yes, and the title of the film directly indicates that the steel muscles hidden under the changgua linen will find application. There will be fights (wu), and heroes (xia), and with the sword, and hand-to-hand. And now enter the village the first bandits, bullies, to get full from the disguised IP man.
Hell no! Peter Chan with a pinpoint blow to the temple to the viewer causes either an ironic hallucination or a skillful deception: a modest hard worker Jinxi gets involved in a fight almost by accident, and I have never heard of any techniques. It seems that he was born under a lucky star, and the robbers themselves killed each other. The camera grabs his clumsy movements, rushes through the turmoil of the fight and generally paints a comic picture of good intentions and bad coincidences. And while the viewer is trying to wake up and understand what it was, an investigator arrives in the village, and the movie takes a completely different turn.
The narrative, guided by the viscous reflections of a distrustful servant of the law, sinks into a silt of doubts and memories. Details left unnoticed in a ridiculous duel, thanks to the sharp eye of Detective Xu, acquire the weight of indisputable evidence. Chilling flashbacks, excerpts from past court cases crudely cut the idyllic world that was imagined at the beginning of the film. The fight with the bandits is disassembled into pits-frames and in slow-mo (for greater persuasiveness) is squandered before the eyes. Who is Jinxi and what is behind his simple smile? After all, it is now obvious that it is not blood that flows through his veins, but concentrated Qi energy. Perhaps Xu should not have woken the beast while he slept peacefully in his hole?
The dual nature of the protagonist found perfect expression in Donnie Ian's play. His disarming smile enters an unequal battle with an uncompromising look, and his body instantly turns from a soft mattress into a tangle of steel tendons. Another kind of contradiction pulls out Takeshi Kaneshiro: paranoid-painful and brilliant-sighted at the same time. The unspoken confrontation between the investigator and the suspect unfolds in comic and sometimes violent mise-en-en scenes, much more traced in sign language than directly in dialogue. Scrupulous in the details of the first hour of the story, the director arranges all the necessary snares to catch on film a deep interpersonal conflict and tragic fate.
However, this is where the features of the genre fail him. As soon as Jinxi sheds his mask, the plot begins to develop rapidly - and not around anyone's experiences and difficulties of choice, but around frisky legs and aiming punches. In the frame, a bunch of new characters appear, and with them a lot of reasons for offense and revenge. The question of trust between the main characters is solved, the theme of forgiveness and the beginning of life from a clean slate hangs in the air. A horde of Tanguts tramples the dramatic ground of the narrative and waters it with the blood of battles. The director hones the visual and acrobatic component so that each frame beats not in the eyebrow, but in the eye, cuts the audience’s expectations with a blade and stops the heart with one of its cold, proud beauty. The soft color scheme of the first part of the film thickens, as during a thunderstorm: clouds of metal hung over the village, rain plunges into the ground with steel spears, the action - from a bright sunny day - moves into the hostile darkness of the night, bursting at the seams with lightning flashes. Blood flows like a black river and freezes in puddles with inevitability when all the battles are over.
Rejecting the genre cliché of "fighting for battle," Peter Chan made a bold leap toward drama. He managed to capture a lot - inner logic, detective intrigue, human feelings - but something slipped away. “Swordbearers” is by no means as schematic as the name might suggest, but, in the end, it is just an oriental martial arts action movie. Stylish, dramatic, sometimes subtly cruel, sometimes unpretentiously good-natured - but action.