Chi bi / Red Cliff

Full of staggering striated patterns of boats and bodies, Triumph of the Will-like phalanxes that might sometimes, from a squinty-eyed distance, look like expertly sculpted pubic hair, John Woo’s first Mandarin megapicture is more than just a work of fantastic fascistic symmetries. A lofty typological marriage of Western and Eastern epic elements, Red Cliff is easily the meat and potatoes cinematic spectacle-qua-spectacle entertainment of the year; a dialectical materialist network topology of object and human relations, rendered as quicksilver synthetic apotheosis, lurching forward w/ pinwheel precision, balancing epic macro and sensual micro, in its adaptation of 14th century Chinese urtext Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a towering novel rooted in fact, that has been transformed over time into totemic mythic abstraction, given elegant though sweaty (and red-dirt-encrusted) digital flesh by Honk Kong slow-mo gangland melodrama master turned sleek Hollywood go-to action director John Woo. Shorn of half the length of the original two-part-and-nearly-five-hour Chinese release – the biggest budget film in Chinese history, as well as surpassing Titanic as that nation’s all time highest domestic grosser – Woo’s new stridently cut version, prepared for the world beyond Asia, doesn’t seem to bowdlerize the original text so much as simply blast through it DJ style, quickening the piledriving web of intersections, scratching out new headrush breakbeats against the grain of the film’s own internal rhythms, intensifying flows instead of breaking them off. Though I cannot wait to see the full version, I have a feeling that by delving further into backstory and courtly politics the film will invariably lose some of the druggy, glandular magic of the motored-away montage on display in the two-and-a-half hour version. The story, that of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, tells of the Han Dynasty, after years of war and corruption, fallen into the hands of power-mad prime minister Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), who convinces the neutered Emperor to declare war on two autonomous southern principalities run by a pair of warlords – the older more wearied/experienced Liu Bei (You Yong) and the young dandy Sun Quan (Chang Chen). Though the warlords are far from being allies, they decide to team up in an attempt to fend off attack from the massive Imperial army which has stationed it troops and naval forces on the banks of the Yangtze at the base of the titular cliff. Two extremely valuable men assist the rebels: Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), Liu Bei’s military advisor, able to predict meteorological events well in advance, thus providing the rebels repeatedly (and ultimately decisively) w/ the tactical upper hand, and Sun Quan’s viceroy Zhou Yu (superstar and Wong Kar-wai regular Tony Leung Chiu Wai), a peaceful and philosophical man of compassion and implacable focus, whose anti-war tea-artist wife is nonetheless not afraid to go behind enemy lines and play Mata Hari for the cause. The film proceeds through a series of bafflingly complex and meticulously executed battles, on land and at sea, in which natural rhythms and environmental factors merge w/ human industry and improvisatory acumen to create a profound transmutation of energies on behalf of the intelligent will of the steadfast rebels, who use fog, dust storms, the reflection of the sun, and shifts in the direction of the wind all to harness nature’s wrath on their collective behalf. Soldiers are tricked into pursuing women on horseback through a wall of luminous dust only to have their horses blinded by the sudden deployment of golden shields reflecting the sun, fog is used to trick the prime minister’s army into unleashing a torrent of arrows unto unmanned boats rigged-up to collect the arrows for rebel recycling, a change in the direction of the wind is exploited to turn the power of fire against those presumed in its possession, and the prime minister uses the corpses of those in his rank fallen by typhoid for some pretty unsportsmanlike biological warfare. Both sides pull every move out of the Sun Tzu playbook. Red Cliff combines Eisensteinean montage and the mythmaking grandiosity and rabble-rousing of a D.W. Griffith or King Vidor to deliver what is ultimately a visceral, supercharged combat experience directly to the brainstem. The CG digital paintbrush is utilized to dead-serious cartoon effect to open up magnificent plateaus and mind-melting horizons that nearly refuse to enter the eye at all. These images actually use their unreality to make them feel more real, like an overwhelming surplus of stimulus might leave one w/ a sense of scope beyond scope, like a mountain that breaks the mind w/ its size, or an event that refuses to be assimilated by the apparatus of perception. Woo’s unapologetic pop-mythological vision is nowhere near as ornate or precious as that displayed in Yimou Zhang’s House of Flying Daggers (’04) or Curse of the Golden Flower (‘06). Chi bi represents a kind of film that simply isn’t made anymore. The makers of such grand exhibitions almost never have this kind of control over the encapsulation of the infinitesimal. It is rare to see such a massive vision coalesce in the form of such an exited and exhaustive drawing inward – such a total, utter inhalation – of forces, resources, image-images, sound-images, action-images, from the smallest element up to the most awesome. It is so much of the world and of the flesh, in all of its flounce and bounce, that yr heart cannot help but beat along to its. Red Cliff is a blood machine. It pumps it w/ evenhanded control of the nerve meter. It works just so. And it’s a massive little adrenal treasure and a hell of a movie-movie fix. Goddamn, it's almost too much fun!