The Legend of the Mountain

The Legend of the Mountain is a 1979 supernatural adventure directed by King Hu. Hu was an important Taiwanese director (although he began in Hong Kong) -- his films Dragon Inn and A Touch of Zen were highly influential large-scale wuxia (swordsman) films instrumental in establishing the genre.  Hu's The Legend of the Mountain adapts an 17th century Chinese ghost story into an elegant, if fundamentally incomprehensible, spectacle.  The movie is set in the Song dynasty, that is the 11th century and it is full of vapors, fog, and vast mountain landscapes over which ancient stone compounds of palaces and temples, mostly abandoned brood.

A scholar named Mr. Ho has failed his "imperial exams", apparently, the tests required to enter diplomatic or government service in medieval China.  At loose ends, he accepts an assignment to translate a Buddhist sutra, a scripture involving the release of dead souls.  Ho is told that the sutra should be translated in isolation at an abandoned frontier fortress, the so-called North Fort.  During the film's first fifteen minutes, there is little dialogue and the picture consists mostly of images of the hero crossing spectacularly mountainous and wooded terrain.  Along the way, he glimpses a woman in white who plays a flute -- she beckons him forward.  A lama wearing a Tibetan Phrygian-style hat and saffron robes lurks on the trail behind him, shadowing Ho as he passes through the wilderness.  At a place on the edge of the sea, the Bamboo Island Pavilion, Ho rests and seems to fall asleep.  When he awakes, the sinister lama is trailing him again and the woman in white, who seems to be a ghost, appears from time to time to lead  him to the North Fort.

At the exquisite North Fort, a compound of elegant dressed stone walls, causeways over great lotus ponds, and flowering meadows and plazas under massive temples atop a hill, Ho is attacked by a shadowy figure that has long fangs like a vampire.  This turns out to be Old Chang, an elderly retainer who is apparently a deaf-mute.  A brazen-voiced middle aged woman, Madame Chang appears in the fortress and invites Ho to a dinner party.  The mysterious lama is skulking about the grounds and  there is Taoist priest named Mr. Tsui in attendance.  At the dinner party, Ho is introduced to Melody, Madame Wang's daughter, and another beautiful young girl who is one of Madame Chang's servants.  Ho gets drunk while Melody plays her little drum and wakes up in the imperial compound in the apartments of the ancient general's concubine.  In the night, while in an alcohol-induced delirium, Ho has slept with Melody and she now regards him as her husband.  The film associates lotus blossoms with sexual temptation and there are lavish scenes featuring the great water meadow filled with the floating flowers, little islands where insects flourish and copulate.  This part of the movie has a vaguely comic atmosphere -- Ho is entrapped by the household full of grotesque and obsessed characaters.  (It's oddly like a daytime version of James Whale's Old Dark House -- we sense that the people at the compound are probably ghosts of some kind, but they all seem to be eccentric.)  The sinister lama is, in fact, an exorcist and he has a little drum that he beats in competition with Melody-- they have a sort of drum duel that results in the lama being vaporized into a cloud of saffron dust.  Meanwhile, Mr. Ho has begun translating the sutra, work interrupted by interactions, some of them bawdy and comical, with the ghosts in the North Fort (if that is what they are.)   When Madame Wang touches some prayer beads, her fingers get burned to a crisp -- apparently, prayer beads are to Chinese ghosts what crucifixes are to European vampires.  To conceal her injury, Madame Wang suggests that Mr. Tsui and Ho stroll to the village and buy some household supplies -- it seems very incongruous to imagine that there is a village anywhere around.  The land is empty and deserted.  On the way to town, Ho and Tsui amble past a tavern.  A young woman, also clad in resplendent white and with her hair studded with elaborate silver trinkets, invites the two men into her mother's tavern.  She tells them that the market will be closed by the time they get to that place and that they should have a few drinks in the family bar.  Mr. Tsui gets drunk and passes out, possibly after a sexual encounter with the girl's mother.  The girl, Cloud, is told by her mother to pick some medicinal fungus, said to be good for headaches.  She goes with Ho to a strange landscape of sculpted rocks, small waterfalls, and boiling hot springs.  A storm blows up and Mr.  Ho takes shelter in another ruined compound where he spends the night with Cloud.  Cloud plays flute and is, apparently, the "beckoning fair one" that  Ho encountered on his way to the North Fort.  By this point, it seems pretty clear that everyone in the film except for the hapless Mr. Ho is either a ghost or some kind of supernatural agent.

The Legend of the Mountain now evolves into a complicated series of duels between ghosts and priests.  Cloud and Melody both vie for Ho's affections, although, possibly, their objective is to wrest from him the completed sutra that he is supposed to be translating.  There is a flashback that shows us that both Melody and Cloud were performers in the all-girl (and all-concubine) band gathered to entertain a local warlord named Han.  Melody was jealous over Han's attention to Cloud and, so, killed her rival by tipping her off a bridge into a deep ravine.  Han responded by exiling the murderous Melody.  Melody dies in exile, but is resurrected as a demon by a sinister Taoist priest.  After this flashback, which really doesn't illuminate the situation very much, Cloud and Melody fight for Ho, hurling colorful puffs of smoke at one another like hand grenades.  They leap up into the sky and perform pirouettes around one another in the tree tops.  (Most of this byplay is edited to disguise the fact that the acrobats are using small trampolines to launch themselves into the air -- there are a few shots showing some rudimentary "wire work", that is, figures skimming along through the brush about ten feet off the ground. The Legend of the Mountain was made before CGI existed and its special effects are all "practical" -- most of these effects consist of loud detonations, perhaps cherry-bomb firecrackers, and puffs of multi-colored smoke often filmed in reverse so that the smoke seems to suddenly be inhaled by the small blast from which it has emerged.)  Sometimes, the fight is between Mr. Tsui and the competing spirits.  Other times, the sinister Taoist and the rather porcine-faced lama duel -- the lama slaps his drum or slams cymbals together; his antagonist Melody or the evil Taoist pound on their little drums and sometimes the figures whirl by one another in mid-air, bouncing up and down on off-screen trampolines.)  Cloud seems to be a benevolent ghost:  when she plays her flute, we see idyllic landscapes full of song birds.  When Melody plays her flute (in addition to her drum she's a flutist), she conjures up landscapes full of aggressive black birds that dart down to feed on small emerald-colored frogs.  There's another pointless flashback -- we see that the clumsy, vampire Old Chang was once a lieutenant in General Han's army but has now been converted into a shambling, long-toothed zombie-lackey of the wicked ghost, Melody.  Ultimately, Ho finishes his translation.  The sutra gives his mudra special power against the various sorcerers and enchantresses in the film.  ("Mudra" signifies a religiously significant hand gesture or bodily posture that seems to have magical power over others.)  There's a big final duel involving more or less all of the characters.  It ends in a clap of thunder with the various adversaries vanishing or reduced to their attributes -- for instance, the lama disappears except for his cymbals and the two rival ghosts both seem to melt down into pools of smoking bitumen, gurgling hot springs.  Melody's severed head rests on the brink of the asphalt pitch pool where she has melted.  Fog obscures the images and Ho wakes up in the Bamboo pavilion -- it has all been some kind of dream.

The Legend of the Mountain was shot in Korea (with some landscapes in Yosemite National Park) and it's camerawork was conducted in parallel with the production of another film about mountain monks, also made using the same actors who would apparently simply change their garments according to the movie in which they were appearing. (This film produced in tandem with The Legend of the Mountain was Raining in the Mountain.) The final scenes of The Legend of the Mountain are totally inscrutable -- they seem part of the other movie about the monks:  we see a monastery and hundreds of chanting monks with the lama and several other priests presiding over some kind of religious ritual.  The Legend of the Mountain is over three hours long.  It's prevailing tone is that of comedy interspersed with some startling violence.  Some critics call the film a horror movie -- I didn't think it was either frightening or horrible.  The picture belongs to no known genre at least as far as Western audiences would be concerned -- it's not a wuxia (or period swordsman) martial arts movie.  I guess it is a Chinese ghost story -- a species of narrative that I don't understand and on which I would hesitate to comment.  The film involves all sorts of esoteric rituals and spectacle.  It's beautifully shot but emotionally vapid -- we don't really care about the outcome of all of the arcane airborne fighting  Indeed, to Western eyes some of the film seems almost abstract -- figures moving against gorgeous mountainous landscapes, the camera either slowly zooming in or out of the frame.  The picture is far more inscrutable than Japanese ghost stories like Mizoguchi's Ugetsu -- the ghosts in the Chinese film look exactly like actual people differing only from ordinary mortals by their ability to (sometimes) fly a little, or, at least, scoot through the tree-tops and pitch hand-grenade-like balls of smoke and fire at one another.  A viewer familiar with Japanese ghost stories, of course, always expects that there will be a dissolve to show that the elaborate compounds with their towering slate-roofed temples are just figments of the imagination and that, as in a Noh play, what we thought to be a sumptuous palace is really just a grass over-grown ruin, but we don't ever get this pay-off.  Because we don't know the rules of engagement -- that is, what these spirits and exorcists are capable of doing (and what limits exist to their power) -- the whole exercise, full of sound and fury, signifies next to nothing.  The Legend of the Mountain is a beautiful picture full of weird spectacle but I have no idea how it is to be judged or by what criteria.  (The short film essays on the movie are no help.  One of the commentators seems to think that the shots obviously made in Yosemite National Park were filmed in Korea -- this is obtuse to the point of discrediting the critic and his opinions.)