Shadow

 Shadow is a 2018 wuxia film directed by the much-lauded Chinese moviemaker, Zhang Yimou.  Wuxia films are a Chinese genre -- these pictures involve narratives set in ancient China with a vaguely mythological bent; wuxia means "chivalry and martial arts."  Such films are to be distinguished from martial arts movies, films that feature elaborate and protracted duels either hand-to-hand or with weapons.  Wuxia is said to be sub-genre of the martial arts category, stories set in a legendary era involving royalty and knights but with extensive combat sequences as well.  Wuxia involves elaborate, rather gothic, narratives, a bit like plot elements in shows like Game of Thrones.  There are warring kingdoms, love affairs and intrigue, as well as court conspiracies and political assassinations.  Shadow has a complicated, nearly impenetrable plot, a slow, rather meditative pace, and impressive battle scenes in its last forty minutes.  The film is a triumph of design.  Although shot in color, the movie proceeds against landscapes and interiors that are a grim black and white.  Rain falls perpetually from grey skies.  The action takes place in various subterranean tunnels, medieval streets that, although exposed to the (wan) light of day, seem to be far underground, and misty gorges filled with deep pools of water.  The set directors have taken inspiration from Chinese scrolls, many of them a thousand or, even, two-thousand years old -- images of hazy columnar mountains, strange eroded rocks, and distant grey mountain ranges swathed in fog.  Even the blood depicted in this film looks diluted, dark, and, generally, mixed with a monochrome slop of mud and rainwater.  All of the big violent scenes are staged in a downpour that is unremitting.  The only hint of color in the images are the flesh tones.  People wear black and white gowns.  In the King of Pei's court, there are innumerable semi-translucent screens on which the King has painted elegant calligraphy, an "Ode to Peace" composed with artistoc swaths of black brushstroke.  The entire film is composed in the murky greys and debased whites of an old, half-destroyed silent film.  There is no relief from the color scheme or the largely vertical set design -- the action takes place at the bottom of funnels of ragged cliffs, underwater, or on the tilted streets of the medieval city, Jing.  One expects that the sun will come out at the end of the movie.  But this expectation is thwarted -- the ending is like the last act of Hamlet, an accumulation of deaths that leaves almost no one standing; therefore, this grim denouement offers nothing to celebrate -- the rain is still falling.  

The film's plot is convoluted.  The picture starts with some exposition about the war between the City of Jing and the Kingdom of Pei. Pei's great commander and his wife are summoned to the court where rows of sycophantic courtiers kneel next to translucent screens in a perspective extended to the vanishing point.  The childish and self-absorbed King wants to conquer the City of Jing.  But he has (I think) agreed to wager the war on a single combat, a duel between the Commander and the enemy general Yang Cang.  To celebrate this endeavor, the King with his proud sister Qingping demand that the Commander and his wife play a duet on the zither.  Inexplicably, the Commander refuses and defiantly cuts off his top knot of hair.  The Commander declines the zither duet for two reasons:  first, he can't play the zither and, second, he isn't really the Commander at all.  The real Commander, dying like the grail king in Parsifal from a chest wound that won't heal, is holed-up in a secret grotto below the castle.  We learn that a peasant named Jingzhou is the Commander's "shadow" imitating the famous general and warrior.  From age 8, Jingzhou (who confusingly has the same name as the City of Jing), has been raised to act and fight like the Commander.  Although not of noble blood, he's a formidable combat soldier as well.  In the Commander's chambers, the maids set out futons for the Commander and his wife.  But, after everyone has left, Jingzhou goes off by himself, virtuously sequestering himself from his double's real wife.  (The plot bears some resemblance to Kurosawa's late film, Kagemusha which was subtitled, I think, the "shadow warrior.")  Yang Cang proposes an alliance between Pei and Jing City; he wants to join his son Yang Pang to Qingping, the King of Pei's daughter.  Indeed, he sends a token of the alliance, an ornate dagger.  But, it turns out that he is proposing to make Qinping his concubine, a degrading offer that enrages the young woman to the extent that in the hostilities she will take a decisive part as a woman warrior.  The real Commander has learned a new fighting style from sparring with his wife who repels his bamboo cane blows with her umbrella.  Although fighting is a Yang enterprise -- that is, male, the Commander has developed a Yin (female and liquid) technique -- this involves graceful, fluid motions in which an umbrella equipped with detachable spines and blades is deployed against the male swords and lances.  (In several key scenes, duels are filmed from a vertical perspective aiming down at a huge Yinyang symbol engraved on wooden platforms.)  After an hour of preliminaries, the army of Pei attacks Jing City while the Commander's shadow double duels with the great swordsman, Yang Cang.  These two threads of action are cut together.  The duel takes place on a yinyang decorated platform exposed at a height between two sheer cliffs of black rock.  The battle in the city involves a legion of metal umbrella-wielding warriors fending off crossbow shots with their whirling bronze parasols and unleashing storms of jagged steel in the direction of the enemies.  There's a Trojan horse aspect to the invasion -- the army of Pei has to swim underwater in the gorge where the flood is impounded by a dam to surface in the town.  The army wears primitive versions of scuba gear and breathe through hollow reeds connected to air balloons on their backs.  Yang Cang is defeated and the city of Jing taken by the Pei forces.  Quingping is struck down and, with her last breath (she's been stabbed repeatedly) uses the ornate gift dagger to kill Yang Pang, the young man who was supposed to be betrothed to her but wanted her to accept the role of concubine -- thus, she is revenged.  The shadow double finds his elderly mother has been murdered by someone -- at this point, I lost the thread of the film, and who couldn't exactly understand who was killing whom and why.  The real commander emerges from his labyrinthine tunnel and kills the foolish young king of Pei.  He also kills the shadow double.  Then, for some reason that is imponderable, he stages the scene to make it look like the shadow double and the king killed one another.  

The film is elegantly made and, generally, intelligible.  It's slowly paced but the stylized acting, the profoundly artificial sets, and misty gorges and mountains are entrancing -- the viewer watches this thing in a state of half-hypnotized enchantment.  Unlike many heavily stylized and artificial (set-bound) films, this picture is humorless, but exciting -- it reminds me a bit of the second half of Fritz Lang's Nibelungenlied film, Kriemhild's Revenge with its ultra-violent combat scenes and manufactured woods and rocks.  At no point did the film oppress me with the sense of claustrophobia that could be implicit in such a completely contrived and intensely disciplined mise-en-scene.  Shadow is so beautiful and strange that you forgive the film for its flagrant artistry -- of course, it's utterly pretentious but the pretense is about something real and the ridiculous stuff on-screen has a sort of grave and dignified elegance.