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The saint's agony, the visionary's dilemma. The first shot is from inside a chamber-grotto, through a blue filter. Mongolian landscapes follow, sand and rocky mountains and surging waterfalls and torch-bearing circles, the camera drinks it in ascending and descending swoops. Chen Kaige's joke is that all this splendor can't be savored by the sightless duo at the center: "Master, is empty space white?" The itinerant old sage (Liu Zhongyuan) was given a long-necked sanxian banjo as a child and told to pluck away, once one thousand strings snapped he'd have his vision back. (He's presently at 995.) His apprentice (Huang Lei), decades younger but also blind, tags along into the infinite desert, less attuned to the old man's mystic asceticism than to the sensuous stimuli of a vivacious village girl (Xu Qing). Majestic vistas and paroxysmal emotions are the ingredients of the lush parable, full of clashing symbols: Talk of women as a serpent slithers by a bonfire, prayer to a plus-sized Buddha figure followed by sunflower seedlings raining on beaming faces. The master ambles into a battlefield and wedges his music between warring clans, he questions his holy status as the last string draws near. "Is the world I am going to see the same world inside of me?" Then: "Is it worth it? It is not worth it... It is worth it." Walking backwards toward the edge of the precipice, the girl is last seen as a reflection in a smudged mirror. The old man embraces his dream woman at last, the cook at an open-air noodle shop who sings him a few stanzas about solitude and transformation. Together updates the tale ten years later, with Chen himself as the God of Death (i.e., music impresario). With Ma Ling, Zhang Zhengyuan, and Zhang Jinzhan.
--- Fernando F. Croce |