Every year there’s usually at least 1 great foreign film I go to bat for. Despite LOTS of great films being made in America, there’s dozens of other countries putting out a host of quality filmmaking. Shadow is going to be on the short list of films I will push for others to see, putting Yimou Zhang back on the map as one of the great storytellers of the tales of yesteryear.
A “shadow” refers to Jing Zhou (Deng Chao), an unimportant boy from a village…who just happens to bear a perfect resemblance to Commander Zi Yu (also Chao), a feared warrior in the Pei Kingdom in early centuries AD. Injured from a battle with General Yang Cang (Jun Hu), Commander Zi employs Jing Zhou to take his place on King Pei Liang’s (Ryan Zheng) court, hoping to take out Yang and restore peace to the kingdom during this time of war.
Yimou Zhang’s best asset is his visually luxurious eye. In Hero, for example, the director staged a fight under a bright red tree losing its leaves during Autumn, leaving me wondering “How did he pull that off?” Zhang pulls that feat off again in this film. In Shadow, the yin and yang, as well as the Chinese painting, help inform the set design, bathing the movie in black and white, with various shades of grey layered on top. This effect makes anything not that color, like human faces, or blood, stand out and draw the audience into Zhang’s world. The choreography is similar as well, as Zi Yu’s loss to the “masculin” Yang’s spear maneuvers leads him to choose to fight in a more “feminine” style, using one of the great weapon inventions I’ve seen in a while: a razor bladed umbrella. There are several breathtaking fights between the masculine and the feminine, the yin and yang, the black and white, in the rain, which gives each foot stomp or jump mroe power with the splashes generated from each movement without sacrificing color palette changes. Were it not a battle for the kingdom, Shadow could be confused for a gorgeous ballet, with moves and counter moves as elegant as the great dancers at the Bolshoi.
By refocusing on a favorite story from Chinese lore, Yimou Zhang’s taste for epic storytelling also helps Shadow shine above the rest. In general, epics can unfold a little slower than a normal story for good reason: to help set up the world the characters are in, and to help people understand the stakes in the storytelling, and how those stakes slowly escalate the tension until the climax. The Yin-Yang symbol again serves a purpose here, as is seen under Isaac Newton’s third law of motion: every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. By employing a Shadow, Zi Yu formally disobeys King Pei, who then becomes suspicious of Jing Zhou as the shadow. Conversely, the king’s appeasement of the current political situation leads to dissent not only from Zi, but also from the king’s sister Qing (Guan Xiaotong) and other top advisor Tian (Wang Qianyuan). Due to Yimou Zhang’s deliberate storytelling, each little decision builds one upon the other until the inevitable conflict between the Pei and Yang kingdoms, resulting in one of the most dazzling battles I’ve seen onscreen in a long time that I will not spoil in hopes you go see. At this point, Shadow is dripping with tension, and you are invested in more than a few storylines of some of the host of complicated characters the movie has set up slowly and beautifully through Zhang’s direction and the excellent acting.
It’s a lovely, rare thing when a move can leave you dazzled. To earn that type of response, that movie has to hook you early on, either by visually or via the story, and hold your attention with well executed story and tension building. And, maybe most importantly, stick the landing. Shadow succeeds on all levels, giving us something so good, that it made me forget for a while that Yimou Zhang was the guy who brought us a movie with Matt Damon in a ponytail defending the Great Wall against aliens. When Zhang’s actually given great material like Shadow’s, the director proves he doesn’t need weirdly haired Americans to razzle and dazzle the audience. A simple razor blade umbrella will do.