Wuxia

I just had the pleasure today of watching "The Blade," a wuxia flick by Tsui Hark. It shares a lot of parallels with  "One-Armed Swordsman," which I've also seen recently. I think it's important to view the latter movie first and then watch the former because you won't get the full impact otherwise. Seen the order I recommend, the two films become a sort of tension between fantasy and what-most-likely-was-the-reality. 

"The Blade" is definitely grittier; it's a deconstruction of the typical wuxia fare, and it starts that off by having the plot lampshaded by a female narrator. She points out quite rightly that life for your itinerant warrior isn't romantic at all - you have to deal with poverty and other people would soon as kill you as look at you. Underworld figures are that - underworld figures. As in, bandits and robbers and murderers. 

And you might as well kill yourself if you're a civilian - aside from the same problems I stated above, you have to deal with getting victimized for sport by roving warlords. And it's even worse if you're a woman...

The ending was quite sad - the narrator gets left behind and her man has to walk the earth so that he doesn't become a target - and perhaps because he caught the bug to somehow gain glory for himself in his crapsack world. She spoke something quite memorable to me: she said that the Jianghu that they live in is about getting revenge, from generation to generation. She even admits that if the villain hadn't died before her father succumbed to his wounds she would have gone on to exact vengeance herself. In that kind of a universe, escalation is inevitable. And that now kind of makes me see all kung-fu movies in a different light.