“King Hu’s A Touch of Zen” by Stephen Teo June 2, 2008
Posted by Cal in : Book Reviews , 6 comments
Asian action cinema tends to get a raw deal when it comes to serious critical analysis, so it is initially refreshing that Stephen Teo approaches the subject of King Hu’s magnum opus A Touch of Zen with a scholarly eye. The movie is, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest achievement of the wuxia genre – an opinion that is reinforced by the fact that its influence is still obvious in films lauded as masterpieces by western audiences ignorant of the source material.
Previous works by the author made me a little wary of this book. Teo tends to overanalyse things in my opinion and his writing can be very “dry” and dispassionate. The book (119 pages in an approximately A5 sized book, with a further 50 or so pages of appendices and an index) is split into several chapters dealing with different segments of the film running roughly parallel with the film’s narrative.
By far the most interesting sections are the introduction and conclusion, where Teo sheds light on the film’s background with information I’ve not read anywhere else. We learn how the fantastically dilapidated Ching Lu Fort set was constructed and aged (with a flame-thrower, apparently!) and how the film’s failure at the box office (it only became successful after a screening at Cannes some years after release) led to the production company’s slow demise.
After reading the introduction, we are instructed to skip to the first appendix which gives a plot synopsis for the 17th century short story Xia Nü by Pu Songling, upon which certain elements of A Touch of Zen are based. After we return to the text, Teo begins psychoanalysing the work in earnest. He comes up with some great theories and discusses the symbolism on display in the film, even approaching the spider motif that crops up continuously throughout the film from different angles. Several times, he spots things that I’d completely missed or he points out cultural or linguistic subtleties that had completely gone over my head – especially on the subject of Zen itself and the character Hui Yuan’s rebirth, which was a complete revelation to me. Certain of his arguments do strike me as quite subjective, however, and Teo has a tendency to state his opinions as fact – a practice that can become frustrating to the reader.
Nowhere is this more in evidence than in Teo’s repeated claims regarding the homosexuality (or bisexuality – Teo tends to use the terms interchangeably) of the lead male character Ku Shen-Chai (written as Gu Shengzhai in the text). In the short story, his bisexuality isn’t in question (he and the Ouyang Nian character become lovers), but Teo keeps insisting that this is also the case in the film adaptation, even going as far as to claim that A Touch of Zen is “a film of repressed bisexuality” – a claim I can see no evidence of whatsoever. Teo writes that Ku considers marriage “despite his homosexuality (which we perceive in the film but know to be a fact from the original story)”. However, my own reading of Ku’s reaction is that he seems keen on the idea of marrying Yang and is visibly disappointed when his mother tells him she doesn’t want to marry him. Teo argues that Hu “played down” the homosexual elements for political and cultural reasons but I feel that Hu simply did not include that element of the story at all. It seems more likely to me that the character Ku is an under confident, somewhat unambitious man (as seen by his constant rejection of the idea of applying for the governmental exam to become an officer) whose bumbling oafishness slowly dissolves after his first sexual encounter with Yang awakens the confident, scheming strategist that he would become. However, only once does Teo ponder the possibility that Hu may have written Ku as heterosexual and does not offer a single shred of evidence in support of his theory. We are also told of Ku’s supposed scopophilic tendencies and that “the spider denotes…a repressed scopophilic instinct”, but again there seems little hard evidence of this.
The theming of each chapter to a specific set piece of the film does occasionally feel as if you’re reading a hasty novelisation of the film, but Teo interjects his own thoughts and quotations from other critics and reviewers into the text along the way. Teo’s writing hasn’t become any more accessible, I’m sorry to say, and you may want to keep a dictionary handy for when he really start to let fly with his vocabulary. He breaks up the text with some very grainy monochrome screenshots from the movie (I’m betting he took the shots from the Tai Seng DVD) to help explain visually some of his points, and the aforementioned appendices offer a little more background (although feel more like padding) as well as copious notes at the end of the book.
I would have preferred more background on the film and less psychoanalysis. If you don’t believe wholly in what Teo tells us, you will have a hard time accepting some of his conclusions. However, the fact that the book exists at all is something of a minor victory as the film itself seems totally ignored today, and the book does rekindle the urge to go and revisit wuxia’s finest three hours.
Published by Hong Kong University Press - 2007.