An epic black comedy from the visionary Zhang Yimou challenges Hollywood’s political complacency.
Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s Full River Red, his latest tour de force spectacular, ends with a threat of war that ought to make Biden tacticians John Kirby and Antony Blinken curl into the fetal position. Zhang shows multitudes of Chinese soldiers — what looks like thousands unto infinity — chanting an ancient national anthem by General Yue to “feast on the enemy’s flesh and drink their blood.” Not only is Full River Red the clearest adversarial statement to ever come out of China, it’s also — startlingly — the first movie of 2023 with great feeling in it.
That chant climaxes a nearly three-hour epic about political intrigue during the twelfth-century Song dynasty, when the devious prime minister, Qin Hui (Jiayin Lei), who ousted General Yue, seeks to cover up a political murder. Qin Hui is outwitted by a group of bizarrely interconnected loyalists to the old Yue Fei regime — corporal Zhang Da (Shen Teng), officer Sun Jun (Jackson Yee), the minister’s aide He Li (Yi Zhang) and concubine Zither (Wang Jiayi).
Even if you don’t know ancient Chinese history (or China’s contemporary Communist hierarchy), you can relate to this film’s double, triple, and quadruple dealings as parallels to behind-the-scene machinations of America’s current political regime. The big difference is that Full River Red is a tradition-based tale of nationalistic commitment. The film’s quartet ultimately reveals time-honored patriotism — none of that transformative, toward a “more perfect union” folderol. The quartet believes in a national ideal (CCP, CPC, PRC) rather than renouncing its heritage.
These characters act with the desperate cunning and violent bravado familiar from martial-arts movies, which Zhang raises to superb visual metaphor — each scene shot in shades of blue, sapphire, or teal disguises a black comedy about individual loyalties. Feats of heroism are jolting and bloody. This hierarchy of killers and deceivers employs switcheroo treachery and brutality, implementing various blades, daggers, scimitars, and cleavers. It might suggest Game of Thrones, but no HBO show ever looked as good as Zhang’s aerial drone shots or the percussively edited fight scenes. As in his 2018 Shadow, Zhang lends Shakespearean gravity to the politics of tribal relations. Jokester Zhang Da and officious Sun Jun are actually nephew and uncle, and Zither’s connection to both (revealed through a metaphorical “Cherry” song) makes the intimacy vibrant. “I am fortune’s fool,” Sun Jun laments.
Americans can look at Full River Red in two ways: with envy of its classical mythology, or astonishment at its Shakespearean view of character. Qin Hui’s warning that “the wolf has a winning game when shepherds quarrel” is the cynicism of a closed society. Zhang has Yue’s loyalty oath tattooed on his back (and is water-boarded for it); Zither swallows a letter bearing Yue’s poem that is the crucial secret to the nation’s unity. This is not the ideological trash of The Woman King or Wakanda Forever that divides America against itself. Neither is Full River Red pious or sanctimonious. Zhang simply moves toward patriotism the same way his visual scheme resolves into full-colored clarity.
Full River Red has scared American reviewers into indecision. The Los Angeles Times said it “might make your heart sink or soar.” Variety said its “call for national pride will mean different things to different viewers” — a perfect statement of the dithering that passes for tact and now characterizes our journalism and politics. They miss a problem that Zhang exposes.
When Spielberg praised Tom Cruise by saying “you saved Hollywood’s ass,” he didn’t claim that Top Gun: Maverick was a great movie; he avoided commenting on the film’s timorous politics and instead emphasized its box-office bottom line. Full River Red is reported to have grossed 4.54 billion yuan ($590 million) since its release in January, an undoubted sign of fervent, popular response to rival Top Gun: Maverick.
But Zhang ingeniously paces each sequence with hip-hop voice-over interludes — unexpected for a period movie yet apparently more expressive of populist tension than the untranslated Spanish that excluded part of the audience in Spielberg’s West Side Story. Zhang’s hip-hop connects to the film’s spoken-word finale that unabashedly resolves tensions in China’s closed-society national harmony.
Full River Red enlarges the gallows humor of A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (2009), Zhang’s refinement of the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple. Zhang knows what the Coens and other American filmmakers have forgotten: National morality breaks on the wheel of selfishness and disloyalty. Odd that Full River Red’s patriotism seems foreign. It can be dismissed as jingoism or taken as a warning.
