Their methods are official and seemly – but behind closed doors, they’re violent and cruel. Likewise, his superiors manipulate social mandates to gain an upper hand against their enemies, obliging them to walk into traps. The agent doesn’t seem as beholden to social mores as the other characters he’s a little more assertive, and he enters other people’s homes uninvited. He only wanted Gu to take the exam to prevent him from interfering with his organization’s plans. Later, we find that one of these people is a high-ranking agent of a corrupt secret police force. ![]() Gu would be perfectly happy if only people would stop pressuring him to take the exam, but they don’t back off no matter how many times he refuses. The exam becomes a burden on Gu Sheng-Tsai, one of A Touch of Zen‘s main characters. This is perhaps unsurprising: the film is based on a story by 17th Century Chinese scholar Pu Song-ling, whose writing was critical of corruption he saw in society, and of the imperial civil service exam (an exam required for those who wanted to become public officials in China until the 20th Century). It makes them seem like cosmic criminals, imposing structure onto the world which prevents people from achieving fulfillment and damages interpersonal relationships. ![]() In fact, the characters’ need to negotiate a social hierarchy becomes a pressing issue because it plays into how the antagonists stray from spirituality. However, that doesn’t mean its political conflict is irrelevant. Transient TyrannyĪ Touch of Zen treats political conflict as something more temporary and narrow than the means of spiritual fulfillment. It draws a connection between his power and his awareness of the environment, as well as his understanding of his own place therein. He exercises his power by moving to allow the sun’s rays to shine past him. In one scene, the film depicts his power by setting him against the sun. Their leader, Abbot Hui, is able to exert an almost supernatural influence over others. ![]() The film’s most breathtaking imagery is precipitated by the appearance of Buddhist monks in the final act, the wisest and most powerful of all the characters. Their enemies, meanwhile, see the stalks as obstacles they have to break away from the fight to cut them down.īecause of A Touch of Zen’s rich colors and the incidental beauty of its landscapes, there’s a sense of serenity and spirituality when characters attain balance in their natural state. When the protagonists face off with government officials in a bamboo forest, they gain the upper hand by utilizing the height and flexibility of the bamboo stalks. The strongest fighters’ mastery makes them freer within their environments. The fight scenes in A Touch of Zen are about elegance and skill as much as they’re about violence. When the first fight breaks out, it reveals the characters’ grace and immense control over their own bodies. They strive to be in alignment with their surroundings they struggle to move against heavy vegetation, worry about intruding on the territory of angry ghosts, and speak in deferential terms when they talk to people from outside their own families. Throughout the film’s first hour, the characters constantly make self-conscious attempts to be unobtrusive. They struggle to realize that nature manifests as a struggle with their surroundings. It feels like they have a natural place in the world, and therefore that they have some kind of intrinsic nature. They aren’t dwarfed or rendered insignificant rather, they have to share space with other things, non-human presences which manifest as inky black shadows and shafts of light passing through mist. The characters struggle to abide this as they navigate sloping topography and contrasting planes of action. ![]() Humans have only a limited place in A Touch of Zen‘s world. Then, we see ruins of abandoned war fortresses, the dilapidated remains of people’s attempts to claim space for themselves. The film opens with spiders on their webs, followed by majestic, mountainous landscapes.
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