House of Flying Daggers (2004)

House of Flying Daggers arrives from 2004, a year when a director could still stage a love triangle among imperial police and call it entertainment. Zhang Yimou fills the Tang dynasty with bamboo, snow, and the wuxing colour theory, and the result is gorgeous enough that Roger Ebert advised ignoring the plot entirely. The plot concerns Mei, a blind dancer at the Peonyhouse, two officers named Jin and Liu, and a rebel army that steals from the rich and gives to the poor. That arrangement earns a modest nod in our accounting, though the Flying Daggers predate the modern critique of capital by eleven centuries and appear to have no shareholders to dispossess. A Robin Hood motif is not a manifesto.

The film's social consciousness is otherwise thin, and we record this without malice. The cast is entirely East Asian, which reflects a Chinese-language production set in ninth-century China, not a directive from a studio diversity office. Mei is a capable fighter and the emotional centre of the piece, but the screenplay positions her as the prize in a contest between two men, and a scene of attempted assault in the brothel is staged as a ruse and never revisited. Her blindness turns out to be an act, which removes the disability from consideration and leaves nothing to file under neurodivergence. There is no racial commentary, no climate anxiety, no body-positivity messaging, and no sermon at the end. The film wants to show us daggers flying through a bamboo grove, and it does.

The result is a romantic martial-arts spectacle of high craft and low ideological content. It was nominated for an Academy Award for cinematography and won nothing. Cannes gave it a twenty-minute ovation, nineteen minutes longer than most films deserve. We recommend it for the visuals, and for the melancholy fact that a beautiful woman destroying two men remains, as the Han poet Li Yannian observed, a theme with remarkable staying power.