Mountain FogRED CLIFF: I BARELY GOT TO KNOW THEE
July 23rd 2009 08:52
Zhang Fengyi as the ambitious Cao Cao in Red Cliff.
How to cut a film in half and still retain its essence? That was the challenge posed by Western distributors to producer Terence Chang, producer/director John Woo, and editor David Wu when releasing Red Cliff to territories outside of China.
Late last year and early in 2009 the two part epic destroyed the Chinese box office, its vivid retelling of classic Chinese history hitting a nerve with a public that knows every beat to this amazing story.
But such statistics weren’t good enough for pessimistic foreign distributors and Red Cliff was ordered to be cut down, in what must be a first in recent movie making history.
The result is a film that almost feels like it’s in fast forward. Scene’s whiz by and characters jump in and out frame like monkey-mastered marionettes. There’s still two and a half hours of film to sit through, but it feels like its over in a flash.
And yet this abridged telling of Red Cliff still manages to work... just. You can almost imagine the filmmakers sitting down for days figuring out which beats to keep and which to leave for the Criterion Collection release in twenty years time, and their hard work has mostly paid off as Red Cliff still captures the imagination and squeezes the adrenaline.
The film opens in 208 AD, during the final days of the Han Dynasty. Shrewd and ambitious, Prime Minister Cao Cao (Fengyi Zhang) convinces the fickle Emperor Han (Wang Ning) that the only way to unite all of China is to declare war on the territories of Xu in the west, controlled by the warlord Liu Bei (Yong You), and East Wu in the south, governed by Sun Quan (Chang Chen).
So begins an unprecedented military operation against the eastern and southern states, led by the Prime Minister himself. Faced with 800 000 enemy troops and 2 000 ships, Liu Bei and Sun Quan, along with his Viceroy, Zhou Yu (Tony Leung), form an unlikely alliance, brokered by Liu’s prescient strategist, Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro).
A series of desperate battles ensues, both on land and on water, eventually culminating in the epic struggle of Red Cliff, which will forever change the course of Chinese history.
As far as historical epics go this is pretty straightforward stuff, something the filmmakers must have been thankful for when attacking their two and a half hour cut. Regardless, Red Cliff still suffers in its initial scenes as it tries to abridge the set up. An early Cao Cao led battle against Liu Bei seemingly casts the western warlord, his strategist Zhuge Liang, and their super posse of generals, Zhao Yun (Hu Jun), Guan Yu (Ba Sen Zha Bu), and Zhang Fei (Zang Jingsheng), as the good guys to get behind. But all of a sudden a Zhuge Liang is making his way to the south where Viceroy Zhou Yu takes centre stage in the film, along with his warlord master, Sun Quan, and pirate general Gan Xing (Shidou Nakamura).
Tony Leung as Viceroy Zhou Yu.
Thankfully, Woo plus fellow screenwriters Chan Khan, Sheng Heyu and Guo Zheng cleverly constructed the screenplay to follow Zhuge, the crafty and engaging strategist acting as the audience’s cipher into this ancient world of war and politics. It was a bright move, and one that now saves the shorter cut from sinking under its heady weight of characters.
Still, the tighter edit tries to give all of its historical figures the essential scenes to explain their motivations, and is partially successful in that regard. Despite some characters being seriously undercooked, Red Cliff generally provides the audience with the broad brushstrokes that will help carry them along, invested in the epic bloodshed that regularly fills the frame. There remain some clunky moments and jumps that serve to drain the movie of its subtlety, but that’s a quality that Woo and cinematographers Lu Yue and Zhang Li certainly aren’t concerned with once the swords are drawn.
And the battles in Red Cliff are simply spectacular, the bloodshed borrowing heavily from 2007’s spray worthy Mongol, but amping everything up to ginormous proportions, Kurosawa style.
Making the epic contests all the more palatable is the impressive and almost old-fashioned work that both writers and director have done to establish each destructive scene, meaning that when the action kicks off the audience is right there with the characters knowing exactly what’s happening and why. Only towards the very end do things get a little confusing, but that’s really down to the film being determined to give each member of its ancient Chinese Justice League the appropriate screen time to cover their particular heroic deed or death.
So Red Cliff succeeds almost despite itself. The shortened cut compresses everything to such a great degree but still retains the most important beats to the story. There remain times when the editing is so liberal the film almost flakes apart, but holding it together is the resolve of the filmmakers to tell a simple story and also an excellent cast, with Kaneshiro comfortably underpinning proceedings as Zhuge Liang and Zhang Fengyi being particularly impressive as the charismatic, ambitious but altogether too human Cao Cao.
An undisputed epic, perhaps a complete cut will eventually be made available to Western audiences on DVD. Until then, however, this abridged, imperfect but still compelling shorter cut of Red Cliff needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
Check out the trailer for Red Cliff below:
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Comment by David O'Connell
Screen Fanatic
It's funny you mentioned Mongol - I just watched it last night and was going to review it tomorrow. As much as I enjoyed it, the sprays of blood - with thousands of individual drops exploding off the screen - do get a little silly by the end. No thick, streaming jets of claret for Bodrov!
Comment by Matt Shea
20/20 Filmsight
I know what you mean with Mongol. I enjoyed it, although I thought it failed in the character stakes a little bit, particularly because it seems to be crimped in preparation for a sequel or two - something that of course didn't come up with this spliced version of Red Cliff!