SEXIS WRONG

up back in the arms of her true love, the bandit Lo. I am not
making this up.
that had me limp in the theater, breathless and waiting for
more—and, get this, its rating was only PG-13.
Follow Zhang Ziyi to her next big, international martial-arts
fantasy hit and you find her in Hero (billed as Quentin Tarantino
Presents...), where she stars with three giants of Asian
cinema, Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, and Tony Leung. This could
have been titled The Complicated and Dangerous Love Lives
of Assassins. Like Tarantino’s society of killers, but without
the sarcasm, the characters here interact in a rarefied atmosphere
of danger and violence, where swordplay stands in for
not only sex but also love, insult, flirtation, confession, etc.
Told in a series of flashbacks with alternate versions depending
on who is doing the telling, various characters love, cheat,
kill, or sacrifice themselves for one another in a filmic orgy of
It’s Romeo and Juliet and a doubleheaded
dong scene all in one.
honor-bound action. In the first segment—which is all about
passion, as a love triangle turns jealous warriors against each
other—everyone sports tumble-in-the-hay hair, tousled and
disheveled seductively into their eyes. In the next segment,
the lovers spend one last night together before they go to
what they know is certain death in the morning. Nothing is
shown other than some symbolic pushing aside of curtains
and a chaste shot of them lying, fully clothed, asleep while
holding hands.
The big opening sequence of the film has our hero, Jin, a
cop, posing as a rich drunk at a brothel, and our heroine, Mei,
an assassin and spy, posing as a blind dancer/whore. He’s
lounging on cushions on the floor, and she stands above him.
He draws his sword on her, the tip to her neck, and when the
camera shows a shot from above, down the length of the
blade, it’s like the slow pan up a porn star’s legs. The shot,
both the way it is filmed and the way it is played, reads essentially
as if he whipped his dick out of his pants and caressed
her face with it.
Am I the only one in the theater who got moist (or hard) at
that point? I doubt it, and yet I don’t think the directors can
come right out and admit what they’re doing,
in much the same way that the packaging on
vibrators has to hide the device’s true intent,
perhaps even deny it. (I kid you not, my trusty
Con-Air vibe came with explicit instructions warning me not
to apply the device to my genital area.) Zhang Yimou’s commentary
about House of Flying Daggers is mostly obscure.
“The women in my films often personify a deeper allegorical
meaning,” he told one interviewer who inquired about the
issues of sex and love in the film. Zhang is accustomed to
having to dodge tough questions, though, since for decades
he has had his films banned and/or censored by the Chinese
government.
No, instead the true mark of their passion is shown on film
when the lovers are walking to the fight, expecting death:
Flying Snow stabs her partner—but not fatally—in order to
spare his life. (He’ll be too injured to fight to the death.) No
final kiss—just a sword in the side. Snow stabs her lover,
Broken Sword, in several segments of the film, sometimes
killing him, sometimes not, and I find it...interesting...that
the way the actor Tony Leung plays it, his first reaction is
to pant. Surely I cannot be the only person who finds this
hot? And then the consummation between the two lovers,
their final passionate scene, in which they both die upon the
same sword. Flying Snow, spooning Broken Sword, pushes
the sword that has already killed him (which she put there
herself) into her own body, as well. It’s Romeo and Juliet and
a double-headed dong scene all in one.
But Hero turns out to be just a warm-up for the truly passionate
follow-up from director Zhang Yimou: House of Flying
Daggers. Here’s Zhang Ziyi again, this time paired up with
the most gorgeous man in all of Asia, Takeshi Kaneshiro. This
one has a love triangle, too, and if you thought the stabbings
in Hero stood in for sex, this time you’re sure. This is the film
John Woo’s first “heroic bloodshed” film, Heroes Shed No
Tears, was shelved by the studio in 1983 for being too violent,
but after his success with gunplay films, they eventually
released it with an added sex scene. Woo reportedly hates
the scene. Robert Rodriguez told reporters on his press junket
for Sin City that the sex scenes were truncated not for
MPAA purposes but because translating the sexual action of
the graphic novels to film gave it too much weight and time.
“They’re single panels, but when you go to the movie, it just
keeps going and going,” he said at a press conference. “After
a certain point, it would look like [we] were just filming for our
own pleasure rather than telling the story at that point.”
So maybe they are making films designed just to make me
wet, or maybe it’s all my oversexed imagination. If it is, well,
that’s cool by me, as long as I can get my itch scratched when
I want it. With Sin City topping the box office and Kill Bill at
the top of the DVD sales charts, I have a feeling I’ll get what I
need, for a few more years anyway. After that, I guess I’ll be
stuck looking for the sexualized undercurrent in Major League
Baseball or something.
190 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG