World Region: Hong KongStarring: Wu Zun, Charlene Choi Cheuk-Yin
Action Director: Ching Siu-Tung
Rating: 4.5/10
Visuals & Art Direction:7
Butterfly Lovers is a beautiful movie. I felt so, so happy watching Zhu and Liang "Big Brother" falling in love in the beginning. High-ranking Zhu goes to a mountain martial arts training center where Liang has lived all his life. Zhu dresses as a boy so that she can go out into the world and start training at the mountain martial arts school.
Both Charlene Choi and Wu Zun are good actors, and both were a pleasure to watch. Choi sounds a little whiny at first, but she later unfurls her sophistication as the plot thickens. I love how Wu Zun thinks and feels things out with his eyes, like many people do in real life. His acting seems natural, lifelike, and subtly spunky to me.
The martial arts were surprisingly good and exciting. I haven't seen Wu Zun in his pretty boy dramas, but the man has got some serious Hong Kong wuxia moves. I can't wait to see more period and action films starring Wu Zun!
Oh! No wonder I liked the action sequences! Butterfly Lovers was coreographed by Ching Siu-Tung, the guy who does some of the most awesome work in HK action like A Chinese Ghost Story, My Schoolmate the Barbarian (Nic Tse), Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Curse of the Golden Flower.
Unfortunately for my still Western tastes, this story is very similar to Romeo and Juliet. The butterfly lovers is a very popular story in China that has been written and produced in many variations. The two are lovers who met in heaven and have been cursed to go through ten unhappy incarnations together. It's a beautiful movie. The end is beautiful, but it is so bittersweet to me. I'm starting to expect most East Asian movies that focus mostly on romance to end in this tragic, bittersweet way. The essence of East Asian arts is often this bittersweet beauty.
To my Western culturization, bittersweet beauty hurts and it seems like fatalism. I'm like, "Why does the more powerful guy always screw things up and kill one of the main characters in the last three minutes of the film? Why can't they just live together and be happy for once?! My god, it's a match made in heaven, no, a match made in heaven for ten lives!" I want to feel saccharine fuzzy by the very end, not that wrenching bittersweet tug all the way to the credits.
I guess I really don't have a sense of next incarnations. That would help a lot. Because they will be happy in their next incarnation for a while. And does it really matter if they live or die? Because they loved each other deeply, and even a second of that is wonderful. On the other hand, strangely (but right on for traditional Asian culture), the bittersweetness and tragicness of romantic love in Asian movies seems to be saying that romantic love makes people do stupid things. Too much attachment maybe?
Butterfly Lovers is a beautiful, delightfully romantic film. If you watch it, just prepare yourself for the usual fare of bittersweet candy. I think this is the kind of movie that grows on you. I ended up writing a lot more about it than I was planning. Recommended.
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