Hero

1. I suffered two heart attacks while playing the DVD of Zhang Yimou's Hero on my new computer. The language and subtitle options were fiddly (I pride myself too much on my Mandarin to turn on subtitles) - and in the middle of all that fiddling, I got - not one - but TWO blue screens in a row, with the same awful "memory dump" message that I got when the hard disk in my laptop died last year. I can tell you alot of suppressed memories came flooding back!

2. You can only conceive how powerful a film is (or how compelling a director) when you realise how much it dogs your reception of other works, related or otherwise. While watching the Maggie Cheung-Tony Leung romantic setup in Hero, in one corner of my mind I realize I'm still seeing them as Chow Mowan-Su Lizhen in Wong Kar-Wai's (yes, I know I'm a little obsessed with him) In the Mood for Love. I don't directly think of them as CMW-SLZ, of course - yet their ghosts linger and haunt every scene. And I know everytime they come up as a couple onscreen, I will see a little CMW-SLZ reincarnation in their every emotion, their every story, their every romance. Now (and I ask this rhetorically) how many films make you do that?

3. I have a friend who is colour-blind, so I make a mental note to warn him about this film. You have to watch it to understand why - in any case the colours in ZYM's films are always steeped in meaning. He started out as a choreographer, and it shows. You can always tell a filmmaker's roots - just as it shows with WKW's films, who started out as a comedy scriptwriter; or Roeg, who was first a film editor. Or Pasolini, who started out with art history, and is also poet and philosopher (and Marxist!) before he went into film.

4. In every period film in which I've seen Zhang Ziyi so far, she always has a scene where she rides a galloping horse (btw I learnt a French proverb the other day about a galloping horse: "chassez le naturel, il revient au galop". Go figure.) Crouching Tiger: she rides a galloping horse to and from Michelle Yeoh's house to make the antidote for poisoned Chow Yun Fat. House of Flying Daggers: she rides a galloping horse after Takeshi Kaneshiro when she decides to elope with him. Hero: she rides a galloping horse only to see Tony Leung killed by Maggie Cheung. I haven't seen all her kungfu films to date (blame it on the marketing caprices in this part of the world) but I am certainly going to keep an eye out.

5. There is startling wisdom in this film - alot of it, of course, metaphorical. All that stuff about the sword and swordplay and the candles and the calligraphy - I can understand why it might try one's patience, get the eyeballs to roll around a little. Yet......maybe it's the language, which always stirs my blood while I'm stuck here in a foreign land. Maybe it's the appeal to a history and heritage which resides in the recesses of my being, extant no matter how many French proverbs I learn. Maybe it's the reminder of a time when I had sought, not found, and now no longer seek. In any case, it renews my faith: that there are answers to the many questions we ask ourselves (ok, the questions I ask myself). It helps me believe: that it is possible. That they can be found: peace, compassion, and the end to suffering.