Green Snake (1993, Tsui Hark)

62/100

Anyone know Tsui's colored-gel budget for this sucker? Every dollar withheld from F/X work—released the same year that Jurassic Park made it clear that digital was the future, Green Snake features tsunamis that look charmingly as if some P.A. just tossed a large bucket of water perpendicular to the camera lens—evidently went into creating a singular gauzy pastel look that leaps out even to my defective eyes. (It's subtle color schemes that are liable to elude me; when filmmakers go big, as in Ju Dou or Umbrellas of Cherbourg, I definitely notice.) While this film boasts significantly less dynamic action than does my beloved Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain, there's still always something striking to look at, from the monk's billowing crimson surplice (which can expand to swallow most of the sky) to Maggie Cheung and Joey Wong, as snakes in human form, sashaying along with an exaggerated hip swing meant to suggest serpentine motion. From what I can discern, the narrative, rooted in folk legend (but directly adapted from a novel), employs an alternate-angle approach not unlike, say, Grendel or (egad) Wicked—Green Snake, played here by Cheung, ordinarily serves as a relatively minor character, around merely to cause trouble for her sister, White Snake (Wong). That aspect obviously didn't fully land for me (in part because the movie only sometimes privileges Green's POV), but one gets the idea: She's 500 years younger than her sister, more impulsive, less able to avoid reverting to her true form (a giant cheapo snake puppet), and perpetually horny. That's really all you need for a broad, goofy comedic love triangle involving a doofus and two humanoid snakes that keep attracting the attention of a somewhat cynical Buddhist monk.

Weirdly, though (maybe it stems from the novel), Green Snake attempts something considerably more ambitious than that. No question that much of the film's intended to be comic—I had to keep reminding myself that Cheung had already appeared in Days of Being Wild, several years earlier, and hence is definitely mugging by design (which wasn't always clear to me in the Police Storys; I thought maybe she was just still, well, green). As I've noted before, the Hong Kong sense of humor doesn't always coincide with my own, but I did get some chuckles here from e.g. the ladies covering for Green's regression by engaging in awkwardly "casual" conversation about what White's husband might perhaps have accidentally seen instead.

There's also a serious undercurrent, though, right from the beginning. We first see the monk trap a spider that's taken human form and then (indulge me while I put this fantasy in a context I better understand) essentially banish it to the Phantom Zone like Zod, Ursa and Non. No reason initially to think this monk's not Superman-righteous, but as the film goes on, it keeps suggesting that then again maybe he's just being an intolerant dick. That could be part of the comedy, theoretically, but that's not really how it plays—Vincent Zhao, as the monk, seems to be acting in a different movie from everyone else, never going for funny humorlessness—and Green Snake's third act makes a literally dramatic tonal shift, with an ending that rivals Woo's The Killer for despairing bleakness. Which I sort of admire, but this maneuver simply doesn't feel earned—far too much of what precedes it strives for coarse yuks and/or shimmering beauty. It's as if The Wizard of Oz killed off Dorothy and every resident of Munchkinland. I had plenty of fun, would happily watch large chunks again right now (indeed, I've been doing a bit of that, but the whole isn't terribly satisfying.