Movies

Streaming: after the dazzling Shadow, catch up on the best of Zhang Yimou


It was buried so inconspicuously in the list of forthcoming home entertainment releases, with a pretty inconspicuous title to boot, that I nearly overlooked it. But there it is: after nearly a year of eager anticipation from arthouse auteurists and wuxia genre geeks alike, Zhang Yimou’s Shadow (Universal, 15) is skipping UK cinemas and heading straight into your living rooms from Monday.

Notable films going directly to small-screen platforms is a preoccupation of this column, though they’re often small-scale indies that don’t suffer too much from the downsizing. (The breath-on-your-neck intimacy of last week’s featured film Her Smell, for example, plays well in private.) Shadow is different: an out-and-out Chinese blockbuster, it’s a panoramic period spectacle crying out for the sound and fury of a cinema. Fifteen years ago, Zhang’s period martial arts dazzler House of Flying Daggers made nearly £6m in British cinemas; the idea of a similar project from the director being demoted in this fashion would have been unthinkable.

Times and tastes change, I suppose; Zhang’s reputation, meanwhile, has been dented by such recent crossover clangers as the culturally dubious Matt Damon adventure The Great Wall. But Shadow is a reassuring return to form for the 69-year-old veteran, as well as an entirely sumptuous experience on its own terms: just about every frame invites a separate gasp. An old-school action fantasy rooted in Chinese legend from the Three Kingdoms era (AD220-280), the kings-and-soldiers-and-subterfuge saga is tangled and absorbing, and also somewhat beside the point.

For visually, Shadow is a kind of ravishing anomaly: a full-colour epic that has nonetheless been designed and styled entirely with a monochrome palette, working in more literal shades of grey than you ever thought possible, as if every set has somehow intricately been painted in ink and wash. It’s as purely beautiful as anything Zhang has made, and you’ve never seen exactly the like: it’ll hold up on your television, certainly, though you may wish for what could have been.

Gong Li in Raise the Red Lantern



Gong Li in Raise the Red Lantern Photograph: Moviestore collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

With Zhang reminding us exactly what he can do, meanwhile, you may be in the mood for a streaming marathon of his greatest hits. No surprise that his twin wuxia pillars House of Flying Daggers (still a shimmering, swooningly romantic vision in bamboo-shoot green) and Hero (which has always had less of a soul, but there’s no denying those iridescent autumnal images) are most readily available on various platforms, including iTunes and Amazon.

Less expected is that his smaller-scale stunner, 1990’s rural marital tragedy Ju Dou, is free to stream on Amazon Prime: it’s always been my favourite of his collaborations with the mesmerising Gong Li, and its visuals, saturated in silk-dye hues, are some of his most subtly dreamy. Not that you can go far wrong with any of the early Gong films: Raise the Red Lantern (Amazon), the most universally celebrated of them, retains its shattered, melodramatic majesty; his debut Red Sorghum (part of Amazon’s arthouse Filmbox channel, for which a free trial is available) has earthy, stirring sweep; the moving, politically pointed riches-to-rags saga To Live (Filmbox again) has a graceful, Cannes-awarded Ge You performance alongside Gong’s greatness.

Some of Zhang’s other early triumphs are harder to source online; his later output, meanwhile, gets a lot spottier. 1999’s heart-clutching education reform drama Not One Less (iTunes) won the Venice Golden Lion, but is rather sticky and worthy. A lot more fun, albeit slight, is the out-of-character knockabout thriller Blood Simple (iTunes again, alternatively titled A Woman, A Gun and a Noodle Shop), a reworking of the 1984 Coen brothers film that gets by on daft, carbonated energy. It remains to be seen whether Zhang can hold onto the regained prime form of Shadow. His new film, One Second, was suspiciously pulled from this year’s Berlinale at the last minute, with Chinese censors suspected to be responsible; when we’ll get to see it, and whether UK distributors deign to release it, remains to be seen.

New to streaming & DVD this week

Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now - The Final Cut



Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now – The Final Cut Photograph: StudioCanal

Woman at War
(Picturehouse, 12)
A surprise crowdpleaser in cinemas, this Icelandic gem doesn’t go for easy sentiment: its darkly comic story of an environmental activist reconciling her mission with her dreams of motherhood is nuanced, complex feminist cinema.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum
(Lionsgate, 15)
Nothing nuanced about the latest instalment of Keanu Reeves’s puppy-loving assassin franchise, but it still does this kind of action at another, fluorescently kinetic level: even the blood glitters.

We the Animals
(Eureka, 15)
This story of three brothers growing up under different parental influences in upstate New York isn’t wildly new in the genre, but there’s a compelling, bruised conviction to its storytelling.

Apocalypse Now: Final Cut
(Studiocanal, 18)
Final Cut? Is FFC serious? If not more essential than 2001’s Redux, the film remains magnificent in any form, and this box set includes three cuts — Theatrical, Redux, Final — for good measure.

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