The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk (Corey Yuen, 1993)
The Legend of Fong Sai-yuk is a longtime personal favorite, a film I discovered on VHS almost 25 years ago during my first rush of Hong Kong movie binging. Having only recently discovered Jet Li, I was renting everything I could find that he appeared in. The film starts off pretty wild, with Li using kung fu to win at track and field (while avoiding injuring a passing ant). Twenty minutes in he starts to fight Sibelle Hu on a big wooden scaffold, the two sending logs flying at each other, which was pretty cool, but still the kind of flash-cut wire-stunt I’d seen before in stuff like Swordsman II. But then they leapt into the crowd and started fighting each other while standing on the heads and shoulders of the assembled mob and I quite simply levitated off my couch. It was the craziest action sequence I’d ever seen and I was hooked for life. It wasn’t the only moment like this I found in that first flush of Hong Kong movie mania. There was a certain quick flashback in The Killer that I had to rewind and watch over and over again. There was the shootout with Phillip Kwok in the hospital in Hard-Boiled. There was the whole second half of Chungking Express. Movies filled with moments and ideas and crazy energy that nothing twenty-plus years of being a Hollywood movie nut had prepared me for. I don’t imagine this kind of experience is unique, especially among cinephiles of my generation, when Hong Kong film was even harder to find, and even less respected, than it is these days.
But I hadn’t watched Fong Sai-yuk in the last ten years. Partially because the DVD I have of it is so bad, really not much better than the old VHS copies. But mostly because I was afraid it wouldn’t hold up, that after almost a thousand other Chinese-language movies, and hundreds of other Hong Kong action films, it just wouldn’t be that special, that what once seemed so wild and shocking would be just another wire-fu movie, just another period wuxia film, or even just another sloppily thrown together but trashily fun film from Corey Yuen. That’s the danger of a film criticism that relies on the shock of the new as a measure of value: in addition to fostering a kind of imperialist exoticism (oh those movies from Country X are so weird, I love them!), the judgements tend to rely on ignorance of local culture and film history, because the more familiar you are with customs and legends and tropes, the less “weird” they seem.
And the fact is, The Legend of Fong Sai-yuk really isn’t all that strange. It’s still a Corey Yuen movie, of course, which means it privileges spectacle and surprising choreography over character or plot coherence, even more than most Hong Kong action films of the late 80s and early 90s. It’s also a Jet Li movie, which means it has that peculiar blend of physical mastery, charisma, and utter lack of sexuality that defined that great star’s image in the peak years of his career. Despite choreography by veterans of Hong Kong kung fu Corey Yuen and Yuen Tak, Li’s movements still stand out as incongruous compared to other Hong Kong film stars, a result of his training in Northern Chinese Wushu rather than Southern forms like Lau Kar-leung’s Hung Gar or the Seven Little Fortunes and Yuen Clan’s eclectic mix of Peking Opera acrobatics with traditional kung fu styles. His movements are more flowing, more elegantly circular, and more aided by wires than the work of stars like Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, or Gordon Liu. They’re just as beautiful, but they never feel as real.
That doesn’t matter of course in a sequence as wild as the Sibelle Hu duel. Yuen and Li use wires and flash cuts and careful framing to do the impossible, in the style of Ching Siu-tung’s contemporary work with Tsui Hark (Swordsman II, for example) building energy and sacrificing less intelligibility than one would expect. This is a very different approach than Yuen’s mid-80s classics for Sammo Hung’s D & B Films, Yes, Madam with Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock, and Righting Wrongs, with Rothrock and Yuen Biao, which are more traditionally cut with an emphasis on showing the physical skills of the stars. This new approach pays off though in that the film doesn’t have to shift styles when the fights involve less skilled actors, such as the subsequent scaffold fight between Hu and Josephine Siao. Yuen can use editing to hide the stunt performers for the most difficult effects without rupturing the flow or style of the film, which in turn allows him to emphasize the two women’s performances, as Hu falls for Siao (believing she is Fong’s brother, not his mother) providing the film a much needed dose of sex and romance (nowhere to be found in the wholly chaste interactions between the ostensible lead couple, Li and Michelle Reis).
Mostly though, Fong Sai-yuk plays as a kind of riff on Li and Tsui’s Once Upon a Time in China series, the success of which launched a mini-revival of the period kung fu/wuxia film after years of subordination to John Woo/Ringo Lam style Heroic Bloodshed crime thrillers. Like Wong Fei-hung, the hero of that series, Fong Sai-yuk is a familiar character in Hong Kong film, a folk hero with a kung fu lineage dating back to the Shaolin Temple itself. He’d been played memorably in the 1970s by Alexander Fu Sheng in a series of movies directed by Chang Cheh (Heroes Two, Men from the Monastery, Shaolin Temple) which in turn helped inspire Jackie Chan’s portrayal of Wong Fei-hung as a youthful dope in 1978’s Drunken Master. Tsui and Li’s Wong gave the character back his dignity while retaining his innocence, tailoring the role to Li’s particular strengths as an actor (his romance with Rosamund Kwan’s Aunt 13, for example, only works because it’s entirely unexpressed). Fong Sai-yuk then takes that persona and tweaks it, melding the grim determination of Li’s Wong with the dopiness of Fu Sheng’s Fong. The more scandalous version of the young hero, exploited by Chan and Yuen Woo-ping in their take on Wong Fei-hung, are instead shifted to Fong’s mother, played by Josephine Siao (according to legend, Fong’s mother learned kung fu from her father, who was one of the Five Elders of Shaolin). While Fong is a carefree kid who ultimately runs headfirst into great danger to protect his friends and family, his mother is a rascal, nearly impaling customer at the family’s textile store and recklessly romancing the wife of the local Manchu governor, albeit somewhat accidentally. Siao’s brilliant performance remains the work she’s best known for in the West, if only because so few of her films have made it over here (or onto the internet with English subtitles). It’s so good in fact that Chan borrowed the whole idea the next year for Drunken Master II, giving his Wong a copycat mom played (with great charm) by Anita Mui.
It’s not a parody of Once Upon a Time a China though. Not in the way that Yuen’s All for the Winner (like Fong Sai-yuk, written by Jeffrey Lau, who also co-directed) was a parody of Wong Jing’s God of Gamblers (which was itself a parody of Wong’s own Casino Raiders, which he’d released six months earlier. This, by the way, is not nearly the strangest fact about the God of Gamblers series). Yuen gets some comedy out of undermining the rectitude of Li’s Wong persona, but he also draws on the moral weight of that performance for the final act of the film, when a now righteously angry Fong marches into town to rescue his to-be-executed father. In place of the complex negotiation of politics that Tsui explores in the Once Upon a Time in China series, as Wong tries to find a balance between competing imperatives of tradition, imperialist aggression, and local modernization, Yuen and his writers (Lau along with Chan Kin-chung (who also worked on Johnnie To’s Sparrow) and Kevin Tsai Kong-yung, mostly known as a TV host in Taiwan) merge the Fong story with that of Louis Cha’s novel The Book and the Sword, which had been adapted in two parts by Ann Hui in the mid-80s (The Romance of Book and Sword and Princess Fragrance). In this version, Fong’s father is a member of the Red Flower Society, an organization of Ming loyalists who are trying to overthrow the Qing Emperor, or at least get him to admit than he is in fact Han Chinese and not Manchurian (hence the film’s opening dream sequence, which appears to have nothing at all to do with the rest of the movie). It’s a kind of wuxia twist on The Man in the Iron Mask, and allows Yuen to position Fong as a member of the anti-Manchu resistance, with all the associations that has with cultural conflicts between Northern and Southern China, Hong Kong and the PRC, and China and Outsiders in general (Japan, the West, etc), without having to invoke the legends around the Shaolin Temple, which had not really returned to popular favor during the early 90s period martial arts film revival (which may have had something to do with their association with the passé Shaw Brothers films of the older generation, but I don’t know. That’s a Subject for Further Research).
Where the Once Upon a Time in China films chart a complex history of late 19th/early 20th Century China, attempting to find a kind of cultural nationalism that accepts the advances of modernity without abandoning traditional culture while also maintaining justice and the rights and freedoms of the Chinese people, The Legend of Fong Sai-yuk negotiates an almost entirely fictional space, with characters that are more legendary than factual, a film whose world is based not in history but in historical fiction, both literary and cinematic. On all sides it’s surrounded by more extreme versions of itself: Swordsman II and Kung Fu Cult Master (another favorite of my youth, a nigh-incoherent Jet Li-starring Louis Cha adaptation directed by Wong Jing) are more chaotic, Once Upon a Time in China is more sophisticated, Drunken Master II is more physical (and more successful), there’s even Burning Paradise in Hell, a darker vision of the Fong Sai-yuk myth directed by Ringo Lam. But still, Fong Sai-yuk’s most magical moments retain their potency. Through all the shifts of tone and jumbles of influences, nothing can take away the romance of Sibelle Hu floating to the ground held in Josephine Siao’s arms, or the wonder of Jet Li playing an unhinged and wire-aided game of kung fu Floor is Lava.
