The Bride with White Hair (1993)
Reviewed by: ewaffle on 2005-05-19
The Bride with White Hair

Wow—what a movie!

This isn’t really a review since everyone on this board must have seen “The Bride with White Hair”. However, here are a few of my reactions to it.

First all it, it is a masterpiece. The parts of which it consists are amazingly good and it is more than the sum of these wonderful parts.

The score is perfect. It is as good a musical accompaniment for an action movie as has ever been done. Compare it with (for example) the scores from “The Godfather”, “Once Upon a Time in the West” or “Jaws”—it is every bit as thrilling in itself and appropriate to what is happening onscreen.

Ji Wushuang is a perfectly evil villain (or villains). The hermaphrodite co-joined set of twins is a being that the viewer can really love to hate. Super strong, incapable of even the most basic human emotions, he/she lives for killing.

Leslie Cheung as Zhuo Yi-Hang plays a character at least as old as the “Iliad”. Like Achilles on the plains of Troy sulking in his tent he has an agenda different than wholesale slaughter. Cheung is perfectly cast as the sensitive warrior who has seen and done enough killing. The world that Zhuo Yi-Hang inhabits is very well depicted—a military state, constantly under attack by enemies from without and beset by political intrigue from within.

Brigitte Lin—I have no words for this astonishingly talented and beautiful actress. Her ordeal upon leaving the evil clan is incredible and her simple “May I leave now,” at its end is heart rending.

The extended love scene in the pond between Zhuo Yi-Hang and Lian Ni Chang is very sexy and sensuous and, in its own way, much more true to life than similar scenes in western movies. They make love, rest, talk, make love again, talk again, make plans, declare how much they love each other and make love again. When Yi-Hang says that he would rather be struck by lightening than lose the newly named Lian Ni Chang, it is something that we can see ourselves saying—he says it after leaping to the top of a very tall tower of rock but in the context of this movie that makes all the sense in the world.

There is more—much, much more—that makes “The Bride with White Hair” such an extraordinary film.

Reviewer Score: 9