1. For his debut as a film director, Patrick Tam directly confronts tradition, staging a tragic, crepuscular wuxiapian. An unexpected choice, considering that his television works were animated by a restless spirit and a new stylistic awareness. Along with other New Wave film-makers, Patrick Tam was reinventing the grammar of narration for images. Some considered The Sword linked to a path that had already been explored, a simple thematic variation, to which, at most, one could recognize good use of photography and a certain formal accuracy. The purpose of The Sword though, was not to erase the contents and substance of the wuxia genre, but rather to re-read the past from a new perspective.
Tam starts from what is already known and, slowly, carves out new meanings from within: at a first glance, an imperceptible fragmentation that acquires full meaning only in the epilogue, building on the details scattered before that here break out. It is no coincidence that the main theme is a classic one: longing for power and self- assertion wears everybody down, disseminating death and destruction. Li Mak-yin (a statuesque Adam Cheng) is a decadent hero, unconsciously Faustian who, due to his thirst of knowledge, which is thirst of power, ravages everything around him, including himself. Parallel to this process of individual destruction, we witness the falling apart of social, family and emotional connections - or rather of society as a whole. The leading characters are, essentially, six: three men (Li Mak-yin, Lin Wan, Wah Qian-shu) and three women (Ying-chi, Hsiao-yue, Yuen-chi). The complex relationships that tie them together are systematically crushed leaving behind only debris. The ties that intertwine the six characters are always dyadic, in a net which is only apparently inextricable. The attraction between lover and beloved (Li Mak-yin and Hsiao-yue), between husband and wife (Hsiao-yue and Lin Wan) or between father and daughter (Wah Qian-shu and Ying-chi), the brotherly relationship between man and woman (Li Mak-yin and Ying-chi), of admiration between master and learner (Wah Qian-shu and Li Mak-yin), between wise man and admirer (Wah Qian-shu and Yuen-chi), between guest and host (Li Mak-yin and Yuen-chi) all end up deteriorating. By his mere presence, the main character sets off a chain of unstoppable reactions, capable of annihilating the collective sphere and crumbling its illusions of glory.
This conceptual nucleus, the downhill parable of Li Mak-yin, fits in the de-structuring of the staging. In the first part, the choices are clearly neo-classic. The naturalistic intervals, magnified by the panoramic frame, the balanced movements of the camera, the range of primary full colours, symbolic to some extent, and the attention to the depth of the shot are all elements that deliberately leave little to plot twists, although present - as in the choice, reiterated at least twice, of having the characters enter the shot from impossible angles. In the second part, the same choices are intertwined with a syncopated rhythm and with more openly experimental solutions. The editing, that proceeds evocatively, makes the structure collapse, suggesting spurious approaches that are concentrated in the vertiginous final crescendo. The red shade of Hsiao-yue's death changes into the plain colour of a wall. The alternated tight close-ups of the details of the bloody bodies of Li Mak-yin and Lin Wan end up by mixing up and mixing us up. The impressive sequence of cuts during the ending of the duel, from the moment when Lin Wan flies towards Li Mak-yin to the shot of the empty entrance of the house, unhinge the exultation for the victory with the emergence of an awareness of a much deeper defeat. The effect is not so much conveyed by the speed of the matching cuts, which is not excessive (19 cuts in 12 seconds), but by the hypnotic intensity of the matching, with the bloody stare of the survivor contrasting with the untouchable tranquillity of the surroundings.
Through the descent to hell of his main character, Patrick Tam derails the entire wuxia genre with increasing clarity. It is no coincidence that the decisive clash between the two antagonists is no longer between the positive hero and his counterpart, as it was implied at the beginning of the movie and as the syntax of the genre would demand, but it is between men who are equally corrupted by their will to possess - whether the title as best swordsman, or two legendary swords, or the same woman. That's why they are both desperately negative.
2. The Sword re-moulds classic wuxia, whilst, at the same time, running on parallel lines. With the benefit of afterthought, it is even easier to see how the movie is part of a process of radical and coherent re-interpretation. A process already carried out, with a different methodology but similar intentions, by Tsui Hark. In The Butterfly Murders, 1979, Tsui takes a plot based on homicides and two-timing and adds alienating elements until the film is saturated. Improbable weapons, baroque choreographies and imaginary inventions fighting against physics contribute to the creation of a sense of hyperbolic amazement. The novelty is not in the plot (a whodunit inserted into a folkloric context), nor is in the impure added elements (individually already utilized in the past), but in what results from the combination of them that explodes only at the end, when one is in the position of metabolizing all the stimuli. The redundancy effect becomes an effective re-writing and overcoming of the models. More moderate, yet equally explicit, is the incursion of Johnnie To. The Enigmatic Case, 1980, follows the investigations of a swordsman who wants to clear his name of the accusations of murder and theft. The movie, with its extremely tight narrative structure (to the point that events are compressed as the director pleased), has an unusual melodramatic tone, highlighted by a persuasive soundtrack and amplified by the opening scenes that, in a feverish flash forward, refer to the two final duels, prey to a fierce brutality that has nothing chivalrous about it. For Patrick Tam, as was the case for the others, the return to tradition is almost a way of paying his dues to it. It becomes the first compulsory step to being able to distant himself from it, in order to head towards more independent works such as Love Massacre, Nomad or his more mature pieces.
In the mid-Sixties, the movies of errant knights had been transfigured by a handful of movies that had re-coded their rules and significance. A revolution that from being technical - for example the naive special effects designed to defy physics in Temple of the Red Lotus (Chui Chang Wan, 1965) or the dancing choreographies in The Jade Bow (Fu Qi e Cheung Yam Yim, 1966) - becomes theoretical. On one side, the nihilist furore and the vertiginous violence of Zhang Che (The One-Armed Swordsman, 1967), that drags the genre towards the physicality of the flesh and to the male yearning for glory; on the other, the syntactic rigor and the allegoric instinct of King Hu (Come Drink with Me, 1966), that alters the ethereal world of swordsmen into a wonder machine that harks back to the (literary) roots of Chinese culture. The Sword continues this effort, by particularly amplifying the pursuit of style begun by King Hu which climaxed in A Touch of Zen (1971). And yet, Hu's Zen Buddhist aporias are not the only sounding board of Tam's work.
In the Seventies, which opened with the triumph of gongfupian (from Bruce Lee onwards) and closed with its comical variations (Yuen Woo Ping, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung), the new wuxia formula was subject to infinite amendments, thereby, with very few exceptions, losing vitality. The peak and point of no return is Chor Yuen, who brings onto the screen the intricate novels of Gu Long. This coupling is to thank for the elucidation of the painful, driving force of the jiang hu, the secret world of martial arts, an impenetrable microcosm separate from the world of mere mortals and ruled by its own laws. Li Mak-yin's will, the central pivot of The Sword, is the same one that animates the characters of Chor Yuen, from Death Duel to Jade Tiger, in the same way as their destiny is beyond hope. The debilitating compulsion to fighting, the yearning for power and glory, at all costs, is transformed into worry about loneliness, madness or death. This can clearly be seen in Swordsman and Enchantress (1978), in which the metaphor is revealed: the jiang hu becomes a miniature house within which the doll forms of the most famous warriors are placed, a theatre of foolish aspirations manoeuvred by a demiurge without scruples, destiny. Spiralling between reality, fiction and inventions, the anti-hero (Ti Lung) believes he has shrunk and has been put into that dollhouse. But even when he realizes reality that lurks behind the facade, cutting the ties that bind him to the stage of martial arts, he cannot go back to the real world, the one that contains feelings and sentiments, because the jiang hu does not permit mind changes.
The continuity is apparent: Patrick Tam re-reads the problems (of contents and representation) presented by Zhang Che and, above all, King Hu from the fatalistic perspective typical of Chor Yuen. His re-elaboration, like those of the other offspring of the Hong Kong Nouvelle Vague, is the wail of yet another revolution heading towards a definitive implosion. But in this case more than a decade is needed before the subversive cycle is complete. And at the end of the incubation period, Ashes of Time, by his protégé Wong Kar-wai, also meaningfully edited by Patrick Tam, and The Blade, by Tsui Hark, flow into a Thermidor which is both sublime and apocalyptic.