"Forget about the plot... and focus just on the visuals."

These are the wise words of Roger Ebert and good ones to keep in mind as you enter the theatre to watch Zhang Yimou's highly-touted (but now in our view, highly over-rated) House of Flying Daggers. Zhang Yimou has always made beautiful films (see Raise the Red Lantern and Ju Dou), but the cinematography in those movies have always been in service of the plot. The most striking scene in Raise the Red Lantern in my opinion is the one where servants are made to unveil huge black lanterns to hang outside Gong Li's concubine quarters to represent her "banishment". The visual impact of those looming black lanterns (as opposed to the symbolically and literally powerful red ones) and the almost operatic movement of something as prosaic as dust are stunning in and of themselves; but they have a greater purpose, to carry the themes of thwarted desire, sexual enslavement, and the profound politics among husband, wives and concubines in feudal China.

Sadly, there is no such depth in House of Flying Daggers. It is a lavish film- stylistically marvellous and visually sumptuous. However, that is all it has going for it. I thought Zhang Yimou was already going the way of style over substance in Hero, but at least there, the colors played as much a thematic as well as cinematographic function. In Flying Daggers, it's all style; and the plot, while gripping in parts, reduced the audience to laughter in the end when I'm sure the opposite reaction was what was intended.

And incomprehensibly, Zhang Yimou ends the film with an Oriental-inspired English aria; I'm not sure if that's only for the American release, but even then, it seems too much like pandering to me. Also, lead actress Zhang Ziyi recently made a small but significant change to her name- Ziyi Zhang, putting her last name behind as is convention on Western shores. It's meant to symbolize her transition to international stardom, but some may also see it as a sucuumbing to the pressures of Hollywood celebrity. While there's something to be said about opening up the Chinese film industry, there's also much value in maintaining diginity and fidelity to your art.

One interesting thing I did take away from Flying Daggers though is a strangely greater appreciation for the Chinese language. Maybe it's being away from home and feeling a more acute awareness of my heritage but watching the movie made me truly understand the concept of things being lost in the translation. I guess Mandarin is a more metaphorical language than English and so many Chinese metaphors are used naturally in regular conversation that they sound awkward when literally translated in the subtitles. I had to translate a whole bunch of Chinese articles for Jude some time ago (believe it or not, all done without a dictionary! Thank you, thank you very much...) and realized how little I had appreciated the lyricism of the language. (It's amazing how much your regard for a language increases when you don't have to take an exam for it...). And so for those of you who read Mandarin, a line from the film (which got really mucked-up in the subtitles, so you can imagine how it lost its punch): "我名是随风...风流的风..."; for the rest of you, there's always Babel Fish. Trust me, it's hilarious...