Shadow (Zhang Yimou, 2018)

From what I recall, the reaction to Shadow was pretty muted coming out of Venice and Toronto last year, although the film did go on to scoop up the Golden Horse for Best Film. I suppose one could fault the film, and Zhang, for falling back on familiar stylistic tropes and tics, but I'd be hesitant to do so. For one thing, Shadow is so effortlessly entertaining from start to finish that it seems to me that finding strictly auteurist reasons to dismiss it as minor is a bit churlish, as if to say, "Sorry, Mr. Grandmaster, but unfortunately you've been this awesome before." And for another, I'd submit that this is, pound for pound, Zhang's most creatively successful film since Hero. (NB: I never caught his Blood Simple remake, or his recent blockbuster The Flowers of War.)

At first I was admittedly skeptical, because on its surface Shadow resembles Hero in pattern and design. Whereas the earlier film is organized according to rich, saturated individual colors, Shadow is practically the inverse, all monotone chiaroscuro. The film frequently looks like an inkwash drawing, or more precisely, a work of Chinese calligraphy, with the written symbols replaced by gracefully swooping bodies and weapons. It seemed as though this reversal of Hero's dominant motif was a bit too convenient, but in time it becomes clear that Zhang's motivation is thematic. This is a film about darkness, and choosing very strategic times to emerge, defiantly, into the light.

In the Kingdom of Pei, a great military commander (Deng Chao) has been gravely wounded. In order to continue to hold sway over political events, he employs Jing, his "shadow," a young man selected at birth to serve as his double and decoy (Deng). The commander and Jing are working in secret to go against the self-interested wishes of a weak king (Zheng Kai) to retake a major city lost in battle, also called Jing. Much of Shadow consists of the commander training the reluctant "shadow" in the art of battle, eventually discovering that his own wife (Sun Li) holds the secret to victory.

Shadow is, at its base, a fairly straightforward combination of castle-intrigue and large-scale battle sequences, and it works extremely well on that level alone. To try to identify deeper meanings may be unnecessary special pleading. Nevertheless, I found myself reading the film as a kind of allegory of contemporary Chinese political life, and in particular the perils of being a public figure in the PRC. One must show a particular official "face" to the world in order to avoid running afoul of the authorities, even as one maintains a distinct private self. This demand for bifurcation, naturally, produces crises of integrity as well as a possible loss of the distinction. The climactic showdown poses the problem this way: can the shadow exist without its original, or does the shadow eventually become the last man standing?