Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, 1979
Directed by King Hu
With Shih Chun (Ho Qing-yun), Hsu Feng (Miss Le), Sylvia Chang Ai-chia (Yi-yun), Tung Lin (Tsui Hong-zhe), Tien Fang (Old Zhang), Rainbow Hsu Chai-Hong (Mrs. Wang), Jin Wenting (Qing), Wu Ming-tsai (the lama), Chen Hui-lou (the Taoist priest)
Ho Qing-yun is an unlucky young scholar who despite real talent and hard work failed to get a position in the imperial bureaucracy, or to have any serious position at all. To earn more money, and despite his indifference to faith, he accepts an assignment from a monastery: to copy a precious religious manuscript on the art of warding off evil forces and keeping demons at bay. The monk who gave him the job sends him to an acquaintance living in a distant corner of the Empire so Ho Qing-yun can works quietly and quickly.
The travel is long, the last miles taking an eerie turn as the people he chances upon look strange, like an old man reluctant to talk, another old man unable to speak and looking like a cripple, who trails him first and then assaults him inexplicably, and above all a beautiful young woman playing the flute, who appears and disappears by magic. But Ho Qing-yun can meet Tsui Hong-zhe and gets accommodated at the place where the distinguished middle-aged man live, an abandoned military fort shrouded in mist where he realizes that the old man who followed him is in fact the valet of Tsui Hong-zhe, Old Zhang.
He also meets a garrulous, meddlesome, and bullying old lady, Mrs. Wang, who invites him to a dinner at her house. When Ho Qing-yun arrives, led by Mrs. Wang’s maid, Qing, he is introduced to the daughter of Mrs. Wang, Miss Le. The dinner is spoiled by the fuss made by a wandering lama and ends up badly for the guest, who drops on the floor as drunk as a fish, after watching a strange performance of drum music by Miss Le, another seemingly ordinary event that has a bizarre and bewitching flavor.
When he wakes up in the morning, Le claims he behaved in flirtatious and disrespectful ways with her over the night. Stunned and panicked, but also mesmerized by the young woman’s beauty, he accepts to marry her right away. Time flies by, the couple seems happy while his writing job moves ahead. But the film stops sticking to the point of view of Ho Qing-yun, takes a wider view, and it becomes clear the women surrounding the lead character have a fairly strange behavior, untold and ominous purposes, and are scared by the lama. Ho Qing-yun, nevertheless, looks as absent-minded, thoughtless, and satisfied as ever, in a funny, nonsensical twist to what is increasingly a sinister tale.
He is forced to change his views, however, as tension rises. Some unpleasant, worrisome words slip from the lips of a drunken Tsui Hong-zhe as both men entertain themselves in an inn run by another nice-looking and spirited young woman, Yi-yun. Then Ho Qing-yun realizes Yi-Yun is the flautist who has followed him as he was arriving in the area. The wrath of his wife, after a storm compelled him to spend the night out, near the inn, with Yi-yun, is the turning point of his story: things unravel, truth comes out, many elements he and the audience have witnessed, at the same time, or at different moments, suddenly fit into the puzzle, and the wider picture is clear – and creepy: the poor scholar has been trapped by a powerful demon, trained by a Taoist priest who is also lurking in the place, in the company of the Tibetan monk, keen on grabbing the book he is copying. Ho Qing-yun finds out, as Le wages an epic war with the lama and the Taoist priest, that the people he befriended (Tsui Hong-zhe, Mrs. Wang, Qing, and belatedly Old Zhang) or fell in love with (Le and then Yi-yun) are just ghosts. He must witness how they vanish one after another, while the Taoist priest is killed. After Le is fully vanquished, Yi-yun lost for ever, and the lama far away, the scholar ends up alone and confused, his copy of the revered text that caused his nightmarish adventures in his hand.
But then Ho Qing-yun has always been lonely: the first image featuring him is a splendid aerial view of his thin figure standing like a small stick on a vast rocky promontory battered by the sea waves. This sets up a visual pattern: the lead is often shot, most of the time alone, and sometimes with one person at his sides, walking through huge, stunning landscapes, with the sky as the limit. Long shots and very long shots are a fixture, underlining nature’s beauty and majesty, or sometimes underlining the challenges ahead, like in the shots where he is touring the fort with Tsui Hong-zhe.
Earlier, the film’s titles appeared on already striking and gorgeous wide shots on the natural landscape: this is a story adamantly and proudly steeped in the natural world, its wonders, its forces, highlighted by shots on a very high, spectacular waterfall. Other images from fauna and flora are interspersed in a great sequence of editing centered on the bodies of Ho Qing-yun and Le making love – with surprising and chilling shots on spiders signaling a looming danger. And natural light also plays a part, like the beautiful glowing sky of a sunset which is the breathtaking backdrop of a walk Ho Qing-yun and Yi-yun take hours after meeting each other for the first time and moments before getting trapped by a storm, the beginning of a new night of love for the scholar, and, unbeknownst to him, the turning point of his story.
Ho Qing-yun’s adventures are framed in a cosmic vision of the world, reminiscent of the developments of a key film of King Hu’s career, his 1971 wu xia pian “Xia nu – A Touch of Zen”. With him, genre movies, shot and edited with consummate skills, with brilliant cinematography and great flair for compositions, are not just high-octane entertainment that grabs right away the audience’s attention and holds them in awe, they strive to be a carefully crafted exercise in contemplation. It is even more vivid in this 1979 film, as the plot does not involve swordplay and fights, but pertains to the ghosts and demons narrative traditions.
Thus the “Shan zhong zhuan qi – Legend of the Mountain” does not only embrace the reality surrounding, and even overwhelming, the lead character, but extends to an otherworldly. It is brought in the story by special effects and an elaborate, atmospheric cinematography highlighting the extraordinary apparition of some key characters, Yi-yun the flautist, the strange lama, or the troubled and violent valet of Tsui Hong-zhe. But it is rather through the soundtrack that the unusual, uncanny, unsettling world Ho Qing-yun has stepped in by chance reveals itself and then becomes the stage of the battle between good and evil. It does not really come from the extra-diegetic music, however suggestive and elegant it is, as could be expected: the shock comes from the diegetic music played by the characters, from Yi-yun’s flute of Yi-yun to the lama’s cymbals, and crucially from the small drums played by Le. Casting a spell, giving orders, or arguing with and indeed fighting against the lama’ own drums, it is where lies Le’s power and wickedness, and notes become as important than any swift move of a sword or any sudden, acrobatic punching or kicking to prevail.
If the astonishing, baffling final sequence of “Xia nu – A Touch of Zen” centered on the spiritual experience and transformation of a Buddhist monk, the final scenes of “Shan zhong zhuan qi – Legend of the Mountain” nicely bookend the three-hour movie, as if things were naturally coming full circle. It is not just the cycle of life that is evoked, but a deeper, more complex movement of the conscience, straddling illusion and reality. The story at the last minute astutely suggests it may have been just a dream, perhaps like the butterfly’s dream of Taoist master Zhuangzi: the Buddhist awakening may be replaced in the director’s view of the world by a bigger interest in classical Chinese spirituality, but he offers a film that is first and foremost a truly magnificent experience striking many a chord in the feelings and thoughts of the audience.