Tag: Ronny Yu Yan-Tai

The Bride with White Hair (白髮魔女傳, Ronny Yu, 1993)

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“This is the so-called underworld rule. You have no choice.” the hero of Ronny Yu’s gothic fairytale The Bride White Hair (白髮魔女傳) is told, only to reflect “Yes, I do.” though the world will eventually prove him wrong. Tinged with handover anxiety, the film finds its star-crossed lovers longing to exercise their choice of exile, to be allowed to live quietly outside of the political turbulence that surrounds them. But in the end their love is not strong enough to overcome their difference and doubt becomes the ultimate act of emotional betrayal. 

This is a tale that signals its tragedy from its inception. The Ching emperor is deathly ill and only a flower growing on a distant mountain that blossoms only once every 20 years can save him. “This flower is not for you” the emissaries are told by man who appears to be frozen in more ways than one, relating that he has waited 10 years for a woman who may have forgotten him. As a young man, Yi-hang (Leslie Cheung) was the roguish heir to the Wu Tang clan whose recklessness sometimes caused him to behave in unorthodox ways in the name of justice. The eight clans of Chung Yuan are beset on both sides, caught between the conflict of Ching and Ming while fearful of an “Evil Cult” that otherwise destabilises their icy grip over the local area. 

It’s becoming clear to Yi-hang that he may not be on the right side. The people are oppressed and starving but their attempt to procure a little sustenance for themselves leads to a bloody raid with clan soldiers cutting down peasants until a mysterious woman in white (Brigitte Lin) arrives wielding a whip that can cut people in half. Interrupted by a tragic scene while napping in the forest, Yi-hang is immediately smitten with the female assassin whom he later realises is the same girl he saw as a child who saved him from wolves with the song of her flute. 

The woman is an orphan taken in by the cult and trained up as an assassin. She has only a surname, Lien, and is then symbolically “reborn” when Yi-hang gives her her name, Ni-chang. Having fallen in love, the pair vow to leave the underworld together and live in the pastoral paradise of the watering hole where they first made love. “This underworld doesn’t belong to us, let them fight for it” Yi-hang insists, attempting to exercise his choice to escape a system he sees as corrupt before it strains his integrity but as he’ll discover he’s not as much choice as he thought. 

In the shadow of the Handover, it might be tempting to read Lien and Yi-hang as ordinary people who just want to live quietly and resent the intrusion of politics into their lives, though they remain caught between two opposing powers with no neutral space for them to occupy. The same could be said of the cult’s leaders, a pair of crazed conjoined twins, one male one female, who are fused at the back in a potent symbol of duality. The twins were once members of the Wu Tang clan but were betrayed and exiled, driven mad by their banishment. At the film’s conclusion, Yi-hang symbolically frees the twins by splitting them apart but their separation leads only to their deaths. In the end, Yi-hang betrays his love because the underworld does not permit it to exist. He doubts Lien’s word and his rejection of her sparks her metamorphosis into the title’s Bride with White Hair, a vengeful spirit of hurt and rage now condemned to eternal wandering just as Yi-hang is condemned to life a waiting only to watch a flower wither and die knowing that he has damned himself. 

Yu’s world of melancholy romanticism is typical of that of early ‘90s wuxia though carries a touch of the gothic not least in the Bride’s cobweb-like hair which eventually becomes her finest weapon. The pervading sense of longing seems to hint at a future act of imperfect union, tinged with volatile ambivalence but perhaps finally suggesting that this romance is doomed to failure because the corruption of the world into which Yi-hang, the authority, was born is simply too great to be conquered by the innocence of his love. 

The Bride with White Hair screens screens at UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley April 23 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Occupant (靈氣逼人, Ronny Yu Yan-Tai, 1984)

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There’s no such thing as a reasonably priced apartment, and so when you find one that seems strangely spacious for the rent, it’s prudent to wonder why that might be. Yes, that’s right, your dream apartment may in fact be haunted! Going a bit meta, Ronny Yu Yan-Tai gets in on the comedy ghost game with The Occupant (靈氣逼人), a tale of supernatural suspense starring Taiwanese-Canadian actress and singer Sally Yeh as a young woman returning from Canada for a three week stay to work on her dissertation researching “Chinese superstition”.

Having not thought to book ahead for her accommodation, Angie (Sally Yeh Chian-Wen) is shocked to discover that hotel rooms in the Hong Kong of 1984 are in no way cheap. Locked out of even the cheapest flea pits, she decides to try renting an apartment only to run into the slimy Hansome Wong (Raymond Wong Pak-Ming), an unscrupulous estate agent/used car salesman. Angie spots an apartment sitting on his board that’s in her budget and asks to see it. Hansome is delighted because it’s been on the market ages, but what he doesn’t disclose is that the reason it’s so cheap is that the place is haunted. Angie is originally quite confused by the fact her furniture seems to move back to its original position all by itself, and irritated by loud noises such as a woman singing and a couple having an argument late at night, but on being told that she’s the only resident by the decidedly creepy caretaker (Yam Ho), decides she’s not really bothered if the apartment has another occupant besides herself and anyway it might be quite useful for her thesis. 

Very much in the Wong Jing vein, much of the early comedy revolves around Hansome’s cringeworthy attempts to worm his way into Angie’s life. Luckily for her, he says, Hansome is a very “superstitious” person and so offers to show her around all the best “superstitious” sights of the city, particularly a local temple where they seem to do every kind of taoist ritual going. The problem is that Angie can’t seem to get rid of him. He even pulls the trick of saying that he left something behind in her apartment so he can come in and retrieve it, only to get his arm trapped in a priceless vase. Hearing about the ghost he vows to stay the night and protect her from the boogeyman, but he didn’t count on the real thing turning up and expelling him from the apartment in exasperation with creepy men everywhere. 

Meanwhile, Angie is actually quite taken with a handsome policeman she runs into at the airport, but incorrectly assumes he’s a “sex maniac” because he was only hanging out with her as camouflage for surveilling another woman who turned out to be a pickpocket. Valentino (Chow Yun-Fat) is an honest cop, which is why he ends up getting asked to take some time off after discovering a fellow officer visiting an establishment they were raiding on a tip off that it was employing underage girls. Like Hansome, Valentino has also taken to Angie, if in a slightly less creepy way, and the three of them eventually get together to try and solve the ghost problem (not that Angie actually has much of a problem with it). 

On investigation, Angie discovers that the previous occupant of the apartment was a nightclub singer who apparently shot herself after a failed affair with a married man who wouldn’t leave his family. She becomes ever more obsessed with the dead woman, Lisa Law (Kitman Mak Kit-Man), despite the warnings from Valentino’s former policeman turned taoist priest buddy (Lo Lieh) who tells her that the ghost most likely bears a grudge and will try to engineer a reprise of her tragedy using a susceptible subject. Yu has fun parodying some of the genre staples like magical charms supposed to ward off ghosts which get mysteriously lost at critical moments, but edges towards a real supernatural dread as the curse takes hold, swallowing our trio in a bizarre recreation of the past which accidentally reveals a long hidden truth and helps to alleviate the ghost’s anger. In her frequent voice overs recorded on a dictaphone, Angie reveals that she came to Hong Kong with a low view of “Chinese superstition” but thanks to her experiences now has a new appreciation for the power of the supernatural. Ghosts it seems can’t be exorcised so much as appeased, ignore them at your peril.

Original trailer (no subtitles)