Probably you are wondering where I have been. As always, I have been depressed, working, or both. For the past few weeks however, I have found a new way of self medicating my despair: old Hong Kong action movies. After a long day of disappointment, client ghosting, money miscommunications, and general fuckery, it is so, so nice to lose yourself in a world where the answer to every problem is kicking it in the face.
But The Heroic Trio stands out even among its peers. If you told me about this movie without any foreknowledge, I’d think it was a Goncharov. You know, a movie created through a yes-and game on Tumblr, catered to the whims and interests of a couple million gay nerds.
Because what do you mean Michelle Yeoh plays a sad, brainwashed henchman of an evil eunuch called The Grandmaster, who is desperate for human connection but flinches from physical kindness because she doesn’t know how to respond to it? What do you mean she has a long lost sister who’s a superhero in desperate opposition of her crimes? What do you mean there’s a third, separate woman who calls herself Thief Catcher, solves all her problems with dynamite, and was enslaved by the evil Grandmaster alongside Ching (Yeoh’s character) and escaped only because Ching lied about killing her?
It is the stuff lesbians dream about. You can’t throw a rock in queer writing spaces without somebody dreaming up an idea like this! And it’s real! It exists! You can go watch it right now! The women all wear the coolest sunglasses you’ve seen in your life! The superhero is even called Wonder Woman, which must be a copyright nightmare but it’s also part of why this rules. It is not thinking about anything that’s not being the coolest movie in the world. And not in a self conscious way, either. In a way where you feel like director Johnnie To just gave himself permission to run with every single idea to its full potential and goddamn does he deliver.
Probably this is the part where I should hem and haw about men directing women led films. But thats so hard to do with a movie where: theres two long lost sisters on opposite sides of a cosmic war. As always with these kinds of movies, it’s hard to tell if they’re blood sisters, martial arts training sisters, or both. But I’m not sure it matters. Because they KEEP coming into contact but do NOT recognize each other at ALL. They beat the shit out of each other SEVERAL TIMES while you are clutching your movie snack begging the screen NO THAT’S YOUR SISTER until they eventually reunite.
And how do they reunite? While dangling off the side of a cliff, they both pull up their elbow length gloves (color-coded to their theme color Of Course) to reveal two halves of a tattoo that make a whole when put together. A symbol that Wonder Woman/Tung has taken as her emblem, shaping her throwing knives in that distinctive pattern. A pattern has an extended scene where she shines it off her knife onto Thief Catcher’s cleavage in a scene that I’m sure is rooted in misogyny but mostly manages to come off as barely buried queer desire.
So you understand why it is hard to do the socially required progressive posturing here. To go ‘oh but it’s directed by a man’, ‘oh but it’s old and problematic,’ to do the ‘of course my simple American brain could never understand the social context of this story’ posturing.
Which like, I admit I don’t. I’m sure the central plot of a demon-eunuch kidnapping babies to attempt to magically instill one of them as the emperor of China exists in a larger context. But also like. I think it’s okay if you don’t know the context because there is so much else happening in this movie. The babies are barely important. The women don’t even save the babies themselves. They just blow up the ones transformed into cannibal monsters, and the evil sewer lair, and leave the babies hanging in their evil bird cages for the cops to find. The babies are maguffians.
I worry sometimes that we build foreign film up as something so Important and Incomprehensible to our feeble little American brains that we have to do a public performance about how much we aren’t the target audience for it and therefore must humble ourselves in front of the movie and apologize for watching it that like, we miss out on some really cool shit.
The only thing that makes me not the target audience for this movie is the fact that I don’t speak Chinese. Everything else: complicated emotional dynamics between ass-kicking women, dazzling fight scenes, cool sets that are designed for a sense of unease and disquiet, a bloody skeleton that walks out of an explosion still alive and even more evil than it was before they blew it up, is the sort of thing I love, have always loved, and will probably still love when I am 99 and we all live in floating pods buffeted by the cruel waves of the Atlantic Ocean.
Which is why it’s insane that I hadn’t heard of this movie before scrolling through Criterion’s selection of Hong Kong movies, looking for something with maximum dudes-getting-kicked-in-the-face potential. This is the sort of movie I’m shocked isn’t on every tumblr gay’s top 100 movies list. It’s not that old, 1993. I’ve seen huge fan followings for older stuff with less women having bloody, intimate interactions in it. This is the sort of movie you’d expect to see photo-sets of everybody’s amazing outfits, gifs of the sister reunion scene, jokes about Thief Catcher always telling the cops to fuck off.
And nothing! Which is wild! The absolute coolest movie I have seen in months, lesbian catnip and nobody knows about it. Because we have all made ourselves too afraid of foreign film, told ourselves we are too dumb to truly understand the nuances and so it’s best just to stay in safe waters and watch things you can’t possibly misinterpret. Which is not as progressive as we are telling ourselves I think.
Anyways. I need you to watch this movie. If you are a nerd you have a buddy with a Criterion password. If you are a nerd you also can probably just find this somewhere, wink wink. If you’re not a nerd you probably wouldn’t like this anyways and also how did you even find this blog.
If you are been yearning for a super hero movie with complicated, messed up women? Watch this movie. If you have been yearning for a movie where superheroes have to reckon with how their own conflicts harm civilians? Watch this movie. If you love complicated layers of identity and characters overcoming brainwashing? Watch this movie. If you want to see a woman using her motorcycle as a boomerang? Watch this movie. Do not be afraid of the subtitles. Do not worry you will not understand the context. Just go along for the ride.
There’s a sequel. I’m going to watch it tonight. It’s called Executioners and it appears to be mad max flavored bullshit. My favorite thing in the world. If it’s even half as good at this one it’ll be fun as hell. I hope it is.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 