To be honest I’m not au fait enough with Hong Kong cinema to really understand what the HK new wave was about, other than that it mainly heralded a new crop of rising filmmakers rather than a big stylistic shift. I do know, however, that Patrick Tam’s The Sword is widely considered one of the chief examples of it, and that I’ve wanted to rewatch it for a very long time… I remember seeing it on SBS in the late ’90s when I was discovering HK cinema for the first time, but that’s pretty much all I remembered about it other than the shot of the villain flying at the camera during the last fight, so I’ve had quite some desire to see it again. I never taped it (that I remember) at the time for some reason even though I did that with almost all the other HK films I saw on SBS back then, and in any case I haven’t had a functioning VCR for 15 years, so Eureka’s recent blu-ray edition was welcome.
Anyway, the titular sword is the Harmonious Sword, which was clearly named ironically or sarcastically; its owner fears he has a cursed object and retires from martial arts, but our anti-hero still wants to test his swordsmanship against the old boy and winds up doing so with the Harmonious Sword… and, unfortunately for both of them, someone else is after the sword as well, which lives up to its reputation for bringing ill fortune. This was Patrick Tam’s first film after a few years in TV, and quite a debut it was; perhaps not quite as heavy on the action as old-school wu xia films—though it certainly delivers with the berserk climax when that comes—and more interested in the question of whether or not being the best swordsman in China is actually something worth going after, especially given the human cost of doing so. A solid piece of work, and good to revisit after all this time.
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