A Touch of Zen [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

Director: King Hu, Hu King King Hu

Overview

An influential martial arts film and an acknowledged influence on Ang Lee's amazing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, King Hu's A Touch of Zen opens with young scholar Ku Shen-chai working at his portraiture stand in a small frontier town. He lives with his nagging mother in a supposedly haunted, rundown house at the edge of the abandoned Ching Liu estate. One day, a stranger named Ou-Yang Yin asks for his picture to be painted, and then suddenly leaves. Soon, another stranger -- this time a beautiful woman named Yang Hui-Ching -- suddenly moves into the complex next door. The presence of these strangers has an increasingly unnerving effect on Ku, and he rightfully comes to believe that the entire town is involved in some bizarre political intrigue. After a night of passion between Ku and Yang, Ou-Yang Yin stages a surprise attack on the compound, which Yang surprisingly thwarts with dazzling aplomb. Yang reveals to him that her father was an honorable general executed due to the nefarious doings of the powerful Eunuch Wei. With the aid of General Shih and Lu (who pose as the town's blind beggar and herb vendor respectively), Yang was spirited away first to a monastery where she learned martial arts and then to Ku's remote corner of China. Ou-Yang Yin, Eunuch Wei's henchman, has in turn vowed to pursue her to the ends of the earth. As Ou-Yang Yin rallies Wei's army to the walled estate, Ku -- having spent a lifetime researching military history -- devises a brilliant strategy to crush the siege and win the heart of this most unusual woman. Though his plan works, he fails to win the loyalty of Yang; she flees into the night as Ku slept. After searching desperately, Ku finds her in the same monastery where she learned kung-fu. Now a Buddhist nun, she hands over their child to him and sends him packing. Realizing that Ku is in danger, Yang and her mentor -- a saintly abbot -- then set out to protect him. Suddenly out of nowhere, Hsu Hsien-Chen -- the profoundly evil army commander of Eunuch Wei -- confronts the abbot and an all-out battle between good and evil ensues. Screened at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival and winning a technical prize, this was the first Chinese language film ever to win a major western film festival award.

Product Details

Release Date:	07/19/2016
UPC:	0715515181914
Original Release:	1971
Rating:	NR
Source:	Criterion Collection
Region Code:	A
Language:	English
Time:	3:00:00
Sales rank:	9,868

Special Features

4K Digital Restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack; Documentary from 2012 about Director King Hu; New Interviews with actors Hsu Feng and Shih Chun; New Interview with Filmmaker Ang Lee; New Interview with film scholar Tony Rayns; Trailer; Plus: An essay by film scholar David Bordwell and notes by Hu from a 1975 Cannes Film Festival press kit

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Ping-Yu Chang	Ku's Mother
Roy Chiao	Golden Monk
Han Ying-Chie	Hsu
Chun Shih	Ku Shen Chai
Peng Tien	Ouyang Nin
Billy Chan	Actor
Hsu Feng	Yang
Pai Ying	Shih
Tien Peng	Ou-Yang

Technical Credits

King Hu

King Hu	Director,Screenwriter
Hu King	Director

Editorial Reviews

One of the finest Chinese-language films ever produced, King Hu's sprawling epic is at once the apogee of the Hong Kong marital arts films and a meditation on human nature. Structured in a manner more akin to Chinese opera than to the Aristotelian three-act structure, Hu's plot line doesn't unfold so much as it evolves. Hu envisioned the narrative progress under a trifurcated thematic rubric based around human consciousness -- the first part being superstition, the second politics, and the third religion. The first two-thirds of the film establishes A Touch of Zen as a masterful genre picture. This film provides some of the best, most inventive, action scenes committed to film. At one point, Yang races up a bamboo grove and then lunges at her enemy from above. Though Hu used few special effects other than hidden trampolines and deft editing, the scene is both thrilling and thoroughly believable. Yet A Touch of Zen's last third is where King Hu shows his true ambitions and where the film rises above genre. Erstwhile main characters Yang and Ku all but recede completely from this section of the picture, giving way to an apocalyptic clash between two supernatural forces. Not only is this sequence breathtaking, but Hu manages to give it an appropriate Miltonian heft without seeming cheesy. The final 20 minutes of the film depart from the material world completely into hardcore metaphysics as the head abbot gains enlightenment, resulting in one of the trippiest endings since 2001. A brilliant montage of the tortured souls, the film's denouement veers into the realm of experimental film. Though little known in the States, A Touch of Zen is one of the handful of films that can be described as an unqualified masterpiece.

All Movie Guide - Jonathan Crow