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PostPosted: Sun Mar 03, 2013 5:38 pm 
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Emperor Visits the Hell

Old tale performs new function

Winner of the Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema at the October 2012 Vancouver Film Festival, Li’'s film Emperor Visits the Hell is a film adapting three chapters of the Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West to a modern Chinese setting. The new film has been called one of the more promising recent works from an independent Chinese filmmaker. In it, Emperor Li Shimin is transformed into a bureaucratic boss in a big city, where the crooked Dragon King’s attempt to change the weather has backfired and led to a death sentence. Li pulls the rug out from under everyone, from the audience to those whose power has gone to their heads. Or so says the festival blurb. For me this film did not work. It's mundane sequences might make ironic sense if one knew the old stories very well, but even so, they would not make this into a good film. Yes, it has strange, dreamlike moments. But Li does not seem to know where he is going with all this, as indicated by a final drunken scene that has no relationship to "Monkey" and is just self-indulgent blather about the future of China.

Richard Schieb, who reviewed the film at Vancouver, points out the story has been filmed frequently. These include the Japanese film Monkey Sun (1940); the Chinese animated film Princess Iron Fan (1941) based on a partial segment of the story; the Japanese film Songoku: The Road to the West/The Adventures of Sun Wu Hung (1959); the Japanese anime Alakazam the Great (1961); the Chinese animated film The Monkey King/Havoc in Heaven (1965); the popular Japanese tv series "Monkey" (1978-9); a South Korean television series called "Journey to the West" (1982); a Japanese TV series with the same title (1993); director Jeffrey Lau’s two-part Hong Kong film A Chinese Odyssey Part 1: Pandora’s Box (1994) and Part 2: Cinderella (1995) with Stephen Chow as Monkey; a Japanese anime TV series "Monkey Magic" (1998), and so on and on including another remake by Jeffrey Lau, a US-made Jackie Chan vehicle, and more.

Sheib thinks the new story resembles Cocteau's Orphee and Black Orpeheus in turning a classic "myth" into a new form in a modern setting. Li Luo doesn't change the magical aspect of the original story, the voyage between heaven and hell including encounters with traditional gods and legends. But in order to make the setting contemporary, the director makes the emperor into a traditional calligrapher whose court is just some corporate offices, while the Dragon King is turned into a petty mobster running his operations out of a bar-cum-pool hall.

Ghosts out wandering the grounds of a palace now look like just people out for an evening stroll. Li Luo has created something quite unlike all the earlier adaptations of the traditional stories, turning toward the everyday and mundance, with a special difference. He brings out an innate humor in the material, by presenting it in a very toned down manner.

Li presents a world dominated by small-tim gangsters, corporate stiffs, and petty bureaucrats -- a satirical version of contemporary China. Or just a realistic one? But in the context of the ancient stories, these characters merely seem like odd stand-ins.

When the character representing the monk Xuanzang/Tripitaka (the hero of "The Journey to the West") arrives toward the film's end, he must get an exit visa to leave China. The film's finale is self-referential, a filming of the wrap part of the film itself. The actor playing the emperor, presumably now just being himself, drunkenly begins to complain about how hard it is to get funding for the arts in contemporary China. And so forth.

Emperor Visits the Hell was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films at Lincoln Center, March 2013.

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