Fridae

The decline of Chinese filmmaking began when its best and brightest directors got enough money to make flashy period flicks. Sure, there was Hero at one end and The Warlords at the other, but in between them was a catalogue of affected and laughable chaff like House of Flying Daggers, The Banquet, Curse of the Golden Flower, and many more.

But then, I would still champion any Chinese director with enough cajones to make a 300-style historical epic, complete with slow-mo slaughter gore, preening villains, mutant soldiers, masked disfigured ninja warriors and a heavy metal soundtrack. Here, though, Jingle Ma offers a surprise: Mulan is no overreaching biopic, no pretentious choreographed visual event, no intensely realistic war movie – and precisely because of this, it works far better than most epic movies.

To wit, Vicky Zhao plays the legendary Hua Mulan, who enlists in the army to beat off the advances of a barbarian host headed by Rouran confederacy, and emerges as a top general after a decade of battles. Jingle Ma being Jingle Ma, there are battles but not quite a war, mean villains but not quite monsters, nepotism and cowardice in the army but not quite endemic corruption, and an unrequited romance that not quite smoulders. Oh yes – as a bonus, Jingle Ma works in the horrors of war and survivor’s guilt, but doesn’t quite work Mulan into a Thin Red Line either.

I believe that’s all for the best. For a legend as big as Mulan, one doesn’t really need or want a hot-shot director to rewrite the story or to put his personal stamp all over the body of work. While each scene is not ideal (someone needs to tell Ma that nomadic hordes can’t be infantrymen!), Ma’s direction ensures that there are no missed notes in this piece. While his sense of characterisation and storytelling may not be perfect, his control of the emotional intensity of the movie is never in doubt.

My only grouses are that Michelle Yeoh would have been more suited to play the legendary cross-dressing general, especially since this movie covers a span of 12 years. But other than that, this is a Chinese epic movie that I would watch over many others, simply because Jingle Ma’s modesty is the Chinese epic genre needs right now.