Both my wife and myself somehow missed watched this film by Tsui Hark from back when he actually a good director. I thought about looking for it later but it seemed impossible to find anywhere except for YouTube. Recently my wife’s interest in it was rekindled after watching an online lecture about it and so we settled for the YouTube version despite its inferior quality. It is very much a film of its era with its kitschy special effects. Yet it is amazingly, even shockingly shock though perhaps much of the credit should go to Lilian Lee, as the author of the novel this was adapted from.

White Snake and Green Snake are sister snake spirits who have ventured out into the human world. Disguised as humans, they have fun teasing men though the younger and less powerful Green Snake is prone to exposing her snake nature. White Snake is more serious about refining herself into becoming human and pursues a relationship with the scholar Hsui Xien. A powerful Buddhist monk Fa Hai is around chasing down and destroying demons but leaves them alone as he sees them being kind towards humans. Hsui Xien eventually marries White Snake and moves in with them. Green Snake, being perhaps envious or curious about human emotions, keeps trying to seduce Hsui Xien and makes so many mistakes that he eventually realizes the true nature of the two sisters. Knowing that her sister is just being playful, White Snake just lets her be. When they next encounter Fa Hai however, Green Snake attempts to seduce him as well and the monk allows her to do so in order to test his own devotion.

With the big names involved in it and the rich themes, it really is quite surprising that this film seems to have passed as unnoticed as it has. There are almost no reviews of it on Rotten Tomatoes for example and it never won any awards. Perhaps because it skirts uncomfortably close to being soft porn? This is certainly a very sensual film and while there is no actual nudity, lust being part of human nature is one of its primary themes. Perhaps because of the cheap special effects and cartoonish props? It does look very kitschy and I don’t know how actresses Joey Wong and Maggie Cheung kept from laughing their heads off from rolling around on the floor trying to act like snakes. Yet Tsui Hark pulls off the requisite atmosphere to make it all work. Watching it today in the CGI era when we can film any scene we can imagine, the simple tricks used here like changing the color of the lighting and swishing their long sleeves at each other in lieu of fighting, make the confrontations feel metaphorical rather than literal. As this is really a clash of moral ideals between beings of mythic power, this works better than treating it as a mere physical altercation.

I’m not sure how seriously to take the religious aspects of the story here but they are unmissable. It’s a given that priests are treated as being fallible beings in works of art but it’s still shocking how cruelly they behave here. Fa Hai is portrayed as being a devout and thoughtful Buddhist, yet even he is in denial when confronted with evidence that he is unable to fully let go of his lust. The Taoist priest who appears intermittently is used as a laughing stock and is motivated solely by the power he would gain through destroying the snake spirits. Here it is the character of Green Snake who is most fascinating. She is inhuman where her sister has been fully humanized and so is skeptical of the value of human emotions and values. Her attempts to seduce Hsui Xien and later Fa Hai are part of her learning about humanity and the wonder of this film is that in the end Fa Hai arguably learns more from her and her sister and they learn about the virtues of humanity. It is a very subversive message and while it may not be surprising that this comes from the same author who wrote Farewell My Concubine, it is strange to think the same Tsui Hark who made this is now such a boringly conventional director.

Even in his prime, Hark made films in a kind of fast and dirty style that makes them feel cheap and rushed so it was never popular to consider him as a truly great cinematic auteur. As good as this film is, it still looks rather cheap, with the props being barely acceptable only because he keeps the plot moving. I’m tempted to think that this fast-moving way of working itself encouraged experimentation and taking risks. His modern films of course now benefit from far larger budgets but that comes along with the baggage of having to sacrifice any originality or subversiveness. I don’t think people really get dumber as they grow older, and something like Seven Swords is really dumb. It’s just that they sell out and don’t much care about the consequences to their reputation as an artist. Anyway their old works will always still be around so whatever they do in the present shouldn’t matter and this one in particular is ripe for being reevaluated.