I watched King Hu’s A Touch of Zen nearly a year ago but I think about it often enough that I could sworn it was just last month. Some films are like that. If you like wuxia films with haunted and beautiful landscapes then I highly recommend it.
@sparrowpost Thank you! That was amazing—I can’t believe I’d never seen it before!
@nicole isn’t it wonderful? It does so many things at once and yet somehow all comes together. It reminded me in places of A Chinese Ghost Story. Have you seen that? That’s another one I need to watch again!
@sparrowpost I have! It’s actually been on my mind this week as something I really need to rewatch.
@nicole Leslie Cheung 😭
@sparrowpost Oh gods, I just read up on his biography. So much I didn’t know. 🥺
@nicole right?? So heartbreaking in so many ways.
@sparrowpost, the film’s structure is just so interesting. It has so many of the “and one more thing” fastening-ons that I associate with oral folktale traditions, where you know every character has lead a hundred lives in a thousand variant narratives, such that they can’t be all brought together cleanly, if at all. And yet here we are, doing just that.
Looking forward to reading the story collection that inspired the film.
@nicole Is that Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio? I was thinking how much the scholar would have loved a studio of his own like Pu’s.
@sparrowpost It is! I ordered the Penguin paperback, and I’m very much looking forward to its arrival.
@nicole enjoy! I want to watch it again soon.