The Swordsman in Double Flag Town (1991)

aka Swordsmen in Double Flag Town

Original title: 雙旗鎮刀客

A teenage boy named Hai Ge (Gao Wei) travels through the deserts of Northwest China to a village known as Double Flag Town. On his deathbed, his swordmaster father told Hai Ge about the girl that’s supposedly been promised by her father to marry him. She’s the daughter of an old companion of Hai Ge’s father (the film actually uses the term “uncle” to describe the man, but everybody here’s called “uncle” or “sister” by basically everyone else, so he’s probably not an uncle by blood), but the only things our protagonist actually knows about her is that she must be about his own age, has a father with a lame leg, and a mole on her butt. This not being a comedy, Hai Ge concentrates his search on the thing with the leg.

It isn’t actually all that difficult to find the two, even for a shy and naïve young guy like Hai Ge. Other problems arise, though: both Lame Uncle (Chang Jiang) and his daughter Hao Mei (Zhao Ma-Na) start out deeply unimpressed by the young man. Though Uncle does give him a job and a place to stay, he’s not willing to marry off his daughter to a nobody she very much doesn’t want to marry, at first. During life in the closed-off little community that is apparently regular visited by duelling swordspeople, and is dominated from afar by the murderous Lethal Swordsman (Sun Haiying, I believe), Hao Mei’s heart softens towards Hai Ge.

Before things can properly develop there, the little brother of the Lethal Swordsman attempts to rape Hao Mei. Hai Ge uses his surprisingly great swordsmanship to defend her, killing the would-be rapist. Alas, killing the brother of a guy like the Lethal Swordsman is not a healthy thing – not only for Hai Ge and Hao Mei, but for the village as a whole as well. It is doubtful that Hai Ge can win a duel against a swordsman this, ahem, lethal, but running away might mean the end of everybody else in the village.

Far too few wuxia films use the Chinese Northwest or a Silk Road setting, so I’m always happy to stumble over one, especially when it is as interesting a movie as – recently deceased – He Ping’s Swordsman in Double Flag Town. Officially taking place in the Chinese West, this is as much influenced by Westerns, particularly the more abstract of the Italian Westerns, as it is by wuxia cinema of its time.

So instead of long, artfully choreographed, non-realistic martial arts battles, this is a film where scenes of guys eyeing one another – in Hai Ge’s case often as fearfully as befits him being a kid and not a grown-up – end in short explosions of quick violence. He Ping loves to hide those behind quick cuts, or, in the finale, a dust cloud, until the slow dropping of a body explains who actually won the fight. Which does of course also have parallels in Japanese cinema.

Where wuxia is traditionally colourful and set in clean – at worst artfully cobwebbed – locations and sets, everything here is realistically grimy and dusty; people look like people eking out their living in the desert do probably look, so there’s a decisive lack of glamour.

Still, the film never feels like one of those dreaded attempts at making a “realistic” wuxia (or western, or chanbara). Rather, it uses what could be flags of realism as its own way of stylizing things when it then shoots them in a surprisingly slick early 1991 visual style, where a synthesizer score doing slightly shifted westerns score riffs feels absolutely appropriate.

On a narrative level, this is a rather minimalist work that eschews huge backstories and monologues in favour of suggestion and archetype efficiently as well as effectively. This is not a film of many words, or one that wants to explain its philosophy to you, but rather one that knows a viewer will understand its morality as well as the emotional price characters here pay for decent actions without it emphasizing any of this.

So often, this feels more like a mood turned film than a detailed narrative, a minimalist, but elegant picture that demonstrates the moral parallels between Western and wuxia by working exactly where these genres meet.