The Forbidden City (2025)

Original title: La città proibita

A mysterious, kung fu fighting young lady we will eventually learn to be called Mei (Liu Yaxi), is smuggled into Italy to be a victim of the flesh trade. Instead of submitting to anything, Mei kicks the ever-loving crap out of her trafficker-captors. Turns out she hasn’t come to be exploited and still make more money than she could hope for at home – the rural areas of China aren’t all charmed – but is looking for her sister Yun (Ye Haijin). Yun for her part came to Italy to earn enough money to pay for the bureaucratic recognition of Mei’s existence. They were both born during the time of of the One Child Policy, and such papers, even once the rule has ended, apparently aren’t cheap. Yun has disappeared, though.

So, armed with her trusty translator app, great kung fu and quite an attitude, Mei has come looking for her sister. It seems Yun has run away with the father of local cook Marcello (Enrico Borello), but, this being the kind of film it is, there’s worse going on, and eventually, Mei and the non-combatant Marcello team up, fall in love and seek vengeance together.

I didn’t expect much of a contemporary Italian martial arts movie starring a Chinese actress with a barely existing CV, but Gabriele Mainetti’s The Forbidden City isn’t just a good martial arts film for an Italian low budget affair but simply a very good martial arts film of a style that’s simply not done anymore at scale. While Liu Yaxi turns out to be a highly capable screen fighter, a fine action actor, and a great on-screen presence.

The action direction is often genuinely wonderful, featuring many a clever use of props, camera work that enhances action instead of obfuscating it, and the mix of controlled movement and poise I often miss in the more MMA-heavy style of fighting contemporary action movies love so dearly.

While the action is sprinkled graciously throughout, this isn’t the kind of martial arts movie that only wants show off the fights – great as they are. This one’s also telling a character-driven story, set in a part of Rome full of immigrants (generally portrayed sympathetically), and puts a lot of work into creating a sense of place and character relationships. This does take place in a community, and so, betrayals and heartbreak do take on a more personal dramatic character than they otherwise would. Handled in this way, the romance isn’t perfunctory as it could easily be in a comparable film, but actually one of the film’s core virtues: acts of violence here follow human emotions, for good and for ill.

I’m not quite as convinced of the film’s recurring comical beats as of the rest of it, but Forbidden City clearly wants to be the full meal kind of martial arts tale, so it’s no surprise humour is an important part of it as well, as is genre tradition. Funny to me or not, the humour does carry as much of a coherent and individual tone as the rest of the film, and Mainetti does manage to balance it, the drama, the romance, and the violence nicely in a way most Western action movies simply aren’t interested in anymore (or, looking at you, Bren Foster, can’t pull off), if they ever were.

I certainly ended the movie’s epilogue with a happy smile on my face – what more can a man ask for?