MULAN made me nostalgic — but not for the animated Disney film of 1998.
In a sign of early onset curmudgeonry, I missed the bus on that film, which has meant so much to so many in the years since it came out. I was too old, too male and too steeped in the legacy of the feudal Hong Kong and Chinese action classics Disney was drawing on to recognize Disney’s savvy reframing of the wuxia martial warfare genre for what it was: a flawed but watershed moment in Disney animation’s evolving commitment to inclusion, not only through providing tween girls with their own version of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” but also via all the oddball transgendery the film contains.
The new MULAN is a straight up wuxia — no songs, next to no love stuff, and just enough sorcery and magic to keep the action sequences a bit unpredictable. It’s more STAR WARS than LITTLE MERMAID, with Zhang Yimou’s muse, the tempestuous Gong Li, as as a witchy character without precedent in the animated source material — the female Darth Vader who tries to seduce Mulan (a likable Liu Yifei) into darkness. “Chi” — the Chinese word for the life force, or what an American drunkard might call “mojo”— stands in for the Force, and there’s a lot of aphoristic nonsense about being true to oneself and learning not to live a lie, which really is a legacy of Mouse factory script doctoring.
I think director Nikki Caro ought to be commended for making a brisk and thoroughly watchable piece of corporate art that has to be the unluckiest movie that isn’t called TENET in recent memory. Disney clearly saw this film as an international tentpole that could draw in the nostalgia trade, sell itself to a combined male and female audience skew on the basis of action and the princess-adjacent original, and wow them in the all important Chinese market.
The star-studded premiere was held on March 9, 2020. The belated US covid lockdowns began a week later. Theatrically speaking, the film was never released.
It’s six months, one plague and a desperate general election ploy by the Bullhorn-in-Chief later, and we’re now supposed to believe that suspending disbelief for a movie celebrating a Chinese legend is an act of anti-MAGA treachery (lead actress Liu Yifei’s twitter support for the brutal police crackdown in Hong Kong is a repellant water muddier too). Expect a late night tweet declaring this movie part of a Biden-led anti incumbent plot, because it’s coming. Oh God is it coming.
But beyond the commendable feminism it inherited from Disney’s original, Mulan doesn’t have enough of a point of view to be a blunt instrument in the culture wars. It’s vaporous, but with its sweeping vistas and epic battlefields, it would have played a lot better in a theatre, if there were still theatres. Instead, MULAN has shuffled off to that graveyard of aspiration known as Disney+, where it will meet with the usual muted applause.
And yet I keep thinking of Gong Li’s face.
We used to see a lot of Gong Li back in the 1990s, when she starred in what for me is still the greatest Chinese film ever made, Zhang’s Bergmanesque chamber piece RAISE THE RED LANTERN. It was one of their five follow-ups to the almost as great RED SORGHUM — a watershed of Asian cinema. Gong was an instant icon the way only a few actors before her have been — Loren, Brooks, Daindridge, Karina, Gong’s contemporary Penelope Cruz. Like each of them, she was possessed equally by fire and ice.
Someone at Disney (perhaps Nikki Caro) has a love of that great and bygone era of Asian cinema, where masterworks were weekly occurrences if you knew where to look for them: art house cinemas, Chinatown mini-malls, bootleg DVD kiosks in grimy downtowns. Gong has made almost no films in the past decade. Yet she isn’t just sympathetically cast here, she’s showcased, allowed to run away with every scene she’s in, with her beauty and her acting gifts softened but intact.
A shockingly aged Jet Li is on hand too — so far removed from his Hong Kong action heyday as the Chinese emperor Mulan defends that I literally did a double take when I realized from the credits that was him. And Jason Scott Lee, who once played Bruce Lee in a movie and was Disney’s live action Mowgli chews scenery rather delectably as a heavy who is even more broadly played than he was by a cartoon.
All of these actors gave me great pleasure in a time when movies were a rare and unruly gateway to the complex pop cultural hall of mirrors that is Asian culture. Each filled their American devotees to the brim with visions of what heroism, empathy and sorrow look like to a Hong Kong cop or a Chinese laundress. I’ve come to believe that international movies serve a critical function in this era of rising ethno-nationalism, in that they make it harder to hate blindly when blind hate is called forth by the bitter politics of the now. Having loved Gong Li through Zhang’s camera the way Zhang surely did; having leapt from buildings wearing Jet Li’s raffish smile; I know something about the Chinese people that Donald Trump never will, which is that they cry and cheer for the same things I do, and that if you cut them they don’t just bleed, they bleed acrobats and opera.
As Cold War the Sequel beckons, MULAN the Remake takes the form for me of an unintended requiem for a time where hope and amity weren’t a platitude but a kind of background hum in theatres showing scratchy prints of Cantonese language masterpieces to the metronomic tick of two audio tracks made of optical sound. I don’t yearn for that time exactly, but I do salute the cortege as it rumbles past. I can see nothing in the clouded future, but my memory of Gong Li’s face.
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