Favorite Characters: Zhou Yu (Red Cliff)

First up, my A Little TLC(w) addition to my reviews for both Red Cliff and Red Cliff II:  “Recommend?  In General – Absolutely.  Fantastic war epic with amazing, killer action and excellent character work.  Tony Leung Chiu-wai – Oh, yes.  Dubbing aside, Leung is just wonderful here as the soulful, insightful viceroy.”  Clocking in at nearly five hours, this one-film-split-into-two is worth every minute, and that’s in no small part thanks to the awesomeness that is Zhou Yu.

I’ll cop to having known basically nothing about this period in Chinese history the first time I saw the film, but even then, I could tell Zhou Yu was a Big Deal the moment he’s introduced onscreen.  Characters start talking about him shortly before his first appearance, and when we do get to his initial scene, the camera plays coy with him for the first few minutes:  giving us shots of his hands, shooting him from behind, extreme closeups of just his eyes, etc., but never pulling back to show us him, not until the anticipation has been sufficiently built.  Translation?  This is a guy you’re gonna want to pay attention to.

And he earns that in spades.  I love Zhou Yu.  On the most basic level, he’s a terrifically well-executed example of the classic archetype of the Noble Leader in a sprawling war epic, the one who gives the meaningful speeches to inspire the men, the one all of them look up to but the one who also fights right alongside them in the heat of battle (he does spend the first part of the “tortoise” battle commanding from outside the fray, but most of the time, he’s right in the thick of it.)  Zhou Yu would fit in nicely with countless brave commanders, both historical and fictional, who’ve graced the screen with an entire army of loyal men behind them.

To go along with the inspiration, Zhou Yu backs up his words with all kinds of competence.  He kills it on the battlefield.  I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again – dude takes an arrow in the shoulder, rips it out, takes a flying leap, and stabs the horse-mounted archer in the neck with the archer’s own arrow that he just shot Zhou Yu with.  Hot damn!  He’s also a tremendous strategist, and he and Zhu-ge Liang take turns being the most brilliant tactician in the camp.  He understands, not just troop formation and battle strategy, but how Cao Cao thinks, predicting when the enemy is gonna zig instead of zag.  And then, just to top it off, he has a number of random additional skills that he can throw in for a wildcard win – his talent for mimicking handwriting plays a key role in one of his machinations against Cao Cao.

A great leader, a skilled soldier, a brilliant strategist.  He’s also an artistic soul with a love of music and a famed ear, and he rushes to his wife’s side when one of their horses is in distress during labor.  I like that, that he appreciates art and cares about the pain of animals.  That’s not something you see too often with this type of character.  I’m not saying that I would’ve expected him to be portrayed as a total He-Man, but these are shades that could’ve easily been left out of the story, and I’m glad they weren’t.  Strong and sensitive, logical and poetic.

It’s always a little frustrating now when I see Leung in a film where he’s been dubbed.  My first time through mainland movies like Hero and Red Cliff, I didn’t recognize his voice well enough to realize that it wasn’t him (not to mention being ignorant enough that I didn’t necessarily note whether I was hearing Cantonese or Mandarin.)  Now, though, it always sticks out to me that it’s not his voice, and while I certainly understand the practice – not wanting Chinese viewers to put up with a Hong Kong actor working their way through their dialogue phonetically – I still wonder what nuances he might have added that are missing.

That said, Leung still does a superb job in this role.  He’s commanding, empathetic, shrewd, lethal, romantic, wry, inspiring – all that and more.  While Zhou Yu is a larger-than-life hero, at times probably a little too amazing for credulence, Leung’s performance keeps him feeling real.  I 100% get why Zhou Yu’s men would follow him into battle no matter what.