Relationship Spotlight: Zhu-ge Liang & Zhou Yu (Red Cliff)

There are two Red Cliff movies, so it’s only fair that I have two A Little TLC(w) posts in lieu of the reviews I already wrote.  Last time was a Favorite Characters post on Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s character Zhou Yu, and today, we’re looking at the relationship in the films between him and Zhu-ge Liang (some Zhou Yu-Zhu-ge Liang-related spoilers.)

From the start, the circumstances between these two are perilous.  They back different leaders – Zhu-ge Liang is a strategist for Liu Bei, while Zhou Yu serves as a viceroy under Sun Quan.  The two kingdoms aren’t in conflict with each other at the moment, but it’s a contentious time, and land and resources could certainly bring them to blows sooner rather than later.  However, Zhu-ge Liang is the one who has the vision that the two leaders need to unite their armies in order to beat back the tyrannous Cao Cao, and he convinces his lord to send him south to try and broker an alliance.

Getting Sun Quan, the young southern duke, on his side is no easy task, and in order to do that, Zhu-ge Liang first has to win over Zhou Yu, who has the duke’s ear and can bring him around.  As soon as these guys are onscreen together, they’re wary of one another but also impressed with what they see.  Zhou Yu notes Zhu-ge Liang’s frankness and cool practicality, and Zhu-ge Liang admires Zhou Yu’s integrity.  However, it’s not over training maneuvers that they decide to come together.  Zhu-ge Liang proves himself to Zhou Yu by helping one of his horses through a difficult birth, and the two later bond over music.  Playing the qin together, they don’t come to any agreements about the war, but Zhu-ge Liang leaves for the night convinced that Zhou Yu is in, declaring that he heard Zhou Yu’s answer in his playing.

That’s a rather unconventional way to become allies in a war together, but hey – it seems to work for them.  There are a lot of competing voices from both sides of the blended army, but it’s always Zhou Yu and Zhu-ge Liang who are the strongest voices of reason and intuition.  Both have an immense talent for strategy, though each brings his own skill set to the table; Zhou Yu is a great observer of human behavior and can predict Cao Cao’s next moves, while Zhu-ge Liang employs his knowledge of science to use the natural world to their advantage.  Each has his moments of brilliance, where the other just sort of sits back and admires his ideas, and they also work incredibly well off each other.  They often take a thought together, passing it back and forth and fine-tuning it until it becomes what their army needs.  I love how eager each is to listen to what the other has to say – this is, by and large, a partnership without ego, and each would rather be right together than surpass the other.

Which isn’t to say that all is love and brotherhood between them.  Running beneath their interactions – unspoken most of the time, although they do discuss it with each other on occasion – is the fact that their ultimate loyalties tend different ways.  It’s all well and good coming together to fight Cao Cao but if, in the future, Liu Bei crosses swords with Sun Quan, Zhu-ge Liang and Zhou Yu will find themselves on opposite sides.  Both hate the idea of fighting the other, which they openly admit to one another, but they also make it clear that they will fight if it comes down to it.  As such, the alliance between them is deep, full of respect for each other’s knowledge and abilities, but it’s also fragile, subject to the whims of their individual leaders – all in all, it makes for a really intriguing dynamic between them.

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.