With all due respect to the HK Movie Association who puts this movie as #9 on the 100 best Chinese films of the last 100 year, I believe this movie is rather dated. As with "Lady Snowblood" (1973) which I put in my two cents recently, they might be at the vanguard of their respective genres at the time, but now, 30 odd years later, they haven't age well at all. This happens, I think, especially with genre movies where technology plays an important part. Dramas such as "Rebecca" (Hitchcock) or "Now, Voyager" (Bette Davis), which are still some of my all-time faves, fare much better because technology won't really make them better; they already have great direction, story, pacing, acting, etc.
I also want to dispute a reviewer from UK who mentioned that this movie is much more Chinese than "Crouching Tiger" which is too westernized. I can't disagree with him more. Having actually read the wuxia novels that many of these movies are based on, I have to say "Crouching Tiger" beautifully captures the lyricism and essence of the wuxia world without any Western influence. But I digress.
The pacing of this movie is really too slow. Fully an hour was devoted to people, chiefly of the male protagonist, walking around and around in that same little village. An HOUR of nothing much happening to propel the story! As a matter of fact, a large portion of the 3-hour movie time is eaten up by showing people walking from point A to point B which is totally pointless. The bamboo forest scene will remind many of a similar scene in "House of Flying Daggers" and is probably its inspiration. Alas, it was done much better in the newer movie, due to better choreography, wire works, and kinetic energy that "Zen" sadly lacks. Same argument for all the other set pieces. The ending is anticlimactic since there is no tension when one party is the living Buddha (or something like that). The use of negative film to denote some sort of divine intervention is jarring and a little laughable.
During the opening credits, it indicates that this movie is based on a book which is written in the Manchu dynasty, probably in the late 18th or early 19th century. I don't know of a direct translation of the book but it is available in English with the title, "Chinese Ghost and Love Stories" by Pu Songling (I coin him the Chinese Edgar Allen Poe). It is one of the premiere books in Chinese literature. Not all his stories are about ghosts but all have a fantastical element and most have a moral to it. But the book are all short stories and none is long enough to be a novella; so stretching a short story to 3 hours entails lots and lots of padding; hence, all the walking. I haven't actually looked for the story that the movie is based on but I can say for sure that in old Chinese society and in Pu's stories as well, no woman who is from a respected family (as the female character is) would bed down with a practical stranger, EVER, unless she is a demon or a ghost, which does happen quite frequently in his stories and are almost always not a good thing. It probably had happened in real life when there was a strong attraction, but she was basically feeling pity for his mother and so decided to give her virginity to him. Yeah, I don't think so! The DVD quality from Tai Seng is abysmal which probably also contributes to my discontent. The transfer is horrid; pixilated (like in a VCD) in some scenes, looks like it's forever raining in dark scenes, some black spots permanently imprinted on the screen throughout the entire movie. The big fight scene that happens at the deserted house at night is so dark that is practically unwatchable. Moreover, the audio is muddy and barely audible even with volume turns to the loudest.
The Chinese title is translated as Heroine but the official English title is a better description of the movie given the spiritual element in the movie.
