Noodle Easterns: the birth of a new movie genre

The Sword Identity Trailer

For an awfully long time, we've had Spaghetti Westerns. This year, we have the first of the "Noodle Easterns."

The analogy is not exact, but in "The Sword Identity" a 2011 film written and directed by Xu Haofeng and distributed by the impossibly named "GooTime," there is no doubt whatsoever that we are witnessing the birth of a new "martial arts" movie genre in Chinese film.

Sergio Leone, the acknowledged (and undoubtedly self-proclaimed) master of the spaghetti western, deeply loved the American Cowboy Movie.  It drools off the screen in his Clint Eastwood westerns, in "Once Upon a Time in The West" and in just about everything he made whether they contained cowboys or not.

It's equally clear that Xu HaoFeng loves Chinese fighting movies under whatever authentic Chinese terminology you want to label them. 

The defining quality of the spaghetti western falls more or less into the "I know it when I see it" category of literary analysis, but there are certain points that are somewhat consensual:

1. they are classic cowboy movies
2. they are deeply in love with the American cowboy tradition
3. the amount of "movie nerd" references and details in them is totally ridiculous
4. they star one or more insanely charismatic actors (usually American in most cases, but not necessarily, and thank God for Claudia Cardinale!)
5. the plots are totally predictable up to the point where they suddenly aren't, and the audience is ambushed by their own expectations
6. you can't seem to get enough of them if they "talk to you." You can barely manage to sit through one if they don't
7. they're usually pretty funny until they get serious, and then they're really, really, really serious (except when they're very funny right in the middle of the serious)
8. the "spaghetti" part identifies them as being Italian or rather as being made in Italy by purported (or authentic) Italians.

We must concede The Sword Identity several points right off the bat for being far less doctrinaire about what it sets out to do than the typical spaghetti western, but then, we're speaking here about the birth of something new, something not completely formed, something that will take shape before our eyes over the next few years until we "know it when we see it."

There is some "getting used to it" about this film. The story defies the expectations of a traditional "wu xia" / Martial Arts / Kung Fu type of movie, yet it is all about all of the cliches in those film. There's no doubt that the actual, historical martial arts that it portrays were carefully researched or, at least, the filmmakers saw a whole lot of old movies and, I'm guessing, have been in a couple of street fights, not to mention studying weapons forms in a real school.

One of Sword Identity's particular joys -- for the initiated -- is the attention to detail about actual, "real" fighting. The Hong Kong Action Film is chock-a-block with wondrous and extravagant impossibilities: leaping, striking, flying, breaking, smashing martial artistes who defy gravity, physics and logic to provide us with amazing entertainments.

There's barely any of that here in The Sword Identity and that fact, more perhaps than any other argument I'll make, may mitigate against my own assertions. But I won't let that stop me: I'm going to go on asserting.

The details here are the details of genuine "fighting." Real fighters fight far less than fantasy fighters. In one or another of Tsui Hark's marvelous Wong Fei Hong movies starring Jet Li, Wong faces down a villain in the streets of a town.  Wong spreads his legs into a fighting stance, clears his garb from his knees and places his hand in front of himself in preparation for his opponent's attack. Instead of rushing him, however, the opponent smiles and concedes that he has been beaten? But how? He is so perceptive that he can see in Wong's stance alone that he is going to get beaten to a pulp and just, sensibly, backs off before it actually happens.

Sword Identity is full of such moments and also of the pay offs for ignoring the "signs of victory" being offered, rushing in and getting the crap beaten out of you.. There is a final payoff for this, but no spoilers here.

So now we have a film loaded on one hand with every silly cliche about martial arts, martial artists and competing martial arts schools, and on the other hand with an extraordinary amount of reality about how real human beings with some sense in their heads really fight one another when their goal isn't to throw their lives away or to titillate an audience full of Kung Fu Yahoos (in the Jonathan Swift sense, not the internet sense and who would have thought that a writer would ever have to explain a reference like that? Not I!).

Once you get used to this strange brew of  "seen that a million times before" and "oh yeah, isn't real fighting boring" (even three of the courtesans in the film complain about how little "action" is going on among what they want to be "real men" fighting it out for their favors), there are some astonishingly suspenseful and exciting moments that match -- viscerally, but not visually -- the delights of the "special FX fighting" that we've all become so accustomed to.

In his day, Jackie Chan was justifiably renowned for his derring-do and literally death-defying stunts as were his co-stars, co-students Yuen Bio, Sammo Hung and the rest. But we all lose our youth, and the days of Chan's brushes with madness are much diminished, though he's still a wonderful and entertaining performer. There is no future in parodying genius like Chan's, but there may well be a future in transcending it in a unique and smart way. Stephen Chow is, without a doubt, the Robin Williams of Asian Cinema, but his films are consciously and often brilliantly satiric, a different approach than that taken here by Xu.

While the term "noodle eastern" may, as I've said, take a while to mature into a truly useful definition of a genre, I think it has a foot in the door now, and I can't wait to see what the next one is going to be like. I've never seen anything like this before, and I want more! The Chinese love their noodles as much as the Italians love pasta. It's rumored that Marco Polo stole the recipe for spaghetti from the Chinese and brought it home to Rome. Indications are that those in the "East" are going to lay claim to a certain kind of story-telling rights that have all but disappeared from the mainstream. Maybe something of Leone (but more likely of King Hu and Cheng Cheh) will transplant back into Chinese Cinema. Very tasty indeed.