Cheng takes the smoke-and-mirrors obfuscation of the spy genre literally: Ye spends much of the time he’s onscreen symbolically mirroring He, while studying himself in mirrors, being looked at through mirrors, and functioning as a looking-glass for the film itself. This outing explores the pressures placed on WWII spies who often had to work in complete isolation for months and even years the film’s Chinese title translates to Anonymous. (The prior film, The Battle at Lake Changjin (2021), was a mega-blockbuster this film had a far more lowkey release, though it’s been such a success - closing on $1 billion RMB, it’s reportedly the top-grossing art film in Chinese history - that there’s talk of a sequel.) Each film, linked thematically but not materially, highlights a different group of ordinary people battling a war. Hidden Blade’s production house, Bona Film Group, loosely placed this film into a “trilogy” called the China Victory Trilogy. But spies are everywhere, and their allegiances aren’t always obvious - sometimes not even to themselves. Our main characters, Director He (Leung) and his subordinate Secretary Ye (Wang), both work for the Japanese regime in Shanghai, rooting out members of each of the opposing factions and doing the governor’s bidding. The country’s combative factions - the Japanese occupants, the Kuomintang leadership, the current puppet government, and the underground communist resistance - all vie to control China’s future as the war wages around them. Our timeline centers around Republic-era China, several years after the Nanjing Massacre. In this case, that means a homeland battered by a brutal Japanese occupation. It serves propaganda only in the way that the average war movie might glorify the homeland - think Top Gun: Maverick. Several wrote it off as a propaganda film.īut Hidden Blade, from writer-director Cheng Er, deserves a much better critical assessment than this. Other outlets that bothered to review it did so poorly, with multiple reviewers unable to tell cast members apart from one another (!), a handful misunderstanding and misstating the plot, one reviewer dismissing the entire cast apart from Leung. The New York Times gave it a kind but mixed capsule review. Hidden Blade has gone largely unnoticed in mainstream US media, usually getting name-checked as the legendary Tony Leung’s latest film. I have never wanted to look at anything more in my life. In the pause, tension and dark purpose coil in his jawline, his shoulders, in every flick of his wrist. But this is Wang Yibo, star of The Untamed and Street Dance of China, former K-pop idol, sometime motorcycle racer, multitalented polymath, and multinational heartthrob. With a lesser actor, this would feel excessive, showy it would flatten the moment. We watch him, wreathed in smoke, take his time. We wait for him to look at his reflection. We wait for him to light a cigarette, take a drag, then another. Wait, please.Īnd then we all - the character he’s talking to, the camera, the film score, the audience, the movie - slow down and wait. “Matte kudasai,” Wang Yibo, playing the canny, careful Secretary Ye, says in silky Japanese. Toward the end of Hidden Blade (无名), the arty Chinese World War II spy thriller that has now reached US cinemas, everything comes to a halt.
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