The Bride With White Hair (1993)

Ronny Yu (The Bride of Chucky, The Phantom Lover, Warriors Of Virtue) directs this highly operatic fable based on a well-known martial arts novel with LESLIE CHEUNG (Temptress Moon, Farewell, My Concubine) and BRIGITTE LIN (Dragon Inn, Deadful Melody) as doomed lovers caught in the crossfire of warring clans. With beautiful cinematography by PETER PAU (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and over-the-top action sequences, THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR is one of the best swordplay fantasy film ever made.

Martial Arts

An exciting movie about Chinese martial arts and how true love is value. A good movie with plenty sword fights with nice love scene. March 22, 2008

Lower your expectations

The story is good and the screenplay has the right idea, but the low-grade technical aspects are terrible. The considerations one must make for this is too much. The movie on this DVD is primitive stuff! (too bad for South City) If Ronny Yu did it today with access to all the technical devices and support it would be worth the money. January 5, 2008

A great story, but not always well told

The Bride With White Hair is a curious beast. Much of the first half of the film feels like you've seen it a hundred times before (a troubled sifu/student relationship, divided loyalties, warring clans and the rise of what would become a united China) and the style often looks like a relatively low-budget film trying to look more expensive than it is rather than the genuinely expensive film it was, with director Ronny Yu shooting much of the film in near darkness with deep blacks, heavy blue filters and smokey backlighting, stylistic devices that aren't to everyone's visual taste. The action scenes are often played out via jerky step-printing (where the film is shot at around 12 frames per second or less but each frame is printed twice or more to create a sense of motion at normal speed that's either heightened or degraded depending on your point of view). While the film was shot on massive sets (genuine exteriors are few and far between), they're neither lit or shot to stress their scale or often to be particularly visually interesting, with much of the early action of the film very deliberately styled after a shadow-puppet play, all profiles and silhouettes. And yet gradually it casts its spell over you and begins to grip as the story becomes more ambitious and intriguing.

On the surface it's a Romeo and Juliet story between Leslie Cheung's heir apparent to a clan dedicated to good but filled with doubt no-one else shares about the severity with which it is enforced and Brigitte Lin's "wolf-girl" (meaning she was raised by wolves rather than turns into one) who has been trained as a supernatural killing machine by an evil pagan cult and who sports a particularly lethal whip that Indiana Jones would kill for - sharper than a meat cleaver and very handy for slicing-and-dicing any number of opponents. Their inevitably doomed romance occupies a moral middle ground that, naturally, neither side will tolerate, with their respective rejected mentors eager to reclaim their undivided loyalty. In many ways the film is a rejection of all the intransigent moral codes of the fantasy swordplay genre, where even the "good" clan and their allies are so blinded by their own self-importance that they have no qualms about killing innocent peasants just to be on the safe side in case they're lying ("Better to kill a hundred innocents than let one guilty escape"). And just to add to the complexity, the film offers a truly unique villain - a pair of male/female Siamese twins, the sister often goading her brother over his inability to understand the woman he loves. The finale is certainly unusually ambitious, and can be seen either as a fantasy battle or as a physical realization of the hero's nervous breakdown: either way, it offers a welcome level of emotional weight to what could easily have been clichéd fare. It's a film that has a lot working against it, but it lingers in the memory long after it's over.
December 28, 2007

The groom with black hair

What a great movie. Ive seen it more than once and it got better each time. The way it is shot is pretty old school but the story and acting or top notch! there is not a lot of fighting action but the love felt between the two main characters really keeps things interesting. the ending of the movie is sad but the reason why the swordsman stays on the mountain ledge is very romantic! To me , great story , acting, and old school flair! February 14, 2007

Widely acknowledged classic, I hated it

The movie is widely considered a classic for Hong Kong action movies. Leslie Cheung is a fantastic actor, and I enjoyed Bridgitte Lin very much in Chungking Express. So, even though I don't normally enjoy action movies and certainly not kung fu movies, I still decided to watch this movie. I was extremely disappointed. The cinematography is boring and poorly done. The plot is juvenile. It is the type of movie that would appeal to teenage boys. I hated the movie. However, I fully understand that many, many people love the movie and that it is one of the most important HK movies ever made. November 9, 2006

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