THE EAST IS RED (1993), a sequel to SWORDSMAN II (1992), is the crowning achievement in the long career of Taiwan-born Hong Kong cinema diva Brigitte Lin (who retired a year later). She is at her highest-flying, gravity-defying best here as Asia the Invincible, a kung fu master who'd obtained the powers of the Sacred Scroll and changed from a man into a woman as a result. Here, four months after her "death" in Part II, she comes back on the scene with the help of a Chinese court officer monitoring transgressions by Spanish and Japanese warships, and seeks to root out the cults that have sprouted in her name and destroy the fake Asia the Invincibles who have emerged to run these cults. One of the fakes is Snow (Joey Wang), who'd been Asia's lover when she'd been a man and who, we find, still loves the transformed Asia. Officer Koo (Yu Rongguang), watching these two beautiful women from the sidelines, gets mighty frustrated.
The film is shot through with the kind of grace and beauty that we only got in Hong Kong costume adventures. Every shot is gorgeous, every cut is perfect, every effect is breathtaking. The more fantastic the action, the more we suspend our disbelief, thanks to the ingenious staging and precision cutting. Characters never walk or take a boat when they can fly or run at high speed along the surface of the water. Characters rip the sails off ships and use them to fly through the air. Cannons are lifted as if they were rifles and ships are pushed back and forth by hand. Underneath it all is a deeply bitter romantic undercurrent. Never have I seen love, despair and rage so intertwined. Raw emotions propel the action and give a dreamy, delirious quality to the proceedings. Never has there been a Hong Kong film quite like this one and never will there be another one.
It wouldn't hurt to see SWORDSMAN II first, although it's not absolutely necessary. (SWORDSMAN I, from 1990, has very little, if any, connection, to the two sequels.) This upgraded DVD release offers 16:9 anamorphic enhancement and is far superior in quality to the earlier edition.
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