Mulan review
I finally saw it! It’s unavoidable that I would have preferred to see it on a big screen, but I couldn’t, but at least I got to see it and it stirred up ‘girls with swords’ and wushu feels.Having said that, I don’t think it’s my platonic ideal version of the Mulan story. It’s a lot more coherent than Mulan: Legendary Warrior and almost as visually striking (as far as I can tell). It wisely drops a lot of the aspects of the cartoon (the songs, the borderline-offensive Eddie Murphy character, and so some of the jokey tone.) I sometimes got the feeling that it was both trying to be respectful to Chinese culture (fine) and the modern Chinese audience AND the American family film market instead of letting the story breathe.
It’s a fantasy action film, leaning heavily on the idea of ‘chi’, the life force that runs very strong in Mulan and others and enables them to do cool wire-work-enabled fighting especially, and another character to do magic. It acknowledges that Mulan is a figure of legend, but tries to make it all relatable through the family context, and I’ll hone in on that, because I got into the film far more from Mulan’s first sighting of the phoenix than the prologue.
Having the father be the narrator didn’t do all that much for me. If anything, I got bored that it was mainly about Mulan’s relationship with her father - okay, he’s the one who knows more about fighting, and she’s going to fight in his stead, but her mother pushed the responsibility of talking to her about what was proper for girl to him. The bad guy is also driven, in part, by wanting revenge for his father, who he’s named after.
For all I know the village being in what looked like an arena is as historically accurate as the rural villages seen in the animated and Chinese live-action versions, and it embodied the idea of constraints on Mulan, but I found it disorientating. Also, the way they filmed the domestic set-up seemed about making it familiar for modern American/Western kids, which actually distanced me a little. At that remove, I wondering whether that was Rosalind Chao playing Mulan’s mother. It turned out it was.
Anyway, we meet kid!Mulan, who has amazing balance and parkour skills and does not behave in the approved manner for girls. But instead of lecturing her about that, her father tells her she has the gift of being really in touch with her ‘chi’. We then move on to Mulan as a teen and on the cusp of womanhood, informed that her parents are going to match her off, terrible at being the ideal, submissive, invisible wife. (I quite cheerfully called out ‘Stuff the patriarchy’ at appropriate points all through the film.)
The film plays it all rather straight, which I really didn’t mind in terms of being focused on Mulan’s nobility and how one of her struggles is the demand to live up to the virtue of ‘truth’ as a soldier, which she obviously isn’t doing by pretending to be someone else, and which poisons her chi. (But she was even worse at pretending to be Good Wife Material.) You don’t have to work too hard to give it a queer reading - apart from the whole scenario, the witch being the first person to recognise Mulan’s dilemma and offer understanding and how Mulan ultimately finds another identity, but there’s none of the camp of the cartoon. It’s not dour, but they play up Mulan’s modesty over the night bathing and interaction with the love interest, Honghui - he admires her in her boy guise and wants them to be on better terms, but she seemed further along in recognising she fancies him. There’s a touch of deferential hero worship from Honghui upon discovering she’s a she, AS THERE SHOULD BE, given she started an avalanche to save him and their comrades in arms.
But I was fiercely sympathetic towards her throughout. Mulan doesn’t just have to be good, she has to be brilliant, her giftedness with ‘chi’ has to be extraordinary to make her clearly the only one with a hope against the supernatural advantage the witch gives the opposing army has, to beat boys who range from the mediocre to the promising. She gets less sleep than they do because she’s been voluneering for night guard duty to avoid communal showering, and then getting up early to bind her breasts and get dressed before everyone else does. That spoke to the demands on working women, especially mothers’ time. The film doesn’t do anything for other girls and women, who are all forced to wear make-up that hides their expression to become invisible wives and hope for the best when they’re matched off, even if they aren’t handy with weapons or whatever.
But I liked the introduction of the witch (played by GONG LI!) who is older, and was forced to take a path that noble Mulan isn’t willing to take. It took her a while to realise her enslavement to a master who compares her to a dog (it SRSLY never occurred to her to bite back? She clearly had the powers to destroy him.) She goes frm being an antagonist to a dark shadow to an ally. I was really disappointed that we never, AFAIK, learned her name. IMDb gives it as Xianniang, but it didn’t register with me.
I liked that other characters had enough ‘chi’ for there to be cool fight scenes, such as the Emperor. As for him, wouldn’t he have had kids to make the dynasty safe? Every time he talked about the ‘citizens’ her loved so, so much and so nobly, I muttered ‘subjects’ (I mean, come on, citizens who prostrate themselves before him? They’re subjects!) It was a placatory depiction, but a nice reveraliven Jet Li’s role in Hero.
But the capital city was just gorgeous, in fact the whole film was visually strong, the moment where the phoenix came up behind Mulan was breathtaking. I was a leetle amused by how beautiful Mulan becomes after she stops pretending to be someone else and owns her identity - female and a better warrior than all the boys. Obviously, there’s a story reason for it, it externalises that comfort with her true self, but her hair continued to be all wavy long after it was released.
I loved its epic sweep, and the variety of locations. What an experience for its young lead, who perhaps was no Vicky Zhao, but let’s hope that this is a highlight of her career and not the highlight. Some of the accents were a bit all over the place not surprising when the cast were Chinese, Chinese-born but grew up elsewhere, or of Chinese extraction, though it is artificial for Chinese characters in a mythical past to be talking in English. Ming-na Wen got to cameol I’m sure she could still have done all the action still, based on her work in Agents of SHIELD. I noticed there weren’t that many Chinese names among the crew. Obviously, the pandemic dampened the release of this film, but I hope Nicky Caro gets more epic gigs.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/483864.html.
It’s a fantasy action film, leaning heavily on the idea of ‘chi’, the life force that runs very strong in Mulan and others and enables them to do cool wire-work-enabled fighting especially, and another character to do magic. It acknowledges that Mulan is a figure of legend, but tries to make it all relatable through the family context, and I’ll hone in on that, because I got into the film far more from Mulan’s first sighting of the phoenix than the prologue.
Having the father be the narrator didn’t do all that much for me. If anything, I got bored that it was mainly about Mulan’s relationship with her father - okay, he’s the one who knows more about fighting, and she’s going to fight in his stead, but her mother pushed the responsibility of talking to her about what was proper for girl to him. The bad guy is also driven, in part, by wanting revenge for his father, who he’s named after.
For all I know the village being in what looked like an arena is as historically accurate as the rural villages seen in the animated and Chinese live-action versions, and it embodied the idea of constraints on Mulan, but I found it disorientating. Also, the way they filmed the domestic set-up seemed about making it familiar for modern American/Western kids, which actually distanced me a little. At that remove, I wondering whether that was Rosalind Chao playing Mulan’s mother. It turned out it was.
Anyway, we meet kid!Mulan, who has amazing balance and parkour skills and does not behave in the approved manner for girls. But instead of lecturing her about that, her father tells her she has the gift of being really in touch with her ‘chi’. We then move on to Mulan as a teen and on the cusp of womanhood, informed that her parents are going to match her off, terrible at being the ideal, submissive, invisible wife. (I quite cheerfully called out ‘Stuff the patriarchy’ at appropriate points all through the film.)
The film plays it all rather straight, which I really didn’t mind in terms of being focused on Mulan’s nobility and how one of her struggles is the demand to live up to the virtue of ‘truth’ as a soldier, which she obviously isn’t doing by pretending to be someone else, and which poisons her chi. (But she was even worse at pretending to be Good Wife Material.) You don’t have to work too hard to give it a queer reading - apart from the whole scenario, the witch being the first person to recognise Mulan’s dilemma and offer understanding and how Mulan ultimately finds another identity, but there’s none of the camp of the cartoon. It’s not dour, but they play up Mulan’s modesty over the night bathing and interaction with the love interest, Honghui - he admires her in her boy guise and wants them to be on better terms, but she seemed further along in recognising she fancies him. There’s a touch of deferential hero worship from Honghui upon discovering she’s a she, AS THERE SHOULD BE, given she started an avalanche to save him and their comrades in arms.
But I was fiercely sympathetic towards her throughout. Mulan doesn’t just have to be good, she has to be brilliant, her giftedness with ‘chi’ has to be extraordinary to make her clearly the only one with a hope against the supernatural advantage the witch gives the opposing army has, to beat boys who range from the mediocre to the promising. She gets less sleep than they do because she’s been voluneering for night guard duty to avoid communal showering, and then getting up early to bind her breasts and get dressed before everyone else does. That spoke to the demands on working women, especially mothers’ time. The film doesn’t do anything for other girls and women, who are all forced to wear make-up that hides their expression to become invisible wives and hope for the best when they’re matched off, even if they aren’t handy with weapons or whatever.
But I liked the introduction of the witch (played by GONG LI!) who is older, and was forced to take a path that noble Mulan isn’t willing to take. It took her a while to realise her enslavement to a master who compares her to a dog (it SRSLY never occurred to her to bite back? She clearly had the powers to destroy him.) She goes frm being an antagonist to a dark shadow to an ally. I was really disappointed that we never, AFAIK, learned her name. IMDb gives it as Xianniang, but it didn’t register with me.
I liked that other characters had enough ‘chi’ for there to be cool fight scenes, such as the Emperor. As for him, wouldn’t he have had kids to make the dynasty safe? Every time he talked about the ‘citizens’ her loved so, so much and so nobly, I muttered ‘subjects’ (I mean, come on, citizens who prostrate themselves before him? They’re subjects!) It was a placatory depiction, but a nice reveraliven Jet Li’s role in Hero.
But the capital city was just gorgeous, in fact the whole film was visually strong, the moment where the phoenix came up behind Mulan was breathtaking. I was a leetle amused by how beautiful Mulan becomes after she stops pretending to be someone else and owns her identity - female and a better warrior than all the boys. Obviously, there’s a story reason for it, it externalises that comfort with her true self, but her hair continued to be all wavy long after it was released.
I loved its epic sweep, and the variety of locations. What an experience for its young lead, who perhaps was no Vicky Zhao, but let’s hope that this is a highlight of her career and not the highlight. Some of the accents were a bit all over the place not surprising when the cast were Chinese, Chinese-born but grew up elsewhere, or of Chinese extraction, though it is artificial for Chinese characters in a mythical past to be talking in English. Ming-na Wen got to cameol I’m sure she could still have done all the action still, based on her work in Agents of SHIELD. I noticed there weren’t that many Chinese names among the crew. Obviously, the pandemic dampened the release of this film, but I hope Nicky Caro gets more epic gigs.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/483864.html.