Country: China
Genre: Drama/Art
Director: Clara Law
Year: 1993
Rating: 
WORTH A LOOK
In Temptation Of A Monk, director Clara Law almost dares the audience to hate her film. Without any exposition whatsoever, we’re plunged into into byzantine court intrigues in which we don’t know either the rules or the players.
The first scene shows an elaborate ceremony involving what seems to be two different armies, costumed in contrasting ways. Afterwards, the generals of the two armies sit down for a game of Go (something like Chinese chess). While they’re playing, General Shi Yan-sheng (Hsing-kuo Wu) and General Huo Da (Fengyi Zhang) carry on a heavily coded conversation involving compliments which are really verbal jousting. Finally, General Huo Da gets to the point. The emperor has recently died, leaving no clear successor. He has three sons. If nothing is done, bandits will take advantage of the instability and become more active. The Mongol hordes will swoop down from the north and there will a terrible war.
Finally, we understand. The two generals don’t belong to different armies. They both serve the emperor, but in different divisions.
General Huo Da proposes a solution to the crisis: If General Shi Yan-sheng will agree to step aside, two of the brothers will be forced to give allegiance to the third brother as the new emperor. There will be no bloodshed. General Shi Yan-sheng reluctantly agrees to this plan.
Needless to say, things go wrong and General Shi Yan-sheng flees, along with what’s left of his army, and become monks.
Believe me, it plays much more obscurely than it reads.
The battle scenes are almost always in slow motion. Director Clara Law doesn’t use violence to excite the audience. Instead, she concentrates on the poetry of motion, but she also wants to emphasize the spiritual emptiness of slaughter, so the violence is quite graphic, with decapitations, impalements, and much spurting blood.
Once the monks become soldiers, they all have their heads shaved. Unfortunately, several of the soldiers have similar features, so it isn’t immediately clear who General Shi Yan-sheng is. The soldiers don’t adapt very well to the Buddhist life. They repeatedly violate the rules of the temple, which are laid out to them by a ten-year-old monk.
Somewhere around the three quarter hour mark, it becomes clear that, in spite of the occasional battle scene, Temptation Of A Monk is going to be principally about the spiritual journey of General Shi Yan-sheng from pure worldliness to enlightenment.
All this is say that Temptation Of A Monk is an Art film with a capital A. Much of the imagery is rapturously beautiful. There is philosophy, some of it quite deep. There is sensuality. There is even humor, especially in the deceptively simple pronouncements of the abbott of the Buddhist temple where General Shi Yan-sheng ends up. The acting is superb.
But even art films need to have narrative momentum, and Temptation Of A Monk has almost none. For long stretches, you have no idea where the film is going. In hindsight, you see what Temptation Of A Monk was up to, but while I was watching it, I was frequently bewildered.
If you have a high tolerance for obscure art cinema, you may enjoy Temptation Of A Monk — I got some pleasure out of it — but the average fan of Asian action cinema set in dynastic times should stay far away.