‘Mulan’ scores in a live-action version

     When asked in a Vanity Fair interview why she and not a Chinese director had been chosen to direct Mulan, Niki Caro pointed out that two cultures had to be considered.

     The first, of course, is Chinese culture, which spawned the enduring legend of Mulan. The second, according to Caro, is Disney culture. Any director of a live-action remake of the 1998 Disney animated musical would have to negotiate his or her way through both cultures. 

    I found the comment both interesting and instructive.
    When you see Mulan, you’ll be watching a Disney movie, which means that the Chinese settings are seldom less than picturesque and the movie’s desire to deliver an inspirational message about family loyalty, courage, and girl power couldn’t be more clearly stated.

    If none of that bothers you (and I doubt that it will annoy most of the Mulan audience), you’ll find a strong helping of live action from Caro and an all-Asian cast led by Yifei Liu,  who plays Mulan. 
     Yifei's Mulan is endowed with extraordinary amounts of Chi, which in this movie might be seen as the equivalent of the Force in the Star Wars universe. Mulan can maximize her use of Chi to defeat enemies in battle -- one-on-one or en masse.

    Sans the songs of the original, Caro tells a story about a  culture-bound young woman who is instructed to hide her Chi and stick to the traditional feminine role that has been proscribed for her; i.e., Mulan's supposed to marry.
      Mulan has other ideas. She rebels by disguising herself as a man, borrowing her warrior father’s sword, and joining the army that’s trying to protect the emperor from northern invaders led by the ruthless Bori Khan (Jason Scott Lee).

    To help him in his quest, Bori Khan has enlisted the help of a witch (Gong Li) who has great powers and who, we’ll learn, has more in common with Mulan than we initially expect.

     Martial arts star Jet Li portrays the emperor. Tzi Ma appears as Mulan’s father. Both are warriors, although Tzi's character, disabled by a war wound, long has retired.

    In keeping with the spirit of the original, Caro (Whale Rider) takes a mostly comic approach to Mulan’s integration into the army, where she finds a friendly rival in Chen Hong (Yoson An). 

    The other soldiers serve as a comic chorus, often commenting on Mulan’s overly ripe body odor. She refuses to shower lest her womanhood is discovered. Should Mulan reveal herself to be a woman, the Commander (Donnie Yen) will expel her for dishonesty. 

      The delicacy of Liu’s features could make it difficult for us to accept her male-warrior pose: The movie says otherwise. The rules governing men and women are so ingrained, no one possibly could be expected to see them violated.

    Aside from the lack of musical numbers, Caro and her team have made other alterations. Some may miss Mushu, the motor-mouthed dragon who was voiced by Eddie Murphy.

    It’s probably the right choice. Caro downplays the story’s more cartoonish aspects, although she does employ special effects for a phoenix, a beautiful bird, and Gong Li’s character goes through many shape-shifting transformations. 

   Caro handles large-scale battle sequences well enough. Some of the combat sequences hinted at the work of Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Shadow) although none display Zhang’s flair for devising at least one bit so outrageously original, it becomes a talking point. 

   Then again, Mulan's charge doesn't derive solely from combat; it stems from Mulan’s emergence as a fully realized woman warrior and from the way that she upholds the movie’s trio of virtues: Loyal, brave and true.

    Fans of Chinese spectacle rightly can argue that Caro hasn’t gone far enough in bringing either operatic grandeur or human frailty to the forefront.  Fair to say that Mulan stakes out a middle ground between PG-13 entertainment and the best of Chinese epic moviemaking.

     But back to where we began: This is a Disney movie that’s trying for the broadest possible appeal. 

    Mulan will be shown on Disney+, not in theaters. Still, it qualifies as a movie of impressive scale and clear visual command, an effort that, for my money, far surpasses its animated predecessor. *

*For the record: “My money” probably doesn't even qualify as chump change in the world of Disney resources.

Some traumas never seem to end

Director Zhang Yimou again reunites with actress Gong Li for a look at the impact of China's Cultural Revolution.

For more than a decade, filmgoers wondered whether Chinese director Zhang Yimou would ever again work with Gong Li, the actress who starred in some of his best movies: Red Sorghum, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern to name three landmark films from the late '80s and early '90s.

Zhang and Li did reunite for 2006's Curse of the Golden Flower, a spectacle-heavy costume drama of the kind that Zhang seemed to be gravitating toward.

Nine years later, Zhang and Gong have teamed again, this time in an intimately scaled drama about the devastating ramifications of China's Cultural Revolution.

Oddly, Coming Home, which should have knowledgeable audiences quaking with anticipation, hasn't set off a roar of anticipation on the art house circuit.

I'm not sure why. Although Coming Home doesn't match the emotional heft or exquisite beauty of the best of Zhang and Gong's collaborations, it certainly carves out a worthy place of its own.

Gong plays Feng Wanyu, a woman whose husband (Chen Daoming) is imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. When Daoming's Lu escapes, the couple's ambitious, teen-age daughter Dan Dan (Zhang Huiwen) shrugs off any association with her supposedly subversive father.

With Zhang compressing time, Lu is recaptured; the Cultural Revolution ends; and Lu is free to return home.

By this time, Dan Dan has shed the infection of rabid Maoist ideology, but Feng no longer recognizes her husband. She even mistakes him for a sadistic interrogator from Maoist days.

We're never sure whether Feng suffers from dementia or from some narrowly focused form of amnesia, an uncertainty that encourages us to view the movie as a meditation on the psychological toll of Mao's vicious cultural purge.

A persistent Lu tries to re-establish his life as a husband, an activity that eventually centers on scenes in which he reads Feng letters he wrote from prison. She still doesn't recognize him, but they become linked in this exercise at restoring lost memories.

Although there are images of sad beauty in Coming Home, the film takes on some of the modesty of its meager settings, notably Feng's small apartment or the street-level room Lu rents to be near her.

In its quiet way, Coming Home raises important questions about how to re-define normalcy in the wake of the kind of upheaval from which some never recover.

One can only hope that Gong, 49, and Zhang, now 63, will find material that allows them to collaborate again. They may never recapture the magic of the movies that helped announce the international rebirth of Chinese cinema almost 30 years ago, but they clearly know how to tap into each other's best artistic instincts.