The much-anticipated House of Flying Daggers (Shimian Maifu), a follow-up to the internationally acclaimed director Zhang Yimou's martial-arts epic Hero, has met with a mixed market response.

In many Chinese cities, movie-goers, whose curiosity was stirred by the movie's massive media exposure over the past year, have been swarming into cinemas. They are willing to pay twice the ticket price of other movies to pull back the curtain of the movie, which flashed onto screens for the first time on July 16.

Although at the Cannes Film Festival in May critics reserved high praise for Daggers, calling it "an excellent adventure" and saying Zhang Ziyi, who plays Mei in the movie, "gives the film a kind of buoyant gravity," the film, unfortunately, has not met with the same reaction from local audiences.

Compared with Hero, Zhang Yimou's exploration of the martial arts genre at the end of 2002, which received both praise and censure, Daggers has almost been drowned in a flood of criticism from the press and public, which mostly focuses on its thin storyline.

According to Zhang, it is a "love story, but also a martial arts film presented in the form of a timeless romantic saga." However, the action sequences have failed to touch audiences' hearts with far too simple a story, which, at times, can turn the movie into a joke.

The story is set in AD 859. The once flourishing Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) is in decline and rebel armies are rising in protest. The most powerful rebel group is the House of Flying Daggers (Feidao Men) which is now led by a new leader.

Two police captains, Jin (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Leo (Andy Lau) happen across the beautiful Mei (Zhang Ziyi), a rebel who disguises herself as a blind showgirl at the newly opened brothel Peony Pavilion. In order to win Mei's trust and to find the headquarters of the rebels, Captain Jin goes undercover, posing as a lone warrior coming to rescue her from prison. While Jin is escorting Mei back to her home, however, the two develop feelings for each other.

In the film's latter stages, it is revealed that Captain Leo is actually an undercover agent for the House of Flying Daggers. He also turns out to have been Mei's lover for years. When he finds Mei trying to escape with Jin, he throws his dagger at Mei and has a duel with Jin.

I could not barely hold back my guffaws in the cinema, when I saw Mei miraculously recover from the edge of death several times and upon finding Chinese comedy actress Song Dandan, playing Er Jie, one of the heads of the rebelling gang, found it hard to keep my cool.

Another sequence worthy of attention is the battle in the bamboo forest, which, unluckily, is thrust into the audience's faces immediately after the autumn birth forest, totally ignoring geological reality and challenging audiences' intelligence.

Obviously, cinema-goers are getting increasingly disappointed by Zhang's latest efforts. They said they paid a high price for a sightseeing film like Hero, and they do not like paying top dollar for another tourism promotion like House of Flying Daggers. Although they admit that Daggers is a feast for eyes and ears, but as a movie, it lacks a decent script. The storyline is too simplified and ridiculous.

Insiders have also expressed their disappointment with Zhang Yimou's genre shift from art movies to martial arts.

Chu Yin-ping, Taiwanese director, said in both Hero and Daggers, Zhang has been pursuing a luxurious production model with astronomical investment and star studded casts. Although Daggers has enjoyed successful promotion and exquisite production, the movie did not reflect Zhang's artistic gift.

Against the overwhelming criticism, Tong Gang, director of the Film Administration Bureau, raised his voice in praise, saying that in the fierce competition with imported blockbusters, Daggers safeguards the dignity of home-made movies and shows the confidence and strength needed for home-made movies to enter the international market. The media should be more tolerant and create a favourable media environment for home-made movies like Daggers.

But the market reaction is different. Although in the first four days of screening, Daggers took 63.95 million yuan (US$7.7 million) at the box office, this figure has witnessed only slight growth in the following two weeks.

To date, box office takings have only reached just over 150 million yuan (US$18 million). Cinema lines claimed that the bad comments of audiences have scared away some moviegoers.

Some cinemas have begun to cut the high ticket price of Daggers to attract more viewers as Hollywood blockbusters Spiderman 2 and Shrek 2 land in China.

That Zhang's new movie is out of favour with Chinese viewers should provide the country's movie industry some food for thought.

Zhang, the golden boy of China's movie industry for years, now faces an unprecedented challenge.

Both of his martial movies have paid too much heed to visuals and have neglected emotional content.

"The failure of Daggers is not surprising. It shows the common problems of Chinese directors of the fifth generation," according to Zhang Yiwu, a professor of Chinese Literature with Peking University. "They have only learned how to shoot a movie from the imported films of the 1980s, and have not learnt what is worthy to be shot. That has led them to make visual effects the sole priority of a film."

Zhang Yimou himself has also claimed that the focus should be on how to shoot, and not what to shoot.

However, a successful movie should reflect real life, touch audiences' hearts and strike a chord with their innerselves.

Zhang's new films have failed to achieve this. In "Daggers," love has been described as wildness and possession, not sharing and care.

Some critics once compared Zhang Yimou with American director Steve Spielberg, pinning hope on him to lead the way for the Chinese movie industry.

Can he?

In Spielburg's masterpieces, like Schindler's list or E.T., we could see his pursuit of humanism. Even in his commercial movies, like Indiana Jones or Jurassic Park, we could not only appreciate his beautiful camerawork, but escape into breathtaking stories.

But I have found a gorgeous garment, and not a soul, in Zhang's latest movies.

However, the failure of Zhang's latest works does not necessarily forecast a downturn in the Chinese movie industry.

There are still many excellent movies made in domestic studios. For example, Cala, My Dog by Lu Xuechang in 2003, reflected a common family's sorrow and happiness deriving from trivial matters in daily life. And Cellphone by Feng Xiaogang in 2003 showed us what modern technology has brought to our lives. Although these movies have neither attracted huge investment nor contained beautiful scenery, we love them because of their show of genuine human emotion.

(China Daily August 30, 2004)