Event

GREEN SNAKE in 35mm

Monday, August 13 @ 7:00 PM / Music Box Theatre
GREEN SNAKE
Directed by Tsui Hark 1993
In Cantonese with English subtitles
Hong Kong pop cinema wasnt exactly sober or sedate before the arrival of Tsui Hark, but once the master of renegade Cantonese genre fare hit the scene in the late 70s, things got decidedly wilder and weirder. Tsui was 14 years and 22 films deep into his career as a director and had moved from punk rock outsider to studio mogul when he made his revisionist wuxia masterpiece GREEN SNAKE, a film that married the surface appeal of a special effects-heavy martial arts blowout with a colorful, hyperactive style and subversive sense of humor reminiscent of Frank Tashlin played at centuple speed. An update of the undying folk tale Madame White Snake, GREEN SNAKE features Hong Kong superstars Maggie Cheung and Joey Wong as a pair of sororal snake spirits hunted by a puritanical Buddhist monk after taking human form. Wongs White Snake, whose human existence is validated by romantic love and motherhood, may have been the focus of the original story, but Tsuis film is equally concerned with Cheungs Green Snake, a character more comfortable eating rats and slithering through the marshes abutting her palatial estate than living among people. Tsuis apparent working maxim of more is more pays off in spades here, as every overindulgent camera tilt and oversized snake prosthetic serve to push this outrightly ridiculous pulp concoction ever closer to the sublime. (CW)
99 min. Film Workshop 35mm from the Academy Film Archive
Preceded by: 90 Hong Kong Trailer Reel