Signis

The Sorcerer and the White Snake

(JPEG)

China, 2011, Jet Li, Shengyi Huang, Raymond Lam. Directed by Siu-Tung Ching

Western audiences are familiar with their fairy tales, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and the tales from Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. However, they are not familiar with Oriental fairy tales with their quite different characters and symbols, different ways of narratives, different types of myths - and from the Buddhist traditions.

The Sorcerer and the White Snake provide an opportunity to begin to remedy this lack.

The first thing to say is that the film is very beautiful to look at. The magical locations have an aura about them. They are both real and stylised, drawing on ordinary Chinese life as well as on the religious overtones.

Jet Li is at the centre of the tale, a guru with an apprentice (somewhat ineffectual who is turned into a demon). Demons are the targets of the guru, to destroy them. They take human form as well as animal forms (sometimes akin to those in Disney films). His first confrontation with a demon sets the tone of the film. He sweeps the demon into a shell-like container and moves to discover more demons.

In the meantime, a nice but poor young man who wants to be a doctor goes with friends to the mountains to find herbs. He is confronted by a beautiful woman and falls off a crag into a lake where she rescues him and kisses him - and disappears. We knows, but he does not, that she is one of two sister demons, the Green Snake (who prefers making mischief but will soon be attracted by the transformed apprentice) and the White Snake. The mysterious woman is the White Snake.

She has fallen in love (and so has the young man), so she assumes human form, knocks him off his boat and rescues/kisses him again. She takes him to visit her family (the demons all pretending to be her loving family with a few slip-ups) and they are married.

At this stage we might think the fairy tale is over and they live happily ever after. Not in this world.

When a plague breaks out, the young man puts his ingenuity into finding a remedy. His loving wife breathes her energy into his medicines and people are healed. No happy ending here either.

The guru arrives and confronts the White Snake, aiming to destroy her. When she disappears, the young man travels to find a tree that will give a potion to reclaim her. Unfortunately, he lets loose more demons (vixens in human and vulpine form) - and the ending is far more complicated than we had hoped for.

A pleasing, magical and beautiful Chinese fairy tale.

Peter Malone