Green Snake

Ching Se

Hong Kong

1993

99 Min

Color

2.35:1

Cantonese

Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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CAST Maggie Cheung, Ma Cheng-miu, Man Cheuk Chiu, Chan Dung-Mooi, Kong Lau, Hsing-kuo Wu, Joey Wang

PROD DES Bill Lui

Synopsis

Green Snake (青蛇, Chinese literal title: The Teal/Green Snake) is a 1993 Hong Kong fantasy film made by Tsui Hark. It is the adaptation of a novel of the same title by Lilian Lee.

The novel itself is a variation of a Chinese folk tale Madame White Snake, where Lillian Lee tells the story from the perspective of Xiaoqing, the Green Snake, who normally plays a minor role behind the main character Bai Suzhen, the White Snake. As the title suggests, the movie also features Xiaoqing as the main character.

Two snake spirits have been training for many centuries to take human form and experience the love, freedom and wisdom that is supposedly only available to humans. White Snake (Joey Wong) is the more experienced one and proceeds to get engaged with local scholar Hsui Xien (Wu Hsing-Kuo), with whom she plans to have a child which would complete her passage into the mortal realm. Green Snake (Maggie Cheung) is the younger and more impulsive of the two sisters and she is not yet quite sure about the benefits of the human world. The two snakes move into their magically created house and start a successful medical practice in the town.

Their enemies are a buffoonish Taoist and an overzealous Buddhist monk (Vincent Zhao) who make various attempts to banish them from the human world. The monk thinks of himself as a keeper of the natural order of the world and is very prejudiced against spiritual beings seeking to improve themselves. He brings things to a head when he abducts White’s husband from the human/spirit mixed marriage into his religious reeducation camp–styled temple. –wikipedia

Director

Tsui Hark

A pivotal figure in the evolution of Hong Kong cinema, action virtuoso Tsui Hark was one of the most popular and influential filmmakers ever to emerge from the Pacific Rim motion-picture community. Famed for his work’s rapid-fire pacing, gymnastic camerawork, and visceral intensity, Hark also won acclaim for his rapier wit and impressive stylistic range, moving easily from the martial arts to gangster dramas to even romance. In addition to reviving the moribund swordfighting and kung-fu genres in the early ‘90s, he was also instrumental in bringing the special effects wizardry of Western filmmaking to the East, eventually following the lead of longtime friend and associate John Woo to Hollywood.
Born Xu Wen Guang in Vietnam in 1951, Hark made his first 8 mm amateur film at the age of 13. After relocating to Hong Kong in 1966, he later attended the University of Texas, graduating in 1969. The following year he directed a documentary, From Spikes to Spindles. After relocating to New… read more

A pivotal figure in the evolution of Hong Kong cinema, action virtuoso Tsui Hark was one of the most popular and influential filmmakers ever to emerge from the Pacific Rim motion-picture community. Famed for his work’s rapid-fire pacing, gymnastic camerawork, and visceral intensity, Hark also won acclaim for his rapier wit and impressive stylistic range, moving easily from the martial arts to gangster dramas to even romance. In addition to reviving the moribund swordfighting and kung-fu genres in the early ‘90s, he was also instrumental in bringing the special effects wizardry of Western filmmaking to the East, eventually following the lead of longtime friend and associate John Woo to Hollywood.
Born Xu Wen Guang in Vietnam in 1951, Hark made his first 8 mm amateur film at the age of 13. After relocating to Hong Kong in 1966, he later attended the University of Texas, graduating in 1969. The following year he directed a documentary, From Spikes to Spindles. After relocating to New York City in 1975, Hark accepted an editorial position at a Chinatown newspaper, later helping develop a community-theater group while working on several cable television projects aimed at Asian audiences. In 1977, Hark returned to Hong Kong, beginning work as a television producer for TVB. Two years later, he made his directorial debut with The Butterfly Killers, followed in 1980 by the back-to-back efforts Dangerous Encounter — First Kind and Hell Has No Door. After completing 1981’s award-winning All the Wrong Clues, the first in a string of box-office smashes, Hark mounted his most ambitious project yet with the 1983 sword-and-sorcery epic Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, a visual effects extravaganza employing technicians previously involved with the creation of Star Wars and Tron.
Remaining a remarkably prolific talent, Hark returned in 1984 with a pair of new features, Aces Go Places 3 and Shanghai Blues. After 1985’s Working Class, he turned to his acknowledged masterpiece, 1986’s Peking Opera Blues; a frenetic martial arts farce set in 1913, the picture was one of the first Hong Kong productions to receive global interest, heralding a new era in Eastern filmmaking. That same year, Hark produced John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, a landmark effort which switched the focus of the industry from chop-socky adventure to hardboiled crime action. Hark spent the next two years working almost solely as a producer, supervising films ranging from the superb A Chinese Ghost Story to I Love Maria to The Big Heat. Only in 1989 did he return behind the camera to direct A Better Tomorrow 3.
While maintaining his busy production schedule, in 1990 Hark co-directed Swordsman with filmmakers including King Hu, Ann Hui, and Ching Siu Tung. The solo effort Once Upon a Time in China, the first in a series of films about the character Wong Fei Huong — an herbalist healer and martial arts master — followed a year later, making mainland actor Jet Li a massive star. After following with parts two and three in the Once Upon a Time series, Hark adapted the Chinese fable The Green Snake in 1993. Between 1994 and 1996, he directed a staggering six films — Once Upon a Time in China 5, The Lovers, A Chinese Feast, Love in a Time of Twilight, Tri-Star, and The Blade, respectively — before traveling to Hollywood in 1996 to film Double Team with Jean-Claude Van Damme and NBA star Dennis Rodman. Teaming again with Van Damme two years later for the wildly unsuccessful Knock Off, it soon became obvious that the spark that Hark displayed in his imaginative Hong Kong productions simply didn’t translate well to American celluloid. Back on his native soil and making something of a comeback in 2001 with his spastically kinetic action thriller Time and Tide, Hark took the conventions of the Hong Kong thriller that he had defined alongside John Woo in A Better Tomorrow and turned them on their head, retaining some of the old magic and resulting in one of his more entertainingly original chaotic offerings in some time. Next up Hark would delve into fantasy with the effects-heavy sequel to his 1983 hit Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, Zu Warriors (2002). —allmovie guide

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