DRAGON INN (Hong Kong, 1992)
Directed by: Raymond Lee, Tsui Hark, Ching Siu-tung
Starring: Brigitte Lin, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Kar-fai, Donnie Yen

“I reasoned that for a bunch of men to survive in the barren desert there must be a woman running the show behind the scenes.” - Tsui HarkIn this case, two women. Maggie Cheung (Jade) and Brigitte Lin (Yau Mo-yin) are two of Hong Kong’s greatest actresses and they transform DRAGON INN into something like a martial arts epic starring Marlene Dietrich and Katherine Hepburn. Maggie is Hepburn, all mercenary greed, her face and body changing like quicksilver depending on who she’s sucking up to. Brigitte is Dietrich, all imperious beauty and steely resolve. When these two actresses first see each other onscreen you can see them size each other up and the tension crackles like lightning.

Underneath the merciless sun, the Ming Dynasty is rotten to the core. The decadent Eunuch Tsao (Donnie Yen, seemingly drained of blood) has seized power and tortured righteous Secretary Yang to death. To lure Yang’s right-hand man, Chow Wai-on (Tony Leung Kar-fai, Detective Dee), out of hiding he sends Yang’s kids into the desert under armed escort and waits for Chow to race to their rescue. Instead, Chow sends his lover, the swordswoman Yau Mo-yin (Brigitten Lin), who saves the kids in a whirl of singing steel and then races for a rendezvous with Chow at the remote Dragon Inn. Isolated in the middle of the lifeless desert, Dragon Inn is owned by Jade (Maggie Cheung), a woman with a cash register for a heart. The rebels hire her to help them escape over the border with Yang’s kids but then Eunuch Tsao’s hit squad, the Eastern Chamber, show up at the inn seeking refuge from a storm. Without a picture of Chow, they can’t quite put their finger on where they’ve seen him before but pretty soon everyone secretly knows the score and Jade had accepted a massive cash reward to betray the rebels to the Eastern Chamber. That’s when the cat and mouse games start in earnest and the inn turns into a jungle gym of kung fu assassins creeping across the rafters, dropping into skylights, sneaking out the windows and crashing through the doors.

Tsui Hark is currently filming his first 3D movie, a remake of DRAGON INN starring Jet Li, due out this fall. It’s the first time the two men have worked together in 14 years, but while Jet Li’s a big deal and all (and we’re even showing his film, Ocean Heaven, in this year’s festival) it’s unlikely that any remake will recapture the high voltage of this version. DRAGON INN is the wu xia as feminist spaghetti western, and it’s no surprise that both Maggie Cheung and Brigitte Lin have since retired from the big screen. Because really, how do you top a movie like this?