The Sword

The Sword, like Tsui Hark's The Butterfly Murders, questions the tenets of wuxia films without abandoning the genre. A poetic treatise against vanity, the film takes after late-genre Westerns like the Spaghetti Western My Name is Nobody (1973), questioning the wuxia convention of generating drama through characters' quest for the Top Sword honour. A supernatural touch is tagged on for good measure, as swordsmen are forced to realise that no mastery of fighting skills can ever overcome a mystical curse. Director Patrick Tam, along with House of the Lute's Lau Shing-hon the foremost formalists of the New Wave, strives to tell his story through film language, orchestrating colour and composition and synchronising them with music and dialogue through calibrated editing. A forerunner of the ‘art martial arts' subgenre that was to emerge decades later.

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