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| Umebayashi |
Jet Li's Fearless: (Shigeru Umebayashi) Announced
as Jet Li's final martial arts film,
Fearless was an ambitious
project untaken by some of Hong Kong's most veteran film industry
specialists. Director Ronny Yu and fight choreographer Yuen Wo Ping
teamed with the 43-year-old Wushu (martial arts) expert Li to tell a
fictionalized story about the founder of the Wushu arts early in the
20th Century. While the film was conceived of as a tribute to the master
(and to the aging Li, for that matter), and it successfully portrays the
pride that Huo Yuanjia gave China in his innovative and controversial
style, it has been diluted by claims of historical inaccuracy and
underachievement in an artistic sense. Much like many Western
equivalents in storyline, the famed fighter disgraces himself by
allowing his own arrogance to cause death and shame to his loved ones,
and the film's ultimate, anti-violence undertones allow for an
examination of how a great fighter's most daunting battle is with his
own inner demons. While Li's acting has gotten better throughout the
years, Wo Ping's choreography puts him in a difficult position, and his
performance, like the film overall, has been criticized for handling its
story in too clinical a fashion. People who are basically fans of seeing
Wushu fighting on screen will have enough to be entertained by, however,
with the usual battle between Li and a huge, Caucasian brute providing
some cheap satisfaction. The orchestral film music for these massive
Mandarin-language productions was introduced to Western audiences by Tan
Dun in the early 2000's, with
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and
Hero both remaining critically acclaimed. Japanese composer
Shigeru Umebayashi was hired for the subsequent
House of Flying
Daggers in 2004, however, bringing an interesting new cultural twist
on the already wide-ranging sound of the genre. Originally a rock
musician two decades prior, Umebayashi has since become a prolific
composer in Asia, with several hit scores among his 60 projects.
The sound that Umebayashi has created for these
projects is a cultural mix of all the style of the old world and current
orchestral standards, spanning both Chinese and Japanese worlds while
catering to the ears of Western viewers who are an extended audience
through which the filmmakers hoped to succeed. His music follows most of
the normal trends of such cross-over scores, but with the additional
touch of Japanese instrumentation for a certain amount of individual
flair. The sound of
Jet Li's Fearless is distinctly Chinese,
despite the international nature of the solo instruments, with the dizi
bamboo flutes and erhu violins sharing time with a dominant percussion
array and more Westernized elements like a solo strings and female
voice. The interesting aspect of Umebayashi's score here is that he
successfully conveys the intended epic nature of the film's scope, just
as he would six months later with
Curse of the Golden Flower, but
without a truly convincing sense of direction or power. Several of the
heavy drum rhythms recorded for the film were actually used to pace some
of the fighting as it was being shot, and while these performances are
very plentiful in the score, they alone don't float that epic feel.
Umebayashi relies on the Western elements to provide the melodrama, with
both orchestral ensembles in China and Japan contributing. But these
attempts to use the orchestras to accentuate the emotions of the film
are betrayed by the static and sterile nature of the themes for the
film. The sound of
Jet Li's Fearless ranges wildly, from the
xylophone solos of the "Kid" tracks to the forced chopping string (and
almost keyboarded effect) over relentless percussion during the many
fight sequences. Electronic manipulation in the fight cues, as in the
sudden volume drop-off and resumption in "Tanaka Fight," are extremely
distracting. For such a storied journey on screen, Umebayashi's score is
sloppy in delivering you from point A to point B, though he does leave
you with an outstanding representation of that point B at the end. The
final two cues, amounting to seven minutes, are the saving grace of an
otherwise tiring album, and they save the overall listening experience
with two very satisfying combinations of all the cultures and ages
depicted throughout the score. It takes a long time to get to those two
tracks, however, and before you get there, Umebayashi's score seems lost
in translation.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
