This review is the third in a Martial Arts Movie retrospective commissioned by Arthur Robinson. Many thanks to Arthur for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon. All other film reviews in this retrospective will be found here. The first 36th Chamber review is here.
Director: Chia-Liang Liu
Writer: Kuang Ni
Cast: Chia-Hui Liu, Lung Wei Wang, Hou Hsiao, King Chu Lee
Runtime: 99 mins.
1980
In 1973, legendary spaghetti western director Sergio Leone decided to try his hand at comedy. The result was My Name Is Nobody, which he considered to be "a Sergio Leone film directed by someone else." He conceived of the film and handed it off to his loyal disciple Tonino Valerii. It's about a man named Nobody who tries to convince his idol to take on the Wild Bunch. It's a piss-take on Leone's typical mythic melodrama, bastardizing those elements with wordplay, farce, and goofy bits. Although the strongest pieces of the movie shine, it's a bit of a failed experiment. I remember the fun meta-commentary; I also remember the endless scene based entirely around a painfully long fart joke.
Return to the 36th Chamber shares a lot with My Name Is Nobody: it is a reworking of a genre masterpiece from a genre master that blends its signature style with farce, to diminished effect. There are two key differences, the first being that The 36th Chamber of Shaolin's director and star both return for the sequel. The second difference is that Return ultimately succeeds in its project.
Chia-Hui Liu returns for the sequel not as San Te, but as ragamuffin impostor Chao Jen-Cheh, who happens to look like that famous monk. This is leveraged for the benefit of the village workers when the boss at the fabric dyeing mill brings in mercenary Manchurian workers to drive down labor costs. The villagers use Chao Jen-Cheh's resemblance and some theatrical tricks to try to bully the mill owner into providing livable wages, but when this plan goes sideways Jen-Cheh must journey to the Shaolin temple to seek true martial arts prowess.
The story is split into four parts, each an improvement on the last. First is the extended farce at the fabric mill, goofy and a bit tedious but well-constructed. Then Jen-Cheh spends a few fun but irritating sequences trying to bluff his way into the temple. The film finds its rhythm when legendary monk San Te allows Jen-Cheh entry-- on the condition that he spends all of his time constructing scaffolding. Finally, after over a year of work on the scaffolding, Jen-Cheh is ejected from the temple and must return to face his enemies.
I have little use for the kind of comedy that Return traffics in. The cartoonish mugging and the ridiculous ploys that only serve to embarrass the protagonist don't delight me so much as make me uneasy. Return's light tomfoolery is a letdown from the first film's clockwork physical drama, but there remains plenty to enjoy in Liu's incredible performance. As huge of a pill to swallow as some of his bits are, he manages to sell everything with charisma to spare. It's a fascinating performance piece in a meta sense, taking the bottomless focus of the first film's character and inverting it into a manic scatterbrained learning style. Both films' heroes learn their signature martial arts techniques at the Shaolin Temple, though their paths to mastery couldn't be more obverse.
The climax is once again where Return pulls off its greatest trick, entirely on the back of performer Chia-Hui Liu's skill and director Chia-Liang Liu's hyperspecificity. Upon his return, Jen-Cheh realizes that he has absorbed combat skill through osmosis and the discipline of manual labor. What unfolds is a multilayered combat sequence that walks us through Jen-Cheh's unique scaffolding-based martial arts style, in which he weaves his bamboo-binding techniques and rhythms into a tapestry of hurt. Much like Jen-Cheh himself, we had no idea how much we were learning over the course of the film until it's all reprised in the fight. After all, it wouldn't be a 36th Chamber film without a deconstruction of the learning process that culminates in a triumphant expression of said process.
3.5 / 5 BLOBS
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