<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

The Bride with White Hair, a 1993 visually rich fantasy of swordplay, kung-fu clans, cult magic, love, and betrayal was directed by Ronny Yu. Leslie Cheung and Brigitte Lin star as Cho Yi-hang, a young swordsman bound, reluctantly, to inherit the Wu Tang clan leadership, and Lien Ni-chang, the wolf-girl, an orphan raised to be a deadly assassin by the evil joined twins who lead the Supreme Cult. With lovers as star-crossed and tangled in family rivalries and loyalties as ever Romeo and Juliet were, The Bride with White Hair is Shakespeare meets Hong Kong cinema at its finest. It’s based on a 1954 wuxia novel by Leung Yu-sang and the theme song was written and performed by Leslie Cheung at the request of one of the producers, Raymond Wong.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

The film opens atop a snowy mountain where Cho waits, and has been waiting for ten years, for the once-every-twenty-year blooming of a flower fabled to cure all illness. Defending it from others leads Cho to tell his tale and the film moves into flashback. His clan is involved in a war with foreign tribes and an evil cult. One day Cho escapes his responsibilities and meets Lien, who he’s glimpsed from afar since childhood--in fact she once saved his life, playing her flute to call the wolves off him. They’re both unhappy and long for lives of peace that neither is destined to lead. They flirt in a graceful, airborne, martial arts style through a vine-draped grotto with steaming springs. When Lien is bitten by a poisonous snake, Cho returns the favor of saving her life--very sensuously. One thing leads to another in one of the most sheerly beautiful love scenes on film.

Lien, however, has been ordered to kill Cho, and his clan is not pleased with the union either. The male portion of Lien’s back-to-back joined master and mistress, known collectively as Ji Wushang, is in love with her, while the female half is in love with her sibling. When Lien goes against their orders and refuses to kill Cho she has to undergo a brutal sort of anti-initiation from the cult. Then Ji Wushang has their revenge by bloodily murdering Cho’s clan leader and others in Lien’s guise, leading Cho to believe it was Lien who killed them. Betrayal mounts on betrayal in a final, cinematically elegant, blood-drenched battle. In the end, Cho’s lack of faith turns Lien’s hair a bitter white and she leaves him.

Stylistically, The Bride With White Hair is breathtaking, its cinematography lush and the fight scenes supernaturally kinetic, as well as artistically bloody. That it also has a romance with tragic heft and is peopled by conflicted and faceted characters--even the ultra-evil Ji Wushang duo has their issues--are the reasons the film ranks as one of the best of the Hong Kong oeuvre.

Sequels

• The Bride with White Hair 2