The special effects that inundate many modern studio blockbusters still require painstaking effort, but they’ve been largely leeched of that sense of obsessiveness so evident in the best fantasies, particularly of the silent-film era, such as Fritz Lang’s Metroplis. Massive anonymous cities are now routinely destroyed for our delectation on big and small screens alike, and characters fly and cast spells and shoot rays out of their appendages as a matter of course. Which is to say that director Chen Kaige’s Legend of the Demon Cat is a rarity: an authentically enveloping modern fantasy that weds the techniques of silent cinema with CGI to conjure a memorably mythic realm.
The story proper, set during China’s 7th-century Tang dynasty, starts with the arrival of a Japanese shaman, Kûkai (Shôta Sometani), at a palace where he’s set to perform an exorcism on the ailing Emperor Xuanzong (Zhang Luyi). The emperor soon dies, a moment which Chen captures in whirling and eerily frenetic camera movements that underscore the misery of this passing, as well as the chaos it unleashes in the emperor’s orbit. A black cat, whom we’ve already glimpsed in a mysterious prologue, is seen in fleeting flashes, whisking around the emperor like a voracious spirit and engulfing him in a whirl of violent energy.
This cat is clearly a CGI creation, which Chen doesn’t attempt to obscure. In fact, he leans into the cat’s artificiality, contrasting its slinky uncanniness with its poignantly dignified human voice. The cat is a nemesis for the government, and for Kûkai, who joins up with the former royal scribe, Bai Letian (Xuan Huang), to solve the mystery of the emperor’s death and to halt the string of murders the event initiates. But the cat is also a tragic antihero, imprisoned in a cycle of vengeance brought on by a nesting series of myths and lies.
Kûkai and Bai uncover intricate intersections between art and history in their attempts to understand the demon cat. Art is signified here by pageants that are held by the emperor as tributes to his rule, and Chen shows in elaborate flashbacks how such ceremonies were used by the emperor to consolidate power, as well as how they eventually came to signify said power’s erosion. These pageants pivot on false idols and excessive indulgences that Chen distrusts as signifiers of truth but celebrates for their own inherent beauty and pleasure. (Most memorable, and decadent, is an image of a vast pool of red wine.)
Chen stages these royal celebrations on huge sets that suggest phantasmagorical mountains and forests, which are rich in frames within frames that contain multitudes of altercations, romances, and other intrigues. These sequences, which rival those fashioned by D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille for ornate, emotionally charged intricacy, are also rendered in pulsating colors that have the ripe eroticism of the best Technicolor.
Art is also embodied in Legend of the Demon Cat by the presence of poets, who think they’re telling the truth in their writing but are actually bolstering the emperor’s mythos, and by illusionists who reveal emotional truth in the openness of their artificiality. The illusionists, of course, are endorsed by Chen as parallels of himself, as they’re all united in attempting to restore to society the notion of truth as a diaphanous concept that’s best unbound by notions of literalness, as few things are less truthful than pretenses of truth, such as the doctored Chinese histories that enable suppression and casual sexual slavery, all of which animate the mystery at the heart of Legend of the Demon Cat.
The cat’s artificiality is more than an amusing visual fillip, then, but a political device—a gesture toward awakening our sleeping senses, which are often dulled by noisy modern blockbusters and the pervading cacophony of pop culture at large. Legend of the Demon Cat is a spectacle as deconstruction of spectacles, with a catalogue of dynamic and moving images that allow one to overlook the font of exposition that keeps the film from being a classic.
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