Synopsis
< A Touch of Zen > moves from one level of mystery to another, its narrative operating like a spider? web that weaves inexorably, enmeshing each episode and its characters in an intricate maze-like pattern. The film centers on the scholar Gu Shengzhai (Shi Jun) and his uncertain liaisons with Yang Huizhen (Hsu Feng), the xia nu (knight-lady) of the Chinese title. Gu lives next to a deserted fortress where Miss Yang resides. Gu conducts a courtship of a kind with Miss Yang. The fortress is thought to be haunted and Miss Yang, on first sight, seizes our imagination as a typical ghost woman of the Pu Singling canon. Hu plays on this imagination to impart the atmosphere of Pu Songling but this is a deceptive layer of the narrative that is slowly and surely pared away. Yang Huizhen is revealed to be a deadly swordsman, daughter of a disgraced minister who tried to curb the power of the eunuchs in the dongchang, the secretive palace guard operating as a power unto them. Now, the dongchang is tracking down remnants of the minister's inner coterie, including his daughter and a general named Shi (Bai Ying). (Stephen Teo)