Movie Review: The Sorcerer and the White Snake (2012)
Fahai (Jet Li) is a Buddhist monk and abbot of a monastery who goes about the countryside with his bumbling apprentice Neng Ren (Wen Zhang) defeating demons who harm humans and imprisoning them until they reform. (Effectively forever for most of them.)
Meanwhile, white snake demon Susu (Huang Shengyi) falls in love with Xu Xian (Raymond Lam), a humble herbalist. Susu enlists the help of her green snake sister Qingqing (Charlene Choi) to win the man’s heart.
The stories collide when Fahai learns the true identity of Xu Xian’s wife. Despite her benevolent behavior and good intentions, Fahai believes that all human-demon relationships are doomed to end in tragedy. With this in mind, he decides to break up the marriage early, by force if necessary. This leads to disaster even worse than that he was trying to forestall.
This 2012 Chinese fantasy film is also known as “it’s Love” and “Madame White Snake”, for those of you who might search it out. It was released in 3-D, but the version I watched did not have that option.
Fahai is a righteous man of great spiritual power, but the rigid discipline that has given him this power has also narrowed his perspective. This is first foreshadowed when Qingqing asks Neng Ren what the procedure is for dealing with demons who aren’t harming humans. The apprentice admits his master has never bothered to give him any instructions for that. To be fair, most of the demons we see are in fact harmful to humans.
Susu, in contrast, is used to following her feelings. Her love for Xu Xian is genuine, and her presence is currently beneficial for both him and the neighborhood (she helps stop a plague.) She has no patience for talk of potential future harm, or what is forbidden.
The boundary between the two peoples is blurred when Neng Ren is infected by the bite of a bat demon, and starts taking on demonic characteristics himself. Qingqing shows her friendship by helping him, but her perspective is inhuman and Neng Ren ends up having to leave his monastic order.
There’s quite a bit of exciting action (kind of mandatory for a 3-D movie) and what the PG-13 rating lists as “sensuality.” This turns out to be clothed or otherwise covered women moving in a way calculated to arouse male interest.
The ending is bittersweet at best; Fahai may have learned a valuable lesson about taking other people’s feelings into account, but it came at a great cost to everyone else. If you’re okay with not having a happy ending, I recommend this to Jet Li fans and fantasy buffs.
