Come Drink with Me

Just about half-way through King Hu’s 1966 Da Zui Xia (Come Drink with Me), the heroine, Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-Pei) has been wounded by bandits but spirited to safety by so-called Drunken Cat (Yueh Hua), a seemingly buffoonish character of the sort that often serve as comic relief to the main drama. For a film that’s been quite serious in subject matter (a fight against evil that’s even included the violent death of a child), Drunken Cat’s intrusions have taken the film in lighter directions: one of his appearances has even detoured Come Drink with Me from the genre of the action film to that of the musical as he leads a group of indigent kids in two song numbers. At the same time, for all his silly awkwardness, Drunken Cat has uncannily shown up at propitious moments to aid Golden Swallow, and his rescue of her to his hide-out appears to confirm how he is often there at the right moment, despite his air of ineptitude. 

Two key things happen for the narrative when Golden Swallow wakens in the lair that Drunken Cat has taken her to treat her wound. First, as she walks groggily outside to see where she is, the camera reveals a lush thick jungle complete with resplendent waterfall, but this décor is unmistakably a studio set. A film that started outdoors in the vast space of a barren land and provided on-location exterior shots for key locales (such as the town in which is located the inn where Golden Swallow has her first action-filled contretemps with hordes of bandits) now suddenly luxuriates in evident artifice. 

Second, as Golden Swallow wanders outside in her relative stupor, she and Drunken Cat are assailed by bandits who have been sent to bring the young woman back but are dispatched readily by Drunken Cat, who exhibits graceful and effective fighting skills that we would not have imagined from this generally inebriated clown. It is unclear how much the somewhat somnambulant Golden Swallow sees of what is going on (though we do in full detail), but her intuition that Drunken Cat isn’t what he initially appeared to be is solidified as she wanders unsteadily again outside in that artificial set and comes upon Drunken Cat – now revealed as Fan Da-pei, the Drunken Master – upright rather than hunched over in intoxication as he had generally been when serving as a low figure of ridicule in the inn sequence. He now seems steadfast and serious. Even more, he is stretching his hand out with purposefulness and from it radiates a force that can change the flow of water in the waterfall. We – and she – are asked to revise our earlier impressions of the character: he’s become a hero, even one with superpowers.  

As different as the discoveries of studio-fabricated nature and a shift in our understanding of a key character are (along with the un-realism of what that character is shown to be capable of), they both serve to take Come Drink with Me out of everyday reality and suggest how aware the film is of its qualities as cinematic construction. Critics sometimes treat the films of King Hu as having a spiritual or lyrical core (and titles like Xia Nu [A Touch of Zen, 1971] and Kongshan Ling Yu [Raining in the Mountain, 1979] can contribute to that), but it may well be the case that what the films are fundamentally “about” is the filmic experience itself – the narration of world-building and character development made manifest and serving as an intrinsic source of delight.

Even its desert opening already had hinted at the ways Come Drink With Me would be about the experience of filmic delight, more than thematically resonant content. On the one hand, there’s a richness of visual style: sweeping camera movements, rich colours, music, and so on that make cinematic form so palpable. On the other hand, there’s the exorbitant yet fully enjoyable and exhilarating nature of the action: balletic bodies leaping and twisting to the beats of the editing and performing feats that leave everyday reality behind. (In a later scene outside a temple, Golden Swallow runs vertically up a wall even though she, unlike Drunken Cat, supposedly is not gifted with magical superpowers.)

Beyond such formal dynamics that toy with everyday reality to open it up into pure visual (and aural) play, the opening of Come Drink with Me also hints at the kind of narrative surprise that will again arise when Golden Swallow comes upon the freshly heroic Drunken Cat performing the supernatural feat of stopping the waterfall at his hideout. Not only does the film render cinematic form palpable, but it does so too with the act of narration. The film narrates a series of reversals of expectation and defiance of verisimilar reason, making manifest how storytelling is governed by no logic other than the construction of moments that could go in any direction. Thus, everything in the details of the opening scene – the imperial nature of the governmental forces, the beat-upon nature of the two prisoners suffering away in the cramped space of their cages, the appearance of a seeming saviour figure all in white – makes us suspect that we are about to see a film about freedom fighters from the land battling for democracy against corrupt figures from the imperial city. And then everything goes in a very different moral direction – the people of the land turning out to be bad guys of an extreme sort, government officials revealing themselves to stand for the path of might and right. Much in this film is not as it seems: women who appear to be men (again, not so much for viewers who would know the convention of the woman hero, often disguised as a man, from Peking Opera among other sources), drunks who are martial arts masters and, even more, possess superpowers.

Yet it is not only the surprise-ridden play with conventions and expectations in Come Drink with Me that drives the narrative but, somewhat paradoxically, the film’s intense adherence to those conventions. Like, say, Sergio Leone remaking the Western in Italy around the same time, Come Drink with Me makes the rules of genre manifest and visible by taking them to their logical extreme. Indeed, Come Drink with Me even plays like a Western in its long set-piece at the inn where Golden Swallow goes in initial search of justice in an immoral environment: as bad guys taunt and encircle Golden Swallow calmly in her chair, innocent bystanders go scurrying off, bar waiters grimace in fright, and a deliberately slowed down pace prepares for the violent burst of combat to ensue, just as Leone films play on longueurs of anticipation before the violence wells up with kinetic force.

Officially King Hu’s second film (he disowned a first one), Come Drink with Me took the wuxia genre (films of historical swordplay often mixed with fantasy) out of the realm of seemingly cheap entertainment for lowbrow Cantonese consumption into one of cultural ambition associated with Mandarin arts. From what was then Peking (now, of course, Beijing), Hu had brought a theatrical inspiration from Peking Opera and a literary one from wuxia novels that may not have overthrown the emphasis on the visceral and the sensational in Cantonese martial arts cinema but nonetheless gave it an air of legitimation. The film is often viewed as a transitional work to Hu’s lyrical efforts after he left Hong Kong for Taiwan (as well as the supposedly crass endeavors of the Shaw Brothers Studio to put money-making ahead of Art). But it is important to acknowledge the powers of Come Drink with Me in itself, and not just as a path to something ostensibly more culturally consequential. The film triumphs in its celebration of the powers and potentials of popular moviemaking offered up with dazzling aplomb.  

Da Zui Xia/Come Drink with Me (1966 Hong Kong 91 mins)

Prod: Run Run Shaw Prod Co: Shaw Brothers Studio Dir: King Hu Scr: King Hu, Ting Shan-hsi Phot: Tadashi Nishimoto Ed: Chiang Hsing-lung Mus: Chow Lan-ping

Cast: Cheng Pei-pei, Yueh Hua, Chan Hung-lit, Lee Wan-chung, Yeung Chi-hing, Wong Chung, Shum Lo, Wang Ruo-Ping