House of Moody Heroes

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE’s Maggie and Tony sublimate their desire by writing martial arts serials. I like thinking of HERO as the rapturous result, with its elegant alibis marshaled in the form of a brain-tingling regicide plot against the king who (as Borges notes) both built the Great Wall and burned all the books. Hit man Jet Li—like Odysseus to the Cyclops, like McKinley’s assassin—is nameless, nobody, no man. So too is Takeshi Kaneshiro, traceless as the “Wind,” to Zhang Ziyi’s Mei in HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS—a small-scale companion piece to HERO, in which the carpet-pulling identities are the deadly filigree on a tale less about the agonies of empire than simply in the mood for love.

What was the question again?