WATCH NOW
Translating humour tends to be very complicated, and there are also many comedic shows that fail to cross different cultures and their audiences. The main issue comes from jokes, where, they cannot be created in silence. When it comes to comedy, it is all about incongruity and expectations which are solely reliant on “culture.” When there are no norms being challenged in the picture, then there is a possibility that the joke will fall right out of the window. Nevertheless, every now and then, there is something that works in inverse. Foreign humour does sometimes work without transitions because there are various comedy sketches from different cultures that break boundaries. In Ancient Kongfu, for example, people can’t help but laugh even when they do not know the entire context of it, and that allows me to see something that completely breaks boundaries. From what I have witnessed, Drunken Tai Chi is a universal example of this. The sheer confusion that Drunken Tai Chi brings to Western audiences adds more humour than the show was intended to showcase making it all the more amusing.
In what is the main source of antagonism, we have here a kind of rivalry between Ta Sha (Mandy Chau, from Taoism Drunkard and Kung Fu Vampires), a bit of a show-off, and Chan Chuen Chung (Donnie Yen, of Iron Monkey and Holy Virgin vs the Evil Dead), a bit of a jerk. Every time Ta Sha indulges his showoff tendencies, Chuen Chung makes a point of undermining his attempts to capture attention by performing the same efforts in a more mastered fashion and otherwise making a mockery of Ta Sha. Chuen Chung is not the only person who treats Ta Sha like this. His older brother Yu Ping (Yuen Yat Chor, from Buddhist Fist and Young Taoism Fighter) is a bit too serious and more often than not, has to endure the same treatment. Oh, and one more detail I have to mention, Chuen Chung is in fact the main character of this story rather than his two frequent targets. So, yes, he may be an obnoxious little brat, but not entirely sympathetic. What is more, his father, Li Kun of The Bloodthirsty Dead and Eagle’s Claw and Butterfly Palm, is so blatantly favorable of Yu Ping that it becomes evident that Chuen Chung’s unpleasantness stems out of the need to cope with defeat.
There is a limit to how much intimidation is tolerable before people get back with justified and possibly lethal retribution. It’s a bit worse if your life resembles a kung fu movie. I need to tell you that Ta Sha’s breakdown is fascinating. Chuen Chung sets up a few of his pals to ambush him one evening in a low traffic alley. And quite literally with a bang attacks him by using fireworks and kung fu. Sadly, Ta Sha always ends up on the losing side of these fights. Simply put, Ta Sha’s fighting prowess is considerably superior, much identical to everything else. To Ta Sha’s misfortune, the overzealous performer gets blasted off the earth in the midst of his own explosives. Even though he gets back as fast as Wile E Coyote, he gets mentally destroyed and fails to get out of bed. On the other hand, his father is well aware who is behind everything, and cooks up an elaborate scheme of vengeance; particularly given that Ta Sha’s father is Don Wong from Bandits and Prostitutes and Silver and 10 Brothers of Shaolin. He doesn’t just target Chuen Chung, but goes after the whole Chan family and even recruits the mute assassin, Iron Steel.
Iron Steel arrives at the target’s home, but the target is not present which is unfortunate because now he has to start the job without a strong lead. Once Chuen Chung spends the night drinking, he comes back to the unfortunate sight of his house being burned down. To make matters worse, he is then faced with the even more gruesome sight of the bodies of his father and brother lying in a crispy state amidst the wreckage.
It is understandable that Chuen Chung falls into a rather deep depression after all that. Since you already know that this is a kung fu flick, going deep into a depression means picking fights with random people that includes a fat lady with incredible athletic finesse (Lydia Shum Tin Ha of Oriental Playgirls and The Invincible Eight) and Yu Cheung Yan of Battle Wizard and The Oily Maniac, who is a hard-drinking puppet master that also happens to be good at tai chi. (I guess I ought to clarify here that “tai chi” in this regard means the original fighting style rather than the fitness and meditation routine that is more popular in the West these days. ) Ironically, those two characters keel over the now homeless lad Chuen Chung as a handyman. Chuen Chung first has to take on some shady work for them which is what leads him to begin studying tai chi with the puppeteer teaching it. This fact might come in handy, because Iron Steel does not seem to have stopped the search for Chuen Chung, and tai chi is bound to be the only technique that works well against the kung fu skills of the assassin whose name guarantees this style is the hardest of “hard” styles.
On how Chuen Chung and Iron Steel finally encounter each other for the climactic battle is probably the best way of demonstrating how dazing Drunken Tai Chi could provide for audiences that are heavily accented on Western cinematic principles and are completely ignorant of its Chinese version. The assassin has a son, a little boy, probably three years old, and Chuen Chung happens to see him being abducted from the street by thugs we have never met before and will never meet again. Indeed, Chuen Chung does not know who the kid is, you see. He jumps in to save him simply because that is what any decent kung fu master is supposed to do under the circumstances. Iron Steel is, on the other hand, madly looking for the child in the marketplace, having not witnessed the kidnapping and so completely without a clue as to what he might have oriented the boy into. Thus, the first confrontational face-to-face meeting between the two opponents transforms into the target returning the son to the assassin. In a Hollywood movie, that would surely mean the cessation of conflict, or at the barest minimum offer a way for it to be resolved amicably.
We all anticipated Iron Steel would break his contract with Ta Sha’s father out of appreciation for Chuen Chung’s magnanimity, whether immediately or after some deep reflection. However, what occurred in Drunken Tai Chi is the exact opposite. Here, a contract is a contract and an assassin is an assassin, even if he lovingly dotes on his child, and the clash between Iron Steel and Chuen Chung takes place exactly when it should. At the same time, indeed, like all preceding fights, that one is also dramatized in at least partial the last fight. Although it’s tragic and serious, it’s not entirely life-threatening. This business of normalizing violent mixture of these types is comical in itself and Drunken Tai Chi effortlessly crosses the line for Western watchers.
While talking about Drunken Tai Chi, I find its most commendable aspect to be the cross-cultural humour. The differences in expectations from the West are slightly different from what is being catered too in the Japanese culture. It is not strange for a film made in North America or Europe to bring a character’s family to be murdered to tears, while leaving the particular character in question homeless. Such tactics are usually employed in order to get a laugh, but a black comedy would be required to put such devices into action, and they tend to fail spectacularly more often than they succeed. However, the mood in Drunken TaiChi favours a great deal towards comedy rather than drama, to such an extent that it is almost unreal! According to the Western standard, his actions shouldn’t have serious consequences, particularly with the existence of a comedic stampede to mitigate the more serious elements of the book. The actual case is quite the opposite. It is not a rare thing to imagine an individual journalist arguing that such fake ledgers encompass a majority of light comedies western movies. Chances are, if one picks on any of the movies featuring the bowery boys, Will Farrell or one of dozens of comedians in between, one is bound to come across crime, laughable domestic problems and even violence presented as a safe source of humor. To blatantly quote Patrick Swayze, Drunken Tai Chi shares a light tone with the rest of the light comedy genre, why which claim that pain don’t hurt.
In comparison, Drunken Tai Chi deals with life and death issues. The entire second and third acts stem from Ta Sha’s post-traumatic stress disorder and his father’s obsession about making Chuen Chung pay for causing it. And if this isn’t depressing enough, the climax has Iron Steel, motivated by the new ethical code in his profession, trying to kill a boy he has every reason to consider a friend. The curious thing about all of this is how the film never seems depressing.
Drunken Tai Chi uses a rather unconventional method towards its physical comedy and here, we witness it in the way the puppeteer’s wife is treated. Most people would presume that she has come to just be a medium through which the fat jokes are made, and while that is somewhat true, I’ll have to stress that the fat jokes in this movie are much different from most you have encountered. There is a total absence of the familiar mocking ruthlessness, and they are all built on the concept that regardless of her enormous girth and ungraceful looks, Lydia Shum is as exceptionally quick, agile, and athletic as Donnie Yen himself. Seeing it for the first time is bluntly refreshing.
To watch more movies like Drunken Tai Chi (1984) visit 123Movies.
Also Watch for more movies like:
