88 Films: Picture of a Nymph (1987) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of 88 Films

In between working as an action film director and choreographer behind films such as Yes, Madam! and She Shoots Straight, Corey Yuen and Sammo Hung reteamed for The Chinese Ghostbuster director Wu Ma’s 1987 supernatural Hong Kong Taoist Black Magic wuxia Picture of a Nymph.  Equal parts wacky zany with some of its wild imagery and unexpectedly emotionally moving for the doomed supernatural romance at the epicenter, the film is something of an unofficial follow up to A Chinese Ghost Story with its cocktail of exorcism, visual-effects heavy martial arts wonderment and heartstring tugging weathers.  Coming to 88 Films in a new 2K restored deluxe limited boxed set featuring a hard slip box, forty-page booklet of essay writing and running audio commentaries with Frank Djeng and David West, Picture of a Nymph is a sumptuously affecting release both for Golden Harvest and for the boutique label.

 
In ancient China, a Taoist disciple Shih Erh (Yuen Biao) is saved from certain death by his master Wu Men-Chu (the director himself Wu Ma) and raised into adulthood.  Meanwhile a gentle natured scholar named Tsui Hung-Chuen (Lawrence Ng) begins falling for a mystical young woman named Mo Chiu (Joey Wang) who later turns out to be a ghost wandering the Earth in impermanence.  Inadvertently, the scholar unleashes a vengeful demon known as the Ghost King (Elizabeth Lee) which longs to seize and possess the soul of Mo Chiu in Hell.  To protect her from the Ghost King and the watch eyes of Shih Erh and his master Wu Men-Chu, he paints a portrait of the ghost to hide in.  Still, the efforts only go so far as the Ghost King invariably tracks Mo Chiu down, forcing Shih Erh and a hard-nosed stubborn Wu Men-Chu to try and intervene and save the scholar and the spiritual love of his life from eternal damnation.

 
Lensed in 1.85:1 by Tom Lau and renowned House of Flying Daggers cameraman Raymond Lam with an effecting emotional score by A Chinese Ghost Story composer James Wong, Picture of a Nymph at the time met skepticism from some critics believing it to be a carbon copy of A Chinese Ghost Story.  Still, the film from Sammo Hung’s Stuntmen Team’s astounding choreography and stunning visual effects is an unlikely mixture of sexy and scary, tender and bittersweet and is loaded with sequences that defy description or easy categorization.  You just have to see them for yourself, although the portal between the living world and the undead reminded me particularly of Poltergeist II: The Other Side. 

 
Yuen Biao has always been a strong leading man in Hong Kong cinema and here he is given one of his most nuanced and complex characters acting as an intermediary of sorts between the battles at play between the living and the dead.  Lawrence Ng and Elizabeth Lee do a nice job of making the interdimensional couple innocent and perhaps a bit naïve.  The one tasked perhaps with the most heavy-lifting in the whole thing is the director himself Wu Ma.  In one of the film’s few breaks with form, Wu Ma bursts into song weighing the pros and cons of whether or not he should meddle in the affairs of a ghost romance and what the true meaning of love is.  The only character (to my memory) who sings in the film in addition to engaging in many of the physical combat exchanges, that Wu Ma did this much in front of as well as behind the camera is remarkable. 

 
Released in 1987 (though credited on the Blu-ray as 1988), Picture of a Nymph was met with mixed reviews for being a kind of spinoff of A Chinese Ghost Story.  Still, between the performances, the choreography, visual effects and surprising emotional gravity to the endeavor, it still found its fans for being one of Yuen Biao’s more tender performances as an actor.  From the idea of using paintings as a portal between our world and the next to some of the wildest action-choreography Taoist wuxia fighting sequences ever committed to film, its a colorful and constantly shape-shifting Hong Kong martial-arts supernatural romance whose phantasmagorical visual magic remains as vibrant and crisp as ever and 88 Films have done a wonderful job on this collectible boxed set edition.

--Andrew Kotwicki