Mom and Pops Unite: Taking on a Dry-clean Giant in Fairfax (in National News) State Safety Net for Immigrants in Jeopardy (in Bay Area News) Were Those Bugle Boys You Were Wearing? (in Business) Fantastic Plastic Machine: Tanaka and His Beautiful Girl (in A&E) Paying Attention: Remembering the Stonewall Uprising of '69 (in Opinion)

Once Upon a Time, Tsui Hark Made a Movie

Once upon a time, Jet Li was a relatively unknown wu shu master, with a couple of films under his belt. Then along came Hong Kong director Tsui Hark’s 1991 martial arts epic Once Upon A Time In China — and all that changed.

Tsui’s masterpiece gets a second time around on movie screens this week when its uncut, 134-minute version is screened in the United States for the first time. The gorgeous, newly struck 35mm prints also have re-translated subtitles and English-language credits that will have nit-pickers, grammarians and copy editors squirming a little less in their seats. Once Upon A Time In China combines a surprisingly complex critique of Western colonialism and stunning action heroics — a “hidden dragon” no more for mainstream American audiences.

Pro-unification to the core and more, the film opens with an atrocity that hints at other outrages to come: The true-life Chinese folk hero Wong Fei Hung (Jet Li) and a departing naval commander are enjoying an onboard dragon dance until the fireworks go off, and a nearby ship of Anglo colonialists misread the sounds as an attack and fire upon the ship. The dragon dancers are slaughtered, and it seems like the dance won’t be completed, until Wong springs into action, runs up the flagpole and finishes the ceremony.

The leaders of China are disturbed enough by the deadly cross-cultural misunderstanding to discuss Wong’s role as the martial arts teacher and leader of the local militia group, the fractionalized Chinese groups that are vying for power, and the treaty signed between Western powers and China. Wong is given the duty to protect “our country, our land, our people,” which leads to an epic credit sequence of militia calisthenics, prefiguring Claire Denis’ Beau Travail.

But nothing is quite as straightforward as martial arts in Wong’s life. His uncle has left Wong with his thoroughly Westernized, English-reared “Aunt” Yee (Rosamund Kwan), who possesses a new-fangled camera, an independent streak and attraction for her nephew. She tries to give Wong a proper English tailored suit, but he resists it like an imperial takeover: He has nothing but bad associations with the West.

Back at Wong’s martial arts school and herbal medicine clinic, a country boy named Leung Foon (Yuen Biao) has arrived, looking for leadership, only to encounter Wong’s hapless Chinese American student “Buck Tooth” So (Jacky Cheung), looking like the worst Jerry Lewis “Chinaman” stereotype and incapable of speaking rudimentary Cantonese without a comical stutter. Scared off, Leung encounters “Iron Vest” Yim (Yan Yee-Kwan), a hardened and poverty-stricken yet powerful and talented martial arts street performer, and becomes his protégé instead.

In the meantime, Wong’s militia group becomes entangled in East-West politics as a tussle with Tong gangs spills over into the foreigners’ settlement and smashes up a genteel tearoom, in spite of Wong’s demands to “Stop fighting!” while handily repelling weaponry and disarming all oncomers. The local magistrate takes away Wong’s militia in order to ingratiate himself to the Western dignitaries, and things go from worse to disastrous as Wong’s school is set on fire, assassins are set upon him, and a bloody shootout ensues during a local opera performance.

The final climax is a true tour de force with its layered scenes of multiple jeopardy. Wong and Yim fight to the death on swooping bamboo ladders — a scene which is said to have used about 300 shots and will remind some of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s bamboo forest battle scene — while Aunt Yee is threatened with rape. The Tongs and Westerners are on the sidelines, ready to attack, and the local magistrate is threatening to jail the hero for the umpteenth time.

The irony is that, in the end, this apex in martial arts film (which upped the ante on the genre and left Li with a broken leg and ankle) ends up critiquing the practice as a thing of the past. “We can’t fight guns with kung fu,” admits Yim, even after he rips the innards out of an opponent with his bare hands. In the end, Wong has to admit there are some reasons to look toward the West — even if the Westerners themselves have little regard for Chinese life.

Another aspect that will hit home for Bay Area audiences are the scenes of hawkers enticing Chinese workers to come to Gold Rush-era California, where, they rave, people have to wear sunglasses because of the brightness of the nuggets strewn across the landscape. “If they really have gold, why do they come here?” the ever-skeptical Wong asks. “Maybe we’re standing on gold now.”

His words are borne out when his clinic takes in an indentured laborer from America who was branded and abused like a slave once he arrived in the Promised Land.

In the same sense, considering the uneasy assimilation of free-market economics, ideals and technology in China today, Once Upon A Time In China seems as fresh and compelling — in both its treatment of cultural imperialism and its superior kung fu — as when it was released a decade ago. Imagine if the film got the attention back then that Crouching Tiger received last year — the past decade would have really been a great leap forward.