Wine and Movie Pairing: MIRAGE (1987)
A forgotten action spectacular paired with a nearly forgotten wine.
MIRAGE ACTION JUNKIE SCORE
Total Action Scenes: 12
Total Action Time: 43.25 min/92 min (47/100)
Choreography: 9/10
Stunts: 10/10
Editing: 8/10
Finale: 9/10
TOTAL SCORE: 95
I clock the total action time and score action movies on my Letterboxd list HERE.
This past weekend we hosted our first Wine 'n Watch Party, where we showed this forgotten 1987 action masterpiece from director Tsui Siu-Ming, MIRAGE aka "Mirage of Martial Arts".
Those who got to watch the film were thoroughly impressed, even though the picture quality was a Laserdisc rip - because that's the best quality format this film has ever been released in. And that's the key reason this film has been forgotten. Not because it only appeals to a small niche audiece, or is only impressive when considering a vanishingly small budget. The film actually had a sizeable budget, a sprawling cast, a soaring soundtrack worthy of John Williams (give or take), and the action and stuntwork are absolutely off the charts.
But it's simply never been released for home video. At least not often and only in certain countries.1
There have been VCD (Video Compact Disc)2, VHS, and Laserdisc releases back in the day. The copy we showed was taken from a Japanese Laserdisc (with burnt-in Japnese subtitles.) A German fella made a custom DVD of this rip a decade or so ago, and added English and German audio tracks to it, alongside the original Mandarin audio track. We took that, then took the subtitles from the VCD release, retimed them to fit the Laserdisc edition, and showed the film in its original Mandarin language with English subs.
But all that blah blah blah above brings us to the crux: this is a mainland Chinese production, and unlike Hong Kong or Taiwan, they were *terrible* at exporting their cinema to the West. In most cases, this wasn't a hige loss as mainland productions lacked the experience and technical know-how of Hong Kong and Taiwanese film crews. But in the case of MIRAGE, this was a large scale production put on by Hong Kong talent and so the resulting film was PHENOMENAL.
The DIrector
Tsui Siu-Ming was a successful child actor of the 60's and early 70's, who went on to try his hand at singnig in the late 70's and 80's. Here's a selection of his songs that were used on Chinese TV dramas:
In 1980 he co-directed his first film with the incredible Yuen Woo-Ping (action choreographer of The Matrix, Crouching Tiger HIdden Dragon, Iron Monkey, Drunken Master, and so many more!) THE BUDDHIST FIST had Tsui co-writing the script, co-directing (though uncredited), and co-starring in one of the lead roles where he got to fight the star - Woo-Ping's brother, Yuen Shun-Yi. It's actually midly shocking how good Tsui is at the action given he had no martial arts or stunt background.
He continued to work with "the Yuen Clan" (Yuen Woo-Ping and his many brothers who had their own production company and action school.) The Idiot Assassin (1981) and The Fung Shui Master (1983) followed, and then Tsui decided to try something most of Hong Kong weren't willing to do at the time: work in mainland China.
The China Years
China had, at this time, reached out to the Hong Kong film industry to come work with them, to train their film industry to produce films at a Hong Kong level. They'd already achieved a milestone success with 1982's SHAOLIN TEMPLE which debuted a talented Wushu champion who went by the screenname "Jet Li". Two sequels were made in 1984 and 1986, and then Tsui Siu-Ming decided to try his hand in the mainland film industry with 1985's HOLY ROBE OF THE SHAOLIN TEMPLE.
HOLY ROBE saw Tsui directing, writing, and choreographing the action. It featured a similar story and setting to BUDDHIST FIST, but here Tsui discovered mainland martial artist Xu Xiangdong, and most importantly: Yu Rongguang. Yu was the villain in HOLY ROBE, but would prove to be a dashing, Indiana Jones type hero for Tsui's 1987's MIRAGE.
Side note: most Americans will know Yu as the star of IRON MONKEY from 1993, the martial arts film that was EVERYWHERE in the mid-90's thanks to Quentin Tarantino giving it the thumbs up. (And Yu plays the Iron Monkey himself!) He also went on to star as the villain in the Jet Li movie MY FATHER IS A HERO, and Donnie Yen films BALLISTIC KISS and SHANGHAI AFFAIRS. He's tall, long-limberd, and moves with a mesmerising grace. But HOLY ROBE and then MIRAGE in 1987 were his first two leading roles, hits debut as a martial arts star.
MIRAGE also stars a lady named Pasha Romani as the female lead. This was her film debut and holy shit does this lasy have PRESENCE. If looks could kill, her look drops a nuclear bomb on whatever is in her sights. And she does a phenomenal job with the action choreography. Pasha would make two additional mainland films in the next few years, and then marry and disappear. Though she did re-emerge in 2006 under her married name Pasha Umer Hood in the film MY MOTHER IS A BELLY DANCER where she plays the belly dancer instructor. And this flick is readily available on streaming!
MIRAGE would prove to be Tsui's apotheosis as an action director. What HARD BOILED is to John Woo, or DRUNKEN MASTER 2 is to Jackie Chan, MIRAGE is the action epic that reaches heights Tsui would never achieve again. The money in the mainland dried up, and Tsui found that he had alienated many of his Hong Kong contemporaies by having working for the mainland.
He did manage a 1993 action film that is also high quality: 1993's BURY ME HIGH, a movie starring the infamous character "Wisely" (Wei Si Li), the protagonist of a series of adventure novels, many of which were adapted into film and TV. There is also the late-career film from 2008 titled CHAMPIONS where Tsui cast many Chinese Olympic champions to perform in a martial arts action film. It's a bt silly - like the Western version of the concept that was GYMKATA (1985) - but the action set pieces are excellent and well worth a veiwing.
Yet beyond these, Tsui was relegated to directing comedies and TV, and was never able to recapture the dizzying action highs of MIRAGE. Sadly, there are no known prints of the film still in existence, so the Laserdisc rip may be the best we ever get to archive.
You can find a compressed and English dubbed version of the film on INTERNET ARCHIVE. Or, if you really want to see our uncompressed, subtitled version, I suppose you could slip into my DM's and ask nicely. ;) And don't miss the next Wine 'n Watch Party!
A Nearly Forgotten Wine to Pair With a Nearly Forgotten Film
We chose to pair MIRAGE with a style of wine that most of the world almost lost: Orange Wine. This is a style made when you take white grapes and make a wine in the style of a red wine - soaking the juice on the grape skins for weeks to months.
Technically the oldest style of wine known to man, it fell out of popularity with the rise of refrigeration and then the speed with which "clean" white wine could be made. A handful of countries kept the tradition alive but they fell behind the Iron Curtain post-World Wars, and so non-Soviet countries forgot the style entirely.
Until the 1990's when Georgian winemakers in Italy resurfaced the style. Natural winemakers were the first to embrace the return of this style of white wine - now christened "orange wine" or "skin contact white wine", but orange wine is not necessarily natural (aka "minimal intervention".) It's simply a choice to include the skins of the white grapes during fermentation and possibly even beyond.
Orange wine gives not just color but also body and texture, tannins (the things that make your mouth feel dry and dusty), and a whole new range of new flavors and aromas. We wanted a whine that was robust and dusty like the setting of MIRAGE, powerful and unique in its sum total elements.
ITRI Cellars "Chapter Two" Skin Contact White Wine
I chose this as my specific orange wine - a blend of 55% Riesling, 35% Gewurztraminer, and 10% Pinot Gris. It's called "Chapter Two" because this is the second vintage of the winery, a small production label decribed as "wine made by misfits, for misfits."
Founded by reality TV Editor Adam Croce (The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Dancing With the Stars), with wine sales maestro Casey O'Brien, and winemaker Kent Humphrey, the group is a rare one that falls under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, and this orange wine was just the right balance of body, grit, fruit, acidity, and minerality. It'll keep you company on the Silk Road where MIRAGE is largely set.
You can purchase ITRI Chaper One wines direct from the winery. Chapter Two wines you'll need to click this link to see if anyone sells it near you, or that can ship it to you! And beyond ITRI, find an orange wine with some grit to it. Get those dusty tannins! As your local wine shop what they have that falls under that banner. Trust me: they have something that does.
We often wonder: can a movie really be that good and yet we’ve never even heard about it? I’m here to tell you: YES. It’s rare, but yes.
VCD were a very Asian thing, and rarely seen in the West. It’s literally a CD - a Compact Disc, the same amount of data space that you’d put a music CD on, aka not much. They would fit a whole half a movie on a disc that could only hold roughly an hour of mp3’s. Then a second disc for the second half of the movie. And it would still look like total shit. Not too horrible if nothing was moving. But especially for action - movement would make everything pixellate horribly. But it was dirt cheap to make so you could sell these movies for like a buck, and I recently wrote about how we really weren’t picky about quality back in the day, so they were popular for a while.
Many thanks for this amazing double find! Mirage and Orange wine!