Green Snake
| Green Snake | |
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| Directed by | Tsui Hark |
| Produced by | Tsui Hark Ng See Yuen |
| Written by |
Lilian Lee (novel) Tsui Hark |
| Starring |
Maggie Cheung Joey Wong Vincent Zhao Wu Hsing-kuo |
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Release date
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Running time
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99 minutes |
| Country | British Hong Kong |
| Language | Cantonese |
Green Snake (青蛇, literal Chinese title: The Teal/Green Snake) is a 1993 Hong Kong fantasy film made by Tsui Hark. It is the adaptation of a novel of the same title by Lilian Lee.
The novel itself is a variation of a Chinese folk tale Madame White Snake, where Lillian Lee tells the story from the perspective of Xiaoqing, the Green Snake, who normally plays a supporting role behind the main character Bai Suzhen, the White Snake. As the title suggests, the movie also features Xiaoqing as the main character.
An overzealous Buddhist monk named Fa Hoi (Vincent Zhao) has trained for 20 years to solely banish demons from the Human World due to his prejudice against spiritual beings seeking to improve themselves. He captures a spider in human form, who has trained for 200 years to be able to reincarnate, and throws him underneathe a gazebo. Fa Hoi is later seen meditating, apparently being haunted by sins of the human mind and is being punished spiritually for his mistake. He eventually releases the Spider spirit.
A storm takes place while Fa Hoi goes into the forest and he attacks two Snake spirits. But after he noticed that they were only preventing rain from hitting a woman giving birth, he also releases them. Again, he is haunted by sins of the human mind, primarily the female body. The two snakes, White Snake (Joey Wong) and Green Snake (Maggie Cheung), are later seen on the rooftop of a festival where Green Snake participates in naked while White Snake eyes a local scholar Hsui Xien (Wu Hsing-Kuo). The two have been training for many centuries to take human form and experience the love, freedom and wisdom that is supposedly only available to humans. White Snake is the more experienced one and proceeds to get engaged to Hsui Xien, with whom she plans to have a child which would complete her passage into the mortal realm; Green Snake is the younger and more impulsive of the two sisters but she is not yet quite convinced of the benefits of the human world. They both move into their magically created house and start a successful medical practice in the town. Other than Hsui Xien's visit, the two gets another visit unexpectedly from a buffoonish Taoist whom Green Snake leaves the household to take care of. Because of White Snake's beautiful charms, Hsui Xien, once known as the toughest and most dedicated scholar of the village, is starting to lose his reputation.
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