Zhang Yimou cares about two things: beauty and politics. Politics poisoned his early life. His parents were considered “bad elements” during the Cultural Revolution and Mr. Zhang was sent to be re-educated in the countryside for 10 years. During that time he sold enough blood to buy a camera and apply to the Beijing Film Academy. He was rejected for being too old, and only after numerous appeals was he admitted.

A member of China’s famed Fifth Generation of directors (those who received their education after the Cultural Revolution ended), Mr. Zhang brought a punishing intensity to his first directorial effort, “Red Sorghum,” set in a sorghum distillery. Sorghum doesn’t grow in China anymore, so Mr. Zhang planted an entire field of it. When a drought struck, Mr. Zhang and his crew watered the fields by hand – the work was so hard the director lost more than 20 pounds in a week. The film went on to become the Fifth Generation’s first popular hit.

Beauty is Zhang Yimou’s antidote to all this harshness. For six movies his lead actress was his lover and muse, Gong Li, whom he first met when she was an unknown. A few years after their partnership ended, Zhang Yimou met another radiantly beautiful acting student, Zhang Ziyi, and cast her in a movie. The two aren’t romantically linked, but their creative collaboration has spawned three films and made the two international superstars.

“House of Flying Daggers” was the second-most popular movie ever released in China; first place is held by Mr. Zhang’s recent color-coordinated martial arts epic, “Hero.” “Hero” was pretty, but “Daggers” traffics in perfection. It is so ravishingly beautiful it instantly makes the audience feel restless and inferior.

Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro, two of Hong Kong’s hunkiest heartthrobs, play Leo and Jin, two cops in Imperial China who hear a rumor that the new gal at the gilded cathouse down the street is an agent of the antigovernment secret society, the House of Flying Daggers.

Jin is younger and cuter than Leo, so he’s sent to suss out the new chick, Mei (Zhang Ziyi), who’s very, very small, and totally blind. Leo and Jin play good cop/bad cop until they have Mei so irritated that she flies around the room and attacks people with her sleeves.

Her identity exposed, it’s off to prison. Leo and Jin throw her into an aggressively ugly torture chamber and threaten her with a human-sized sandwich press. But Jin, pretending to be a rebel sympathizer, breaks her out, hoping that she’ll take him to her leader in the House of Flying Daggers.

In order to make Mei and Jin’s flight to freedom convincing, however, the government makes sure they’re attacked – and attacked frequently – by hordes of pursuing soldiers who drop down from the trees and pop up from pretty fields of flowers. When nature isn’t enough, Mr. Zhang employs digital color manipulation to give his autumn foliage an exact ochre burn or submerge his bamboo forests in an algae-green murk.

Mr. Zhang is the ultimate director, controlling the weather, the leaves, the actors’ complexions, every fold of fabric. At the climax of the film, one character’s perfect hairdo becomes disheveled, and it feels like a slap in the face. As ominous storm clouds pile up, we don’t know if they’re echoing the turmoil in his heart or if the gods are angry at the ruination of this perfect coif.

Unfortunately, this swashbuckling romance seems too much pop showcase for its dewy stars – a kind of “Crouching Hottie, Hidden Hormones” – and seems to be directed under duress. As he always has, Mr. Zhang takes every opportunity to subvert the movie’s cliches and tweak the action and emotions just over the line from awe-inspiring to ridiculous.

The problem is, with this film, no one’s forcing Mr. Zhang to do anything he doesn’t want to do anymore. No longer forced into genre conventions, he has to fully stock his movie with cliches before he can gently deconstruct them. Even then, the deconstruction is so gentle that it’s almost invisible.

Characters are mortally wounded, but rouse themselves from the dead for one … more … line – which turns into two … more … lines, which turns into three … more … lines. The exposure of secret identities becomes so outrageous you expect Andy Lau to pull off a rubber mask to show that he’s actually Jackie Chan. And while the action is appropriately jaw dropping, Mr. Zhang seems too busy tweaking tradition to invest them with a genuine sense of wonder.

Where the movie does raise a pulse is in its make-out sessions. Zhang Ziyi and Takeshi Kaneshiro manage to breathe life into their thin characters when they lock lips. Their sudden, genuine intensity makes the audience feel like clearing its collective throat and quietly giving them some privacy.

Some say that Mr. Zhang’s two martial-arts epics indulged in beauty at the expense of politics, that having had three movies banned in China, he became reluctant to offend Chinese authorities. But Mr. Zhang has made two extremely successful movies, which have shored up the entire Chinese film industry. Who was it that said success is the best revenge?

A ZHANG YIMOU DISCOGRAPHY

Miramax has just released “Hero” on DVD, so now all of Zhang Yimou’s post-1994 movies are domestically available. But two of his best, “Raise the Red Lantern” and “The Story of Qiu Ju,” are not available domestically on DVD (though some online hunting will rustle you up copies).

If you want to see his first two films, “Ju Dou” and “Red Sorghum,” though, good luck. Special edition discs of “Van Helsing” clog the shelves, but no “Ju Dou”? What a world.

RAISE THE RED LANTERN (1991) Zhang Yimou’s third film, and his most stunning. Gong Li suffers beautifully at the hands of the decadent patriarchy.

STORY OF QIU JU (1992) Starring Gong Li and a gang of non-actors and shot with hidden cameras, this black comedy follows a peasant woman going to Beijing to seek justice after her husband is kicked in the crotch by an official.

TO LIVE (1994) An epic melodrama about a family of rich good-for-nothings trying to survive 40 years of Chinese Communism. Plush, like a Chinese film by Douglas Sirk.

SHANGHAI TRIAD (1995) The story of a vicious gang war in 1930s Shanghai, told from the point-of-view of a 10-year-old servant. Gong Li and Zhang Yimou’s final collaboration. Toxic and beautiful.

THE ROAD HOME (1999) Zhang Yimou teams up for the first time with Zhang Ziyi in this beautiful flashback story about a son’s parents meeting, falling in love, and getting married.

NOT ONE LESS (1999) A 13-year-old girl is instructed to teach her village school when the teacher goes on leave. Shot with non-actors, and never sentimental.

THE TURANDOT PROJECT (1999) A television documentary about Zhang Yimou directing a gigantic production of the opera “Turandot” in the Forbidden City, which threatens to go hurtling off the rails every five seconds.

HERO (2002) It took Miramax two years to release this color-coded martial arts epic starring Jet Li, but it became the sleeper hit of the summer. The most popular movie ever released in China – and a masterpiece.