Lau Kar-leung’s hero, Liu Yu-de (Gordon Liu Chia-hui), weaves in and occasionally out of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. As many films go, sometimes, it’s about the supporting characters, like Yu-de’s and his fellow Han Chinese students in Canton inadvertently offending the Manchu invaders during late Imperial China. Yu-de eventually gets on the Manchus’ radar, the latter killing his father and entire family. He escapes to a Shaolin monastery that teaches martial arts. He reluctantly becomes an apprentice monk, taking the name San Te, and starts out as the monastery’s worst apprentice.

But as these things go, San Te becomes the monastery’s best student, willingly giving into any physical challenge that the elder monks give him. There is an underlying tension between him and the monks though. It’s one that the latter are more willing to speak of. He may want to be a perpetual student but eventually, he’ll want to go to the outside world. The temple currently has 35 chambers and he’ll want to built the titular 36th. What will he do with two kinds of adversaries – academic ones inside the temple and real enemies like General Tien Ta (Lo Lieh), waiting for him in the outside world?

This film can have a political interpretation, like finding out who are the Manchus supposed to be in a modern context. But let’s keep things simple and look at this film as microhistory. One way of looking at The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is that this is an imagined story. One about how one generation passes down martial arts like kung fu from one generation to another. Scenes like San Te doing everyone’s dishes feel like the blueprint for future martial arts films. In this one and ones that follow it, the student learn everything before learning how to fight. Fighting, as this film shows, requires discipline.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin also feels like a middle ground between the comedy of Jackie Chan’s films and the fatalism of Bruce Lee’s. If veers more to the comedy side although yes, the comedy is subtler here. Or at least, it’s as subtle as San Te and his fellow apprentices headbutting sandbags. They do this to make their heads stronger, I guess. There *are* similarities to comedy and martial arts’ filmic language. However, the shots here are more medium than wide to reinforce San Te’s endurance. These shots capture Liu’s eyes which at times capture San Te’s curious side as much as the application side of learning kung fu.

San Te’s journey into becoming the temple’s best student takes five years, a time period that, duh, has to end. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is practically more of a training film than a fighting one, and as it transitions to the latter, it shows that he fights most of the fights – dynamic fight choreography, natch – but not all of them. Even as he’s off screen, we feel his external struggles as well as internal ones. The film, specifically, deals with how to use one’s strengths while still being a force of good. And yes, one can be a force of good while kicking ass during one on one kung fu battles.

Watch The 36th Chamber of Shaolin on MUBI.