Identity and Illusion: A Deep Dive into Green Snake (1993)

Imagine two serpentine spirits, draped in silks the color of jade and moonlight, stepping out of legend and into a world of human desire. That’s the premise of Tsui Hark’s 1993 film Green Snake. As we embark on 2025, the Year of the Wood Snake, a year of growth and transformation in the Chinese zodiac, symbolized by the color green, it’s the perfect time to revisit this cinematic gem.

Maggie Cheung and Joey Wong are mesmerizing as sworn sisters, two snake spirits who have cultivated their souls over centuries. They yearn to understand the human experience, and so they take human form.  Wong, as the elder White Snake, glides through the human world, understanding its delicate intricacies, and she finds love with a gentle scholar, in a union that seems to transcend the boundaries between their worlds.

Cheung’s Green Snake is a whirlwind of untamed energy.  She’s a creature of instinct, a vibrant spirit who struggles to grasp the rules of human society. She’s drawn to the exotic allure of an Indian dancer, the familiar comfort of her sister’s husband, and the stern challenge of a powerful but self-deceiving monk. Her journey is a testament to the messy, beautiful chaos of the human heart.

The film dives into the shimmering, often treacherous, waters of identity and illusion. The snake sisters, in their pursuit of acceptance, employ artifice, yet they strive for an inner integrity.  Contrast this with the monk, a man who cloaks himself in the rigid robes of intellectual Buddhism, yet is willfully blind to the desires that simmer beneath his surface. He desperately judges the world rather than embracing the fluid beauty of what it is.

Tsui Hark uses this seemingly righteous character as a foil to the snakes’ compassion, a commentary on the destructive power of self-deception and rigid ideology. He wants to believe that his superficial intellectual understanding of Buddhism is the same as renouncing attachments. He can’t face his shadow, and he desperately commits judging the world rather than accepting what is.
Like many of Hark’s finest films, Green Snake is a tapestry woven with threads of polycultural identities and the interconnectedness of human lives. It whispers a powerful message: the sterile categories we create to divide ourselves are a betrayal of the vibrant, messy truth of existence. A truth that the two sisters exemplify in their journey.

The White Snake traditionally holds the spotlight in this classic Chinese folktale, but this is no traditional film.  Hark centers Green, the less educated and more intuitive of the two.  As Green says at the end of the film:

“What is love? It’s really ridiculous that even humans don’t know. When you’ve worked it out, maybe I’ll return.”