Recipient of awards at Venice, Cannes and Berlin and the first of his ambitious nation’s filmmakers nominated for an Oscar -- thrice, as a matter of fact, since 1990 -- Zhang Yimou is hot property. Showing at the New York Film Festival two months before opening nationally, House of Flying Daggers cannot but enhance his reputation. “A tribute to king fu movies” for which the director sees the “Wuxia” (martial arts) Hero as “just a rehearsal,” this newest is way more than that.

Some might feel that pruning would not have hurt in the minute-short-of-two hours story, co-written, -scripted and –produced by Zhang. Certainly there are excessive twists in love and (civil) war, but so very much is combined in the way of imagination, music, choreography, scenery and photography that the total package is a full, arresting movie experience.

It is reported that, largely with Pan-Asian actors and technicians from previous films of his, Zhang required six months of rehearsals before the cameras cranked. Given that unions in China are weak, this may be true, but, whatever the case, such unheard-of preparation is rewarded in the integral blending of a far from usual variety of elements to reinforce and complement one another.

The base of martial arts hand-to-hand and weaponry is comely, restrained and not laughably overkilled to outrageous flying fist acoustics. These are trained warriors, female and male, interrelated through double or triple agency and a triangle of love old and new, but the mano a manos are graceful, near believable -- this is, after all, adventure -- and all enhanced with hoofbeats, windblown bamboo and leaves, birdchirps and the ping of steel on steel and whizzing projectiles.

After two-hundred-fifty liberal, cultured years, China’s ninth century Tang Dynasty is falling apart in corruption, as rebel armies roam, most prominently the Robin Hood-like House of Flying Daggers. Operating in the very shadows of the capital, the mysterious group includes women, has recently lost a revered leader said to have left behind a blind daughter, and may have insinuated one of its number into Madam Yee’s (Song Dandan) fancy Peony Pavilion dance-house brothel. County captain Leo (Andy Lau Tak Wah) sends playboy companion Captain Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to the place as a customer, to ferret out this rebel undercover dancer.

Ordered to perform for him, novice Mei (Ziyi Zhang) turns out to be blind but so beautiful that, feigning drunkenness as planned, he attacks and tears her sumptuous long-armed robes. On cue, troops burst in to “arrest” the two, but first she must perform the Echo Game dance to head officer Leo’s beans-against-upright-drums and then, matching swords with him, reveals her Flying Dagger membership. (Blind or crippled fighters are a genre staple.) Silent during interrogation though threatened with harsher methods, the sightless dancer is saved by a skillful warrior calling himself Wind, “I come and go like a playful wind.”

The rescuing hero is Jin, who is to earn her trust so that, likely the dead leader’s daughter, she will lead him to the rebels. Co-schemer Leo’s warning not to fall for the woman merely underlines what will come to pass. Although Wind saves her a second time in faked battle with troops, Mei’s hesitancy about him as traveling companion, ally and lover is only gradually overcome, with a bit of humor and wounded pride, as well. Trusting love is far from the only complication, however, for an army general has entered the picture, whose soldiers hunt to kill both fugitives, who are in turn helped by an unseen third party. Further, absolutely no one is what he or she seems, and all sorts of revelations will surface in the realms of heart and politics.

Events turn out not exactly what one expects in such a tale, which concludes with sacrifice, tragedy and embrace in an extended three-way struggle so epic that late summer turns to autumn turns to heavy snowstorm winter. Shigeru Umebayashi’s score, with theme performed by Kathleen Battle, is a distinctive blend as evocative as Morricone’s for spaghetti Westerns; Zhao Xiaoding's camera is brilliant in its use of shifting stock and landscape -- one would swear the Ukraine location is the Berkshires -- and contrasts, especially bright reds, pale vs. dark greens and alabaster Ziyi and her swarthier men; and costume and choreography are sumptuous yet subtle enough not to be an end in themselves. The result, the unified whole, is a visual, aural and emotional feast, storytelling as cinema can best do it.

(Released by Sony Pictures Classics and rated "PG-13" for stylized martial arts violence and some sexuality.)