…let’s call it “Reconceiving the Action Flick.” I’ve seen in the last week three pretty strong, strange films which seem bound up in the generic constraints of the action film but, with Houdini’s flair, slip the shackles to become (in 2 of the 3) something kind of wonderful, odd, sui generis.
Johnny To’s first Election film begins in backroom political melodrama rather than gunplay, and we’re thrust–confusingly–into the machinations of a couple of candidates for Triad Chairman. One of the first slaps at expectation is this sink-or-swim lack of exposition; we jump in, and you start paying attention to who’s who and who’s speaking for whom and what the issues are . . . and only a bit later are you given the (useful) context of the triad societies’ historic decision to build coalitions through an explicit, ritualized election process. It took me about 30 minutes–30 engaging, complicated, enjoyable minutes–to figure out the rough contours of plot. Then the film continues to resist a desire for all hell to break loose, instead spending another good 30 minutes ratcheting up tensions between the two prime candidates (the seemingly batshit Big D, Tony Leung Ka Fai; the staid, smiling businessman Lok, a great great Simon Lam), and the backchannel attempts to avoid war. And the last 40 minutes are enormously suspenseful, but–again–avoiding the thirst for gunplay. Instead, we get typically great To choreography in a race to get the symbolic baton of Chairmanship. And the ending’s enormously satisfying and dark. I thought much more of The Godfather than of your typical shoot-’em-up, but the film’s its own pleasing synthesis of templates. I think it’s really great genre filmmaking.
I wish the second film was as good, as perverse in its attention to genre, but it’s still a passing good time. Election 2, renamed (on Netflix, in the States) Triad Election for some reason, spends its first 30 minutes spelling out everything about the election process and internal strife that the last film took pains not to explicate; it felt like I was in for a cheap attempt to cash in on the first film’s rep by doing a slick recreation, smoothed out to catch more viewers. But after the plot’s in motion, the film–while never as subtly discomforting and engaging as the last–kept me enthralled, with set pieces (including one in a dog kennel) that were equally bleak and blackly funny and suspenseful. If you ain’t got subtlety, go for it with gusto. Simon Yam returns as Lok–huzzah–but the film concentrates on the trying-to-go-legit Jimmy (a suitable but too pretty, and less interesting, Louis Koo). This film isn’t quite as challenging, nor as much fun, as the first, but it’s still a good To film.
Shinya Tsukamoto’s Bullet Ballet is equal parts Alphaville, Eraserhead, and Kurosawan noir. The protagonist Goda (played by the director) has lost his longtime girlfriend to suicide. But how’d she get the gun? He obsesses, and the film follows his determination to get another gun of the same model and . . . ? wreak revenge? Kill himself? We’re never sure, and his obsession is both the engine that fuels the film and a mystery that fractures the narrative. The film skewers temporal and situational logic, building up a really rich sense of suspense that seems hyperreal, exaggeratedly expressionistic in following Goda’s misadventures. I have to be frank: watching the whole thing, I often found myself wondering why this (or in one or two instances what) was happening, but it’s so gorgeously edited, so maddeningly attentive to its central character’s state of mind, so dingily beautiful in its photography . . . I enjoyed it. Maybe admired more than enjoyed — it’s a poem using tropes of youth-in-rebellion and revenge-of-hurt-lover films, and it’s a confusing but generally enthralling flick. (I’ve never seen the director’s Tetsuo, and I feel like now’s the time to see more of his work.)
I enjoyed ‘Election’ as well. I just got Mike’s care package (thanks!) so I had watched ‘Exiled’ and ‘Election’ within 12 hours of each other. As a result, I was a little let down by ‘Election’ because it lacked the kinetic energy of ‘Exiled.’ There are moments of savagery — usually unexpected — in the former (including one in a closed up “wine and oyster bar” and another on the banks of an urban river), whereas ‘Exiled’ signals it set piece gun battles so you have time to get comfortable and watch the bullets fly.
I wouldn’t myself think of the ‘Godfather’ because the cast is not strong enough (though Simon Lam is wonderful), there is too much idiocy from minor characters (it often seems as though we turn to Whistle or Big Head or some other wimpering fool for comic relief rather than to move the plot along), and the movie is too slow in the middle when we follow the search for the baton. But what I did like a lot was the way in which professions of ancient honor, and codes of secret societies, were so openly flaunted in practice as self-interest dominated the choices made by the principals. The solemn pledges of honor and loyalty are revealed as fig leaves as a combination of fear, cowardice and greed win out.
My Godfather reference was meant more as guide, as no I don’t think the two films are equivalent. I’m okay with the comic relief — that’s a staple of Hong Kong action films, the collision of radically different tonal and acting styles. But I agree that the film never does as much as it might with the characters beyond the leads and one intriguing loyal pitbull of a Triad go-fer.
Wasn’t Exiled fun?
oh, good, so this is another johnny to thread after all.
OK,so it is another Johnny To thread, but I loved ‘Exiled’: everything from the moment they all start cleaning the house and putting in furniture to the prostitute collecting gold bars at the end.
This theme of friendship and shared experience between antagonists, that is so central to HK action flicks, works particularly well here. Why is this theme so omnipresent? Or rather, why is it so rare in Western action movies? Is it necessary to create moral distance between the good guys and the bad guys in the US?
Whatever, ‘Exiled’ is a blast, and the entire cast is impressive, especially Josie Ho as the “girlfriend” (sorry, Gio).
(when i can be bothered i’m going to merge all fifteen johnnie to threads, and split mike’s stuff on bullet ballet to its own thread.)
I think they all belong in the John Woo thread but I could be wrong. Exiled would have been a lot more fun had it been 30 minutes shorter.
Speaking of which… whatever happened to Woo? He has nothing since ‘Windtalkers’ in 2002 except the execrable ‘Paycheck’ and a video game. What a waste. Going to Hollywood was a big mistake.
I was going to start another thread on To just to bug Arnab, but instead: Mad Detective literalizes with remarkable fluency and chutzpah ye olde genre trope of the detective who can imagine his way into sympathies with the criminal, and thus capture the cretin. In To’s collaboration here with Wai Ka-Fai, that protagonist (Inspector Bun, played with equal parts emotional depth and leftfield passionate eccentricity by the very good Lau Ching Wan) is in an opening prologue revealed as expert crimesolver (natch) *and* batshit loon (slicing off part of his ear at a going-away party). Some years later, Bun is approached by a young detective Ho (a workmanlike Andy On) to help crack a tough corrupt-cop case, and we learn that Bun’s technique is to literally see the “inner personality” of the criminal. And–deliriously–the film’s bad-guy is seen by Bun as seven different personalities, leading to some dizzying (but, as it’s To, absolutely lucid) compositions and edits where we are constantly piecing together what’s really going on, who’s really in the room, and so on.
The plot is reasonably suspenseful, the film maintains a pleasant thrum of anticipatory energy, but it’s not an action film–no big trademark To set-pieces, ‘though there are any number of gorgeous shots. (One footchase down an alley, shot from 90 degrees overhead…) It’s just plain fun.
And (again, natch) unavailable yet in the States. I’m happy to loan it out; I also have To’s Sparrow, and I’ll get to that in the next few days….