Johnnie To's Drug War (2012) finds the director working in Mainland China for the first time. As such, he's had to make certain...concessions...to the demands of the mainland marketplace. It's a testament to the director's filmmaking savvy that not only hasn't this hindered his ability to put his trademarked noir sensibility on the screen, it may have intensified it. Still, there are some noticeable differences between this film and his usual crime films.
Note: Here there be spoylers.
If you want to know what a director actually does, and if you want to know what distinguishes a "good" movie from a "bad" movie when both types of movie share a common pool of elements, you could do worse than study Hong Kong director Johnnie To. I mean, taken purely on the level of their plots, To's movies are not particularly distinguished. They're stock genre exercises, most of them. It's what To does with the elements of his movies that make him special. His films chart the geographies of action like no other. He moves his pieces around the board like a chess grandmaster.
Take, for instance, the scene in Vengeance (2009) where Johnny Hallyday's character first hires the team of hit men to find his daughter's murderers. Each of the hit men are shown in a series of crosscut shots walking in specific directions. When they come together in the same frame, there's a sense of an action completed. They're in the EXACT right spots relative to where they've been shown in the previous shots, and from there, the director puts them into motion into the next sequence:
It's fluid. It's carefully composed. It's totally not essential to the movie, but the aggregate of these kinds of shot sequences adds up. You can sense the quality of the filmmaking, especially when the director punctuates them with shots that DO matter. For an action film, the shots that matter are in the action sequences, and here, the director takes the rhythms he's been riffing on in the rest of the movie and kicks out the jams.
Keeping in mind that To makes movies for an action audience, it's worth looking at the action sequences in the same light. The first big action sequence is like a blueprint, in which the hit men retrace the murder of Hallyday's family. It's like the director is going through point by point and showing the audience how he blocks the action, so they know what the hell they're looking at when he's not guiding them by the nose. When the bullets are flying for keeps, the director is very cognizant of where his characters are, what is around them, and how it affects the battle. The first of these scenes is beautifully orchestrated after the filmmakers allow the bad guys to finish a picnic with their families (suggesting a level of honor among killers). The subsequent shootout hinges on the position of the clouds in relation to the moon, of all things. To is a master at putting the elements to work in his movies, something he learned from Kurosawa. There's a further scene in the movie, in which To recreates the essence of one of Kurosawa's big samurai battles in a trash dump, complete with a "king" viewing the action from a pavilion. It's a sequence that stands as one of the glories of the director's output. It's a marvel of motion and color.
The story in Vengeance, while an exercise in stock genre, is more convoluted than one would expect. It's twofold. It's the story of Frank Costello, a chef with a violent past intent on avenging his his daughter's murder. Complicating things is a bullet in his brain that is slowly depriving him of his memory. Costello was written for Alain Delon, and To, for his part, would be a perfect director for Delon, a kind of Asian descendant of Jean-Pierre Melville, whose existential crime films explore many of the same themes. To has Johnny Hallyday to stand in for Delon, and it works. Hallyday is a superior presence. The memory theme is interesting, too, providing the question of what vengeance means. Of what use is it to a man who cannot remember it? The film even puts this question in the mouth of one of its hitmen. This is also the story of the trio of hit men he hires, played by To regulars Lam Suet, Ka Tung Lam, and the ubiquitous Anthony Wong. In taking the job, they unknowingly cross their boss (played by To regular Simon Yam), who does not look kindly on their conflict of interest, and Costello's vengeance suddenly becomes their own. To is on familiar ground here, inhabiting a Hong Kong noir style that he largely invented, and this film forms a thematic trio with The Mission and Exiled. As he does in those films, he tweaks the conventions of the action film to make them sing.
13. Yasuzo Masumura's Black Test Car (1962) is an indictment of capitalist backstabbing among industrial spies, and if it's less outrageous a film than Masumura's earlier Giants and Toys, it's certainly as scathing a criticism. The montage of the burning wreckage of the test car of the title is a neat summary of the movie as a whole.
14. Johnnie To's Exiled (2006) is more or less a remake of the director's The Mission, but where The Mission turned its back on the gonzo filmmaking of the Hong Kong new wave, this film embraces it fully. A quartet of gangland assassins duel over their intended victim, only to abandon their hit over dinner when the victim's new wife and child intercede. Unfortunately, the boss who hired them is none too happy about it. The opening movement of the film seems like To's ode to the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West, while there are two apocalyptic gunfights later in the film that see the director interpreting the gunfights of John Woo or Ringo Lam in his own idiom. To loves to stage his mayhem in master shots where the combatants are close in on each other. A marvel of bullets and bodies in motion.
15. Big Trouble in Little China (1986, directed by John Carpenter) is one of those mid-eighties films where Hollywood tried (and failed) to catch the zeitgeist of the Hong Kong action films. My SO put this in the machine and immediately noted: "When I first saw this, I didn't know what 'wire fu' was." Kurt Russell is a picture of an incompetent hero, whose only real heroic act is to put an end to the big bad guy. It's been a while since I've watched this all the way through. This is the first time I realized that the "Masters of Death" were swiped from the second Lone Wolf and Cub film. This film was made at about the time that Carpenter's muse was beginning to leave him.
16. Cloverfield (2008, directed by Matt Reeves) doesn't have an original thought in its head, but damned if it doesn't work in spite of all of that. This film takes the classic mistake of Kaiju movies--emphasis on the human cast--and turns it into a razor sharp narrative gimmick. It's hard to believe that it's taken nearly ten years for someone to find the perfect use for The Blair Witch Project's technique of putting the camera in the hands of its characters. We still don't care all that much about the film's shallow, yuppie characters--which is good, otherwise their various deaths might overwhelm the movie--but seeing things from their ground-level point of view has a startling immediacy that I've never seen in this genre before, and that immediacy returns the giant monster movie resolutely into the realm of the horror movie. The film's best set-piece (involving a perilously leaning skyscraper) doesn't even depend on the monster. That all said, Cloverfield's most generous gift to the viewer is Michael Giacchino's faux Akira Ifukube "Overture" over the end credits.
17. Much as I like Hitchcock's original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), I understand implicitly why Hitch decided to remake it. He grasped that this original version ends at the wrong point. Instead of the vivid climax at the Royal Albert Hall, the bare outlines of which are present here, it ends with a big gunfight. It's kind of an anti-climax. Still, Peter Lorre is a superb bad guy even if Leslie Banks is a stiff as the lead.
18. I've sometimes expounded my theory about what I call "The Catherine Deneuve Problem." Essentially: if you have Catherine Deneuve in your movie, you have a problem because the actress is so inhumanly lovely that she can potentially ride roughshod over whatever your movie is about. There are, it seems to me, two solutions to this problem. The first is to submit to it and turn your picture into an adoration. This is how Jacques Demy approached it, for instance. The other solution is to defile her. This is the solution that Polanski used in Repulsion, but Luis Bunuel beat him to it in Belle de Jour, and repeated the experiment in Tristana in 1970. There was something about Deneuve that brought out the director's sadomasochism, and in this movie, he constructs a rigorous examinations of sexual power games, in which Deneuve's character submits to the older Don Lupe (Fernando Rey), only to turn the tables on him once she loses her leg to a tumor. This film is Bunuel at his most brutal, and the imagery is particularly grotesque.
Current tally: 18 movies, 9 horror movies.
I'm still mulling over my reaction to Johnnie To's Throwdown (2004), which seems to be a weird hybrid of his comedies and his crime films. It's shot in the Hong Kong noir style (as opposed to the bright, open style of, say, Yesterday Once More), but it's populated by lovable misfits and a sense of redemption that seems almost out of place in such a world. The story follows ex-Judo champ Sze-To Bo, who walked away from the sport to open a (failing) nightclub, where he seems to be drinking himself to death. Enter a young judo artist intent on challenging him, and a vagabond singer who's looking for a job. Mix well. The plot is almost entirely irrelevant. It's an excuse to watch these characters (and some others besides). My favorite character in the movie is the triad boss who is so competitive that he crushes little kids at air hockey. Louis Koo is pretty good in the lead, in a role that demands that the audience not know that he's blind until two thirds of the way into the movie.
On the other hand: To's Election 2 (2006, aka: Triad Election) is, if anything, even blacker than the style with which it is filmed. Picking up the threads from the first movie, we find Chairman Lok (Simon Yam) coming to the end of his term, and scheming to extend his rule contrary to triad custom. We also find Jimmy (Louis Koo) in the Michael Corleone role, a gangster who thought he was out, but who got dragged back in anyway. Having framed the romance of the Hong Kong crime film in the first two thirds of the first film only explode it in the end, To begins this film in a much darker mode. It's easy--poisonously easy--to see these films as a riff on The Godfather, but I think the true source is Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity series. In the first of Fukasaku's films, the director mocks the yakuza sacrifice of fingers as penance for transgressions against their bosses by throwing one of those fingers into a chicken coop, where it is promptly devoured. To goes that one better in a scene of baroque nastiness involving a dog kennel, a cleaver, and a meat grinder. If the audience was making the mistake of sympathizing with Koo's Jimmy, this sequence obliterates it. Everyone here is a soulless lowlife. And that's where the movie becomes most interesting, because in addition to the triad machinations, there is also the specter of the government. Jimmy doesn't want to be a gangster, but the authorities on mainland China WANT him to take over the triad. To is cagey--he knows the game of pleasing the censors while saying what he wants. This is a masterclass in that kind of gamesmanship.
Milos Forman's Amadeus (1984) is witty (the title, in addition to being Mozart's middle name, is a terrific verbal bon mot). But it's not particularly good. Oh, the movie covers for the fact with lush production values and all the Mozart you could ever want, but the performances are stiff and the resolution is ridiculous. Still and all, I was surprised to learn that the god-awful laugh that Tom Hulce invented for Mozart was based on historical fact (a contemporary described the real Mozart's laugh as sounding like steel rubbing over glass). File this in the category of entertaining bad movies.
Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong (2005) is as shameless a love letter to a favorite movie as has ever been penned, but it's not an unreflected one. Especially in its extended edition, the movie echoes the original scene by scene (and occasionally frame for frame), but it manages the not inconsiderable feat of offering subtle, and occasionally scathing criticism of the original point by point. Consider, for example, the use to which Jackson puts Max Steiner's original score and the costumes worn by the natives in the original in a scene that lays bare the colonialist racism of the first film's natives. The film also difuses the weird (and racist) Freudian innuendo of the first film and places a character into the film that sympathizes with Kong as much as the audience does. But, of course, what's of real interest here is the dinosaur mayhem and the swarm of biplanes, and here, Jackson delivers in spades. Some viewers have called these scenes excessive, but when has Jackson ever delivered restraint? It's not in his nature.
Leo McCarey was convinced that the Cary Grant persona was an impersonation of himself, learned by Grant on the set of The Awful Truth (1937). I doubt very much that this is wholly true, but I suspect there might be a kernel of truth to it. Grant, the chameleon, picked up bits and pieces of a lot of the people he worked with. But to my eye, the Grant persona was already in place as early as Sylvia Scarlet, two years prior to The Awful Truth. That said, it’s possible that The Awful Truth shows the Grant persona perfected. The movie itself is great fun, and Grant’s deft self-deprecation is one of the film’s main attractions. Watching him spar with co-star with Irene Dunne as they both try to wreck the other’s happy divorce is a delight. I used to love the Dunne/Grant pairings, but time hasn’t been kind to them. Dunne seems woefully out of her league, a creation of the 1930s, while Grant seems timeless. This probably works the best of them, though, and the look she gives Grant from her bed at the end of the movie is a look that I can imagine on the faces of a lot of women were Cary Grant to walk into their bedrooms.
Most of the reviews of Johnnie To’s Breaking News (2004) focus on the opening shot. It’s a great shot, so I’m not going to quibble with this, but the consensus seems to be that, outside of that shot, the rest of the movie is rote. I’m not so sure about that. There are two things in the movie that set it apart from standard Hong Kong actioners: The first is the sly, meta-cinematic reworking of Johnny Mak’s Long Arm of the Law (1984)--in both films, a gang of criminals is trapped by the police in one of Kowloon’s mammoth apartment blocks. It’s commonly thought that the satiric point of the movie is trained at the media--and it is--but it’s also trained at the history of the Hong Kong action film itself. Most viewers won’t catch this, or even care about it, but I liked it. The other thing that sets it apart is the measure of everyday life that our gang of criminals brings to their ordeal. They take a family hostage, discover that the father (To regular Lam Suet) cannot cook, and end up making a feast for the family. Both of our criminal masterminds dream of opening restaurants. It’s a totally unlooked-for flourish in a film that could be a routine programmer. We also get still more variations of the director’s obsession with cell phones, which marks this distinctively as a To film. To may be my favorite director on the Pacific rim right now.
In the interests of full disclosure, here’s how I stand with Robert Bresson: I was indifferent at best towards both The Trial of Joan of Arc and Diary of a Country Priest. I hated Au Hasard Balthazar, which may be the most disgustingly misanthropic movie I’ve ever seen. I was quite content to let sleeping dogs lie. I have plenty of other interests without forcing my way to an appreciation. In steps my significant other, who collects Arthuriana, with Bresson’s Lancelot of the Lake (1974). Now, I don’t know what I was expecting. Much as I disliked Balthazar, I’ll certainly admit that it was impeccably filmed, so I wasn’t expecting Lancelot to be as unwatchably awful as it turned out to be. For a brief moment at the beginning of the film, I wanted to pop it out of the DVD player to make sure that we were watching the right film. The opening sequence, consisting of various slaughter and mutilation of knights, seems like a first sketch for a Monty Python skit, or a poor-man’s imitation of the bloodier chambara set pieces from Japan, only with blood pumps set to “ooze” rather than “geyser.” The feeling that this was a half-baked sketch was reinforced by the constant, annoying clatter of armor. The film’s other signature sound effect is the whinny of an off-screen horse. The film repeats this sound effect--the same, unvarying sound effect--at random throughout the movie--and, again, I began to think of Monty Python (the resemblance between this and Monty Python and the Holy Grail is too close to be an accident). The film has no interest in people, except, perhaps, to delineate how awful human beings are. Bresson communicates this through his zombie actors and by a desire to look at anything but a human face except when he can’t get around it. There are a LOT of shots of the feet of knights and the feet of horses in this movie, so many that it becomes ridiculous, even at an 80 minute running time. In his desire to deny the audience the pleasure of romance or spectacle--and I’m sure that this is the intent--Bresson elides anything that might be considered a set-piece, resulting an a completely disjointed narrative as the film comes to its climax. We see aftermaths, mostly, but we don’t see context. After we finished watching this movie, my GF said “Well, that’s two hours I’ll never get back.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was only an hour and twenty minutes. Such is the relativistic, time-dilating effect of really terrible movies.
I think I’m done with Bresson.
99.9 (1997) is another film by Spaniard Augusti Villaronga, whose other films ambushed me late last year. Villaronga knows how to get under the skin. He knows how to give the knife a twist or two beyond what the audience thinks it can bear. He’s on speaking terms with horror in a way few directors can manage for long. This film is no different. It follows the host of a radio show as she tries to unravel the death of a friend who died under mysterious circumstances while conducting paranormal research in a small village in Andalusia. The plot has an Asian feel to it, on the surface. Parts of the film, detailing our heroine’s friend and his work, mine the videodromic dread of The Ring and its progeny. But unlike those films, the film ultimately has a little-c catholic view of horror and evil. Evil in Villaronga’s world is part of the air. It’s everywhere. It’s wherever you find it. That all said, this isn’t nearly as alarming a film as In a Glass Cage. Its focus is far too diffuse. Villaronga follows a number of narrative dead ends as a result. The film doesn’t add up, exactly, but when it is clicking, it remains as bruisingly hurtful to the audience as the director’s other films, only with less of a point. He’s traded scalpels for an aluminum baseball bat, if you will, but both will screw you up bad in the right (or wrong) hands.
I got a huge shipment of Asian films this week. My review of Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is up on my web site. A bunch of Johnny To movies are in the stack too, including two recent offerings.
Rumor has it that Johnnie To’s Election (2005) was cut down from a three hour running length and that it is the first installment of a trilogy. One can feel a more expansive narrative in the negative spaces of the movie and I can’t help but wonder what To might have had in mind for a longer film. The movie seems like it was made on a bet: “Can you make a triad movie without any guns?” The answer is yes, of course. Don’t be deceived by the lack of firepower, though. There’s plenty of violence in this movie. What we have here is a study in power politics among the underworld, centered around the election of a new triad chairman. The obvious comparison is The Godfather (or The Godfather Part II, given a final scene that recalls the murder of Fredo). Like those movies, Election presents a conflict between the traditional, highly ritualized (and highly self-deceiving) ways of organized crime, and the new, more impersonal, ruthless, corporate style of crime. Beyond that, though, I don’t think the analogy holds up. The Godfather movies don’t necessarily distance themselves from the gangsters they depict. They like them just a little too much. To doesn’t like ANY of his gangsters. A closer analogue would be Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honor and Humanity films, which Election also resembles. This is a generally somber movie, filmed in deeply shadowed spaces even during daylight hours, but in spite of that, To’s own playful cinematic anima comes to the fore. There is a long chase at the center of the movie, in which the baton that symbolizes the power of office is sought by both sides of the conflict. During this chase, the allegiances of the players change, then change again. It culminates in one of the director’s drollest set pieces, in which both combatants are interrupted by cell phone calls from their respective controllers. To loves cell phones, and this scene compares favorable with the cell phone scene in PTU. The ending of the film annihilates this (much like the ending of Running on Karma turns THAT movie into something much darker than its playful nature suggests). There is no “play” in the final sequence of the movie. It plays for keeps. To sets up some expectations with Simon Yam’s character, who is exactly the sort of charismatic criminal that might be an anti-hero in another movie. The ending obliterates this notion. This is To at his most black-hearted.
Like any self-respecting auteur, Johnnie To never throws anything away. There are echoes of To’s other movies in each subsequent offerring. Running on Karma, for instance, takes the absurd sight of Andy Lau in a muscle suit from the equally absurd sight of Lau in a fat suit in Love on a Diet. In Yesterday Once More (2004), we see the influence of To’s crime films on his romantic comedies. (Note: interested parties are advised to read no further). The film has Andy Lau and Sammi Cheung playing husband and wife jewel thieves. Like all international jewel thieves, they live a life of luxury, treating their careers as an elaborate game. The game becomes even more elaborate after they divorce each other over the split of a diamond robbery. A year later, when Cheung’s character threatens to remarry, Lau, in the best tradition of Cary Grant, re-enters her life to disrupt everything. Confounding everything is the ambition of Cheung’s would-be husband (the Ralph Bellamy character, if that means anything to you) and his meddling mother, who, it seems, is herself a thief. This sets up a curious echoing effect in the plot as scenes double each other, then double each other again. On the surface, this film is a frothy, caper film a la To Catch A Thief crossed with My Favorite Wife, but underneath, we have a variant on Running Out of Time. The final montage includes the unexpected lowering of a casket into a grave, a sight that turns the frothy comedy into a darker, more bittersweet movie.