Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film

Director in Action

Hong Kong University Press thanks Xu Bing for writing the Press’s name in his Square Word Calligraphy for the covers of its books. For further information, see p. iv.

For Elisabeth

Director in Action Johnnie To

and the Hong Kong Action Film

Stephen Teo

Hong Kong University Press 14/F Hing Wai Centre 7 Tin Wan Praya Road Aberdeen Hong Kong © Stephen Teo 2007 Hardback ISBN 978-962-209-839-8 Paperback ISBN 978-962-209-840-4 All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Secure On-line Ordering http://www.hkupress.org Cover image: Photograph by Jupiter Wong Printed and bound by Lammar Offset Printing Ltd., Hong Kong, China.

Hong Kong University Press is honoured that Xu Bing, whose art explores the complex themes of language across cultures, has written the Press’s name in his Square Word Calligraphy. This signals our commitment to cross-cultural thinking and the distinctive nature of our English-language books published in China. “At first glance, Square Word Calligraphy appears to be nothing more unusual than Chinese characters, but in fact it is a new way of rendering English words in the format of a square so they resemble Chinese characters. Chinese viewers expect to be able to read Square Word Calligraphy but cannot.Western viewers, however are surprised to find they can read it. Delight erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed.” — Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

xi

1. Introduction

1

2. From The Big Heat to Lifeline

31

3. Nucleus of the Milky Way

65

4. Directed by Johnnie To

101

5. The Uneven Auteur

145

6. Postscript

177

Epilogue

199

Appendix 1: Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

215

Appendix 2: Johnnie To on Election

245

Notes

249

vi

Contents

Bibliography

273

Filmography

281

Index

283

Illustrations

Still Still Still Still Still Still

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6

Still 1.7 Still 2.1 Still 2.2 Still 2.3 Still Still Still Still Still

2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8

Still Still Still Still

2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12

A professional gun hand: A scene from The Mission A scene typical of the urban Western, from Breaking News A hero gets his gun, from The Odd One Dies Kowloon Noir: the heart of To’s darkness A portrait of feminine cool in Breaking News Cherie Chung tries to come between two swordfighters: a scene from the climactic step-printed slow motion action sequence in The Enigmatic Case To’s mentor, the avuncular Wang Tianlin (Wong Tin-lum, in Cantonese), as he appears in Election Chow Yun-fat’s tragic end in All about Ah Long Violence and the Hand of Fate: an image of the Destiny-machine at work in The Big Heat Explosion in an apartment, a Johnnie To trademark patented in The Big Heat The tape player: “a small object which propels the action” The big heat visited on the corrupt villain The eunuch beholds a future emperor Anthony Wong with a missing digit in The Heroic Trio Blood drips out from the back of the baby’s head: a violent image in The Heroic Trio Anita Mui’s Wonder Woman: a contemporary Niobe Maggie Cheung’s “butch” outfit in The Heroic Trio Women warriors battered but undaunted The eunuch’s skeleton emerges from the fire in The Heroic Trio

6 7 8 12 13 23

26 33 35 41 41 42 44 44 45 46 49 51 52

viii

Still Still Still Still

Illustrations

2.13 2.14 2.15 3.1

Still 3.2

Still 3.3 Still 3.4 Still 3.5 Still 3.6 Still Still Still Still

3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10

Still 3.11 Still 3.12 Still 3.13 Still 3.14 Still 4.1 Still 4.2 Still 4.3 Still 4.4 Still 4.5 Still 4.6

Still 4.7

Fire as a protagonist in its own right in Lifeline Fire consumes a firefighter in Lifeline Giving and taking the salute: heroes vindicated in Lifeline The hapless figure of Wong Ah Kau (Lau Ching-wan) in the China misadventure section of Too Many Ways to Be Number One Wong Ah Kau (Lau Ching-wan) and Matt (Francis Ng) in Taiwan, with Ah Kau striking a characteristic hapless pose Wong Ah Kau, the luckless hero with a bullet in his head Two views of the exaggerated visual style of Too Many Ways to Be Number One Takeshi Kaneshiro as the young hoodlum-hero of The Odd One Dies Carman Lee as the dejected female assassin in The Odd One Dies The visual style of The Odd One Dies A mobster’s hand grabs a knife: The Odd One Dies Carman on the rooftop Face to face with his double: Tony Leung and Lau Ching-wan in The Longest Nite The final duel in The Longest Nite, set in a warehouse of mirrors Lau Ching-wan as the “monstrous double” in The Longest Nite A minor explosion in an apartment, from a scene in Expect the Unexpected The fatalistic end of Expect the Unexpected The duel in the bar with coins and glasses of wine The final duel in A Hero Never Dies Leon Lai wheels in Lau Ching-wan’s corpse to fire the last shot in A Hero Never Dies Andy Lau, running out of time and standing on the edge of a rooftop Andy Lau and Lau Ching-wan as the odd doubles of Running out of Time Andy Lau, disguised as a woman, and Lau Ching-wan playing out a gay sub-theme in the double motif of Running out of Time Gunmen executing the law of the jianghu

57 61 61 74

75

76 78 80 80 81 82 83 88 89 91 94 98 107 109 109 111 113 115

120

Illustrations

Still 4.8 The stasis of action in the shopping mall gunfight in The Mission Still 4.9 Kowloon Noir Still 4.10 Caged bodies in PTU Still 4.11 The slow-motion final shootout in Canton Road, emphasizing still figures Still 4.12 Action in one long take: scenes from the opening sequence of Breaking News Still 4.13 The first cut in the opening sequence of Breaking News Still 4.14 Face-off inside a mini-bus between the male robber and the female cop in Breaking News Still 4.15 Gunfire action as an example of Johnnie To’s achievement of coordination and precision in Breaking News Still 5.1 A Chinese transnational killer: Andy Lau in Fulltime Killer Still 5.2. The “gold medalist” of killers Still 5.3 O: the monolingual Japanese fulltime killer Still 5.4 A glimpse of madness: Simon Yam in Fulltime Killer Still 5.5 Andy Lau’s phantasmatic body in Running on Karma Still 5.6 Johnnie To’s direction of 360-degree space in the “Four Tables” sequence in Throw Down Still 5.7 A judo brawl in the street Still 5.8 Redemption of the champion: Tony Leung Ka-fai acknowledges defeat in Throw Down Still 6.1 Gunless violence in Election Still 6.2 Simon Yam holding the symbol of the triads, the catalyst of real and symbolic violence in Election Still 6.3 Paying allegiance to the laws of the triads Still 6.4 Louis Koo as Jimmy Lee, a tanned and pretty criminal-butcher, in Election 2 Still 6.5 The feminine yin “look” of modern triad gangsters: Election 2 Still 6.6 Encagement, in Election Still 6.7 The four gunmen-protagonists of Exiled Still 6.8 Shootout in a Macau restaurant: Exiled Still 6.9 Taking in a beating: Anthony Wong and Simon Yam in Exiled Still 6.10 The gravity of violence at the end of Election Still 6.11 The trauma of violence impacting on the next generation

ix

127 130 131 132 135 135 140 141

158 161 162 163 166 171 172 173 178 179 180 184 185 186 189 191 194 197 197

x

Illustrations

Still E.1 Death in the city: the final massacre in Expect the Unexpected Still E.2 The “killing” of Shin in The Mission Still E.3 The Hand of Fate: does it bring closure? A scene from The Big Heat Still E.4 Exiled: the stylistics of violence Still E.5 Walking down the road to Avici: a scene from PTU

203 204 205 207 211

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the following persons who have each in their own way facilitated the writing and research of this book: Colin Day, Phoebe Chan, Delphine Ip, David Bordwell, Shan Ding, Jupiter Wong, Winnie Fu, Patrick Tam, Louisa Wei, Meaghan Morris, Adrian Danks, Frank Reefman, Yung Sai-shing, James Hewison, Irene Nai, Seow Chye Seng. I am grateful to Johnnie To who kindly made time during the making of his film Election for three rounds of interviews with me, which I have translated and edited into a single interview for inclusion in the appendix. I am also grateful to the Melbourne International Film Festival, the AFI Research Library in RMIT University, Melbourne, and the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Some of the material in the Epilogue concerning the violence of Election was presented in a seminar on 27 April 2006, organized by the Asia Research Institute, on the subject of violence in Asian cinemas, as part of ARI’s “Asia Trends Seminar Series”. I thank Professor Chua Beng Huat of ARI for giving me the opportunity to shape and refashion my thoughts on the two Election films based on the material I presented. My last word of gratitude goes to my wife, Bea-fung, whose assistance and companionship during the months of writing this book made it a pleasant experience.

Introduction

1

1 Introduction

Director and Genre This monograph is a study of a genre and the work of a director in the contemporary Hong Kong cinema. The equation of genre and director opens a question about the nature of the Hong Kong film industry and its structure of genres. Since the industry employs filmmakers to achieve and consolidate its objective of entertainment and commerce, how does a director make use of and transcend the limitations of genre to make films of his own wishes and design? The relationship between genre and director is an underdeveloped area of Hong Kong film studies. Much of the published studies of Hong Kong cinema focus either on genre or director but rarely examine the symbiosis between the two. From the point of view of genre theory, genre films tend to make themselves so long as the director follows the established rules and conventions of genre. The theoretical premise of this monograph is that the work of the director in focus, Johnnie To1 (Chinese name: To Kei-fung in Cantonese, Du Qifeng in Mandarin), has affected and changed the nature of genre and its industry more so than the other way around. To’s work in the genre of the action film was undertaken in a period of steady decline (from 1997 to 2005) in the Hong Kong film industry as Hong Kong itself was beset with economic and social malaise in the years following reunification with China in 1997. To secured his reputation largely through his direction of a series of off-beat action films set in the contemporary era, centring around the world of professional killers, criminals, triad gangsters and their policemen adversaries: A Hero Never Dies (1998), Running out of Time (1999), The Mission (1999), Fulltime Killer (2001), Running out of Time 2 (2001), PTU (2003), Breaking

2

Director in Action

News (2004), Election (2005), Election 2 (2006) and Exiled (2006). At the same time, To also produced and supervised (in some cases, actually directed), under the banner of Milkyway Image, the production company that he founded in 1996, an even more unusual series of action films directed by younger proteges: Beyond Hypothermia (1996), Too Many Ways to Be Number One (1997), The Odd One Dies (1997), The Longest Nite (1998), Expect the Unexpected (1998). These films set an extraordinary record for To as the most distinctive and innovative director in Hong Kong cinema today. They merit a study of To as an auteur working specifically in the genre of the action film. For To, the action film genre gave him the space to build interesting narratives around his main concerns which are cinematic but also social and political. As such, there is an imperative to study To’s action films in order not only to understand To’s career in the Hong Kong cinema and the scope of his achievements as a director but also the genre as “experience and meaning”, to use Barry Keith Grant’s formulation of genre cognition.2 Grant invokes the idea of genre films as “social myth … directly related to lived experience, their traditions clearly connected to communal values”.3 The action film genre represents in microcosm the cinematic range of To’s career and the community of Hong Kong which moulds To’s “lived experience”. (To had also spent a formative part of his career in television, which falls outside the scope of this monograph.) To has handled a variety of genres and he has directed action films of many kinds. As the term “action film” is a broad one, it is necessary to consider the term more closely and in the process, come up with inter-generic terms of reference within which we may assess To and his films. To’s distinctiveness lies in marking out the differentials between the intertextual connotations of genre, as I hope to demonstrate below. His films can and are often referred to multifariously as the “gangster movie”, the “cops and robbers movie”, the “detective movie” (or “policier”, to use the French term), the “crime movie”, and other subsets and variations peculiar to the Hong Kong cinema — such as the “young triad movies” (guhuozai pian), “professional killer movies” (shashou pian), “hero movies” (yingxiong pian), and “black society movies” (hei shehui pian: the term “black society” being an euphemism for triads). Such arbitrary labelling can amount to pigeonholing and stereotyping which often confuses and does not reflect the intrinsic value of a genre. How does one define action as an intrinsic value of the Hong Kong action film? Is action, in terms of pure action (defined as spectacle4 ), the meaning or the structure of the genre? Since action in the Hong Kong cinema is usually defined in terms of choreographic scenes of violence involving gunplay, swordplay, and martial arts, or a combination of all three, the term “action”

Introduction

3

is thereby applicable to a wide range of genres — martial arts,5 comedy, horror, melodrama, and the gangster movie. The action films of Johnnie To can be defined under the name of one or many of all these genres, and this, apart from anything else, makes him a typical and representative Hong Kong director. But we are still somewhere short of a definitive understanding of the action film genre and from knowing how it stands vis-à-vis the director of this study. The chart below delimits the genre categories of To’s action films forming the focus of this monograph:

Gangster (or triad) movies

The Big Heat Loving You Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 The Odd One Dies The Longest Nite A Hero Never Dies The Mission PTU Election Election 2 Exiled

Cops and robbers (or detective) movies The Big Heat Loving You The Longest Nite Expect the Unexpected Running out of Time Running out of Time 2 PTU Breaking News Running on Karma Election Election 2

Professional or hired killer movies Beyond Hypothermia The Odd One Dies The Longest Nite A Hero Never Dies The Mission Fulltime Killer Election 2 Exiled

The fact that some films appear in more than one category shows that there is considerable overlap between the categories (some appear to cross all three categories and these are perhaps the most representative action films in the To canon). (I have not categorised To’s other films that will be analysed in this monograph, namely The Heroic Trio, Lifeline, Needing You, Help! and Throw Down, for the reason that they do not fall as neatly into the above categories, although their generic links with the action film will be dealt with in the upcoming chapters; and it is possible of course to form other subcategories within the three above, e.g. Running on Karma could be classified in the sub-category of “serial-killer” movies or “muscular action” films ). The element of arbitrariness in delimiting the genres above is compounded by the fact that they can all fall under the wider category of the “crime film”. Western critics denote the “gangster film”, the “detective film” and the “crime film” as discreet or distinctive genres,6 and they have a somewhat different understanding of the action film. Based on the empirical evidence of Hollywood products, James M. Welsh divides the action film into two categories: pure action and action-adventure. Welsh favours the latter as a

4

Director in Action

more cohesive category because it meets the definition “of a film genre that requires a recognizable iconography, coded characters designed to respond to dangerous situations in predictable ways, and clearly defined formula filmmaking”.7 To Welsh, the action-adventure category encompasses disaster pictures featuring spectacular visual effects, including Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) and Cameron’s Titanic (1997), the films of John Woo and Richard Donner (the Lethal Weapon series), the Simpson-Bruckheimer films (Top Gun [1986], The Rock [1996], Con Air [1997]), and almost any kind of big-budget “testosterone movies” borrowing from “the film noir tradition involving an atmosphere of menace and a corrupt or corrupting city, past, present, or future”. 8 The action genre appears to be quite a distinctive tradition of blockbuster adventure with film noir atmosphere but it appears also to be multi-generic. Similarly, Mark Gallagher asserts that “the action film constitutes a genre of its own” but that it “draws from other traditional film genres” such as the gangster film, the Western and the war film.9 I would argue that To’s action films with a cop and gangster background share a certain affinity with the Western more than any other genre. In one sense, the Western denotes the earliest generic mode of action cinema, invoked by the famous shot of the outlaw firing his gun into the camera in Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), and in another sense, it denotes a certain relationship between Hollywood and the Hong Kong cinema: Hong Kong as a miniature Hollywood (the relationship here points to a sharing of generic properties in both cinemas as well as to the fact that the Hong Kong film industry was modelled after Hollywood). To’s films could be regarded as “urban Westerns”, with the “urban” denoting the “determinate space” of action (while the Western in itself denotes its own determinate space in the American frontier). The term is borrowed from Thomas Schatz, who gives a distinction between genres of “determinate space” (which includes Westerns, gangster and detective films) and those of “indeterminate space” (including musicals, screwball comedy, melodrama).10 Schatz’s definition of “determinate space” is a “symbolic arena of action” in which conflict over fundamental values is sustained within a familiar locale and enacted “according to a prescribed system of rules and behavioural codes”. By “indeterminate space”, Schatz means a civilized, ideologically stable milieu where there is no physical conflict but rather “attitudinal oppositions” which are more ideological and abstract.11 Space in The Mission, PTU, Breaking News, Election and Election 2, is certainly determinate in the sense of being a limited, symbolic arena of action where conflict and resolution are played out according to a prescribed system of rules and codes. This immediately invokes the kind of mythic space which

Introduction

5

the Chinese call the jianghu (literally, “rivers and lakes”), referring to the world in which triad-based gangsters, hired killers and even the police-detectives operate according to prescribed codes and rituals. The action is determined by these codes and rituals — as To demonstrates succinctly in Election. There is a parallel here with the literary world of romance where “the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended” and in which the hero must be portrayed as “doing something”, as Northrop Frye explains (the romance genre is thus defined “by the hero’s power of action”).12 The hero’s “prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him”.13 Certain Hong Kong critics have latterly coined the term “jianghu movies” to refer to the kind of action films that I am trying to define here (the 2004 release Jianghu, starring Andy Lau and Jacky Cheung, is the archetype marking the trend to rename the action-cum-gangster film in this culturally specific way, somewhat in the manner of the Japanese genre known as yakuza). I could well have used the terminology jianghu films as a metonym for “action films”, but to my mind, jianghu is much too broad and there is no determinate jianghu myth that defines the contemporary action film: a jianghu movie could just as well be a martial arts movie in the style of wuxia (the martial chivalry form). The jianghu myth is seen through the subjective points of view of filmmakers and arbitrarily categorized by critics and filmmakers equally, although it is true that the Hong Kong action film is driven by jianghu precepts such as the notion of yi (the sense of righteousness), loyalty, bonding, as evident in To’s The Mission and PTU, which can be seen as variations of earlier films based on the same precepts in both the gunplay-action format (such as John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, Hard Boiled, Ringo Lam’s City on Fire) and in the swordplay and kung fu action format (Zhang Che’s The Heroic Ones, Blood Brothers, and many others). The action film can be recognized by the jianghu myth and its precepts, but if jianghu-space is mythical and determinate at the same time, how is it manifested? For convenience, we might see the jianghu-space in the same urban dimensions as the urban Western, where the urbanity of the space connotes a certain type of action, as well as a certain apparatus of action. In Election and Election 2, the jianghu codes proscribe the use of guns and these two films may in this sense be excluded from the realm of the urban Western, but if guns were only a stylistic feature of the action film, their absence in the two films is immaterial. According to John Cawelti, the urban Western is a genus which “frequently requires a group and elaborate technology”.14 To’s films, including Election and Election 2, are models of this requirement. They are all about the group operating in urban settings with the elaborate implements of modern technology forming what I will call the “infrastructure

6

Director in Action

of violence”: cars, lifts, elevators, mobile phones, TV, the internet, and above all, guns. Guns are not immaterial to the majority of To’s action films and ought to be placed at the centre of this infrastructure of violence. On the one hand, they are practically synonymous with the action film, and on the other, as Jason Jacobs claims, the “cinema and gunfire had always been intertwined”.15 It is guns that clarify the analogy of To’s urban action films with urban Westerns.

Still 1.1

A professional gun hand: A scene from The Mission

Robert Warshow also sees an unmistakable association between the Western and the gangster-action film, and the crucial link is the use of guns. He declares: “The two most successful creations of American movies are the gangster and the Westerner: men with guns”.16 Insofar as To’s action films are about men with guns, they are an amalgamation of the gangster film and the Western.17 “Guns as physical objects, and the postures associated with their use form the visual and emotional center of both types of films”, Warshow asserts.18 He could be talking about A Hero Never Dies, The Mission, PTU and Breaking News — all true urban Westerns, all with gangsters in them, and all featuring emotional relationships between protagonists and adversaries that are “fundamentally bound up with the gunfire itself” (as Jason Jacobs comments on the central relationship between the two cops in John Woo’s Hard-Boiled 19 ). To’s heroes are typical modern gunfighters, evoking a cult or a mystique described by Richard Slotkin in the context of the American Western as “a style of action more appropriate to a certain kind of worldview (which) is essentially ‘hardboiled’: the world is a hostile place, human motives are rarely good, and outcomes depend not on right but on the proper deployment of might”.20 To’s hardboiled urban settings can be interpreted as a Western frontier, complete with all its mythic proportions as well as its propensity for crime and violence. Might rules in this hostile environment, but To’s films do not

Introduction

7

Still 1.2 A scene typical of the urban Western, from Breaking News

lack a moral, ethical dimension of violence. The urban Western denotes violence as a natural corollary of guns, but it is the emotional relationships bound up with gunfire that determines the nature of violence. Jacobs writes essentially about the aesthetics of gunfire sequences (exemplified by the last shootout in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch), and I will make the point that the violence in To’s films is a manifestation of mythical violence, in other words, aestheticized as myth (more on mythical violence later). Jacobs also notes that gunfire is gender-specific. “Gunfire sequences offer particular pleasures for men, pleasures which often cannot be found elsewhere”.21 To’s gunfire action films are certainly male-specific and emit homosocial and homoerotic pleasure as a natural part of what Richard Dyer calls “the masculine structure of feeling” in the action film.22 Though it is tempting to take this masculine structure for granted, To’s films consciously or unconsciously pose a question about violence and its association with men, highlighting what Yvonne Tasker calls “the politics of representation in terms of the construction and dissolution of categories for identification within the cinema”.23 The masculine structure in To’s films is not as solidly conceived as it might seem, and some critics have shown that it does occasionally crumble, supporting their claim that To’s films in fact exhibit a “crisis of masculinity”.24 Jacobs suggests that gunfire sequences offer a broader pleasure which is “less gender-specific and more universal than it might at first seem”.25 He writes, “the profoundest desire and deepest pleasure in … gunfire sequences (lies) in the will to fight back, to gain mastery over one’s life even in circumstances so desperate and agonised”.26 Gunfire sequences give us “genuine dramas of mastery and loss” and that if they “do reflect male pleasures and anxieties, this is because in a patriarchal world men have more to lose”.27 While To’s action films are overwhelmingly a male domain, as To himself will be the first to admit, women are always present and sometimes play a central role in the action (as in Breaking News) or a subversive one that

8

Director in Action

ultimately threatens the existence of the homosocial group (as in The Mission). The presence of women in To’s films, including A Hero Never Dies, The Mission, PTU, Breaking News, offsets the overwhelming masculinity of violence, serving as symbols to standardize male anxiety in the patriarchal environment and the “will to fight back” — in PTU and Breaking News, the will to fight back works on both sides of the gender divide. Violence and gender are intertwined in this respect, as a denominator of To’s preoccupation with male anxiety and the thrust of fatalism as a male drive. On the question of violence, it is pertinent to identify the nature of violence in To’s films. Whereas violence is generally conveyed through gunfire, not a single gun is fired in Throw Down, Election and Election 2, although the films are not less violent for that. Election and Election 2 are violent in a highly surreal fashion — and here it is important to remember the determinate, mythical space of the jianghu in which the violence takes place. The violence in To’s films serves to remind us of Walter Benjamin’s notion of “mythical violence”, outlined in his essay “Critique of Violence”.28 Benjamin uses the concept as a meta-critique — a form of violence that critiques the violence in our midst, and To’s violent action films are an implicit meta-critique of violence, all the more so when we recognize the violence as mythical violence in the jianghu of Hong Kong and other Asian hot spots. The question of violence will be dealt with in greater detail in the relevant chapters on specific films, in particular the postscript on Election and Election 2.

Still 1.3

A hero gets his gun, from The Odd One Dies

So far, we have identified guns and violence as generic ingredients of the action film which are moreover gender-specific. Guns, as phallic symbols, define the masculine value of action on the one hand, but seemingly also the intrinsic value of action on the other hand — much more than movement,

Introduction

9

which is implied as the basic property of the “action film” when translated into Chinese (dongzuo pian). Movement (dongzuo) as an idea in itself is insufficient to define action, which is why an important tradition in Chinese literary criticism of martial arts novels is the distinguishing of the specific type of action linked to weaponry, whether it is “swords” (pudao) or “clubs or cudgels” (gan bang), or “kung fu”, and so on. Aaron Anderson considers movement as a primary value of action but associates movement with martial arts (movement is martial movement). 29 Anderson pushes the idea of movement as a physical recreation of “muscular memory”, a notion highly pertinent to the Chinese martial arts where practitioners mimic and repeat movements, committing them to memory.30 Nicole Brenez takes the concept further to accentuate kinetics as a theory of psychic energy: “movement is not a tool but a value in Asian action cinema”.31 The value of movement lies in a spiritual process of “alteration and metamorphosis”: “The kinetic principle makes it clear that it is not in the actual move, but in the figurative embrace of impossible motions in a possible body”.32 According to Brenez, there are three basic temporal aspects of cinema that are captured in movement: mobility and immobility, instantaneity and accumulation, singularity and overlapping.33 One might point to To’s action set-pieces in The Mission and PTU to illustrate the spiritual energy of stasis within movement: in The Mission, his protagonists stand motionless with their hands poised horizontally at ready to fire guns; in PTU they react to on-coming bullets impacting their bodies by staying upright and firing back. The association with gunplay in the majority of To’s action films clarifies the kind of action-movement based on weaponry. This dimension of weaponry yielding action-movement is otherwise missing in the use of other nomenclatures, such as “adventure film”, “film noir” or indeed “urban Western” (which implies in the first instance a cityscape movie). I have considered To’s films as “urban Westerns”, which is a form conducive to gender-specificity and to guns and violence, but since “urban Westerns” only “resemble the Western”, according to Cawelti,34 To’s action films are implicitly different from the Western in both a cultural and generic sense. Yvonne Tasker makes the point that while the roots of the urban action film may lie in the Western, its changed location significantly alters that tradition.35 Tasker conflates action and adventure to suggest that action is much more concerned with spectacle while adventure is more concerned with narrative.36 To’s films may certainly be seen as adventure stories but it seems inappropriate to call them “adventure films” insofar as the action-adventure combination now mostly denotes the hyperbolic blockbuster style with “an emphasis in performance on athletic feats and stunts”, as Steve Neale

10

Director in Action

indicates,37 while Tasker sees action-adventure films as a near-parodic form that she calls “muscular cinema” featuring the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, or Bruce Willis. In her book, Spectacular Bodies, Tasker isolates “muscular cinema” as a contemporary form dating essentially from the 1980s.38 The action films of this kind, supposedly exerting a strong influence on Hong Kong and other cinemas, are “bound up in the body of the hero and the masculine identity that it embodies”.39 Here, the issue of masculine identity once again reaffirms the gender-specificity of the action genre. To’s action films, however, are far less muscular (Running on Karma features a hero in a muscular body suit which is manifestly a parody of muscular cinema) and even if they celebrate masculine group identity in classic male-bonding, homosocial fashion (The Mission), they also demonstrate vulnerability and a kind of intellectual fatalism not often invoked in the muscular cinema (Expect the Unexpected is exemplary in this regard). To’s heroes are far more subtle and the action is far more abstract. In short, To’s action films are more like art films in the vein of Jean-Pierre Melville rather than James Cameron. Here we might consider the “art action film” as a separate category — the action genre fused with the art film, which is itself a distinctive mode of film practice, following David Bordwell.40 The art action film foregrounds To as the auteur of action films. The word auteur itself confers an art film mode of cinematic practice, or at least a mode of film that is atypical from normal practice. Peter Wollen uses the expression “auteur film” to denote a group of films — the work of one director — that somehow exists independently from many other factors, generic or otherwise.41 I will dwell on To’s auteur status shortly, but the conspicuous personalization of the genre in such films as The Mission, PTU, Breaking News, Election reveals To as the “shaping narrative intelligence”.42 Their narrative and artistic achievements may even be demeaned by the “high-concept” sheen of action-adventure films as big-budget “testosterone movies”, although they would be elevated when the film noir tradition, such as Welsh describes it in connection with the action-adventure film, is raised inasmuch as the films are urban films containing a psycho-pathological element in the characterizations. Thus while the idea of adventure stories clearly applies to To’s action films, it is more useful to think of adventure not as a genre but as a narrative mode, as Tasker suggests, in contrast to action as spectacle, marked with special effects43 (my reservation in fully accepting Tasker’s point lies in the fact that action in To’s films is portrayed less as spectacle — or if it is that, it is a very different, restrained, kind of spectacle — in the same way that his heroes are far less muscular). In fact, the film noir framework of To’s urban adventures put his films squarely into the tradition of psychological thrillers where the

Introduction

11

predominantly male characters are brought down by their weaknesses, wounds, infirmities, and fears. In this sense, To’s films belong firmly to the category of action film as a “body genre” if not as muscular cinema: the body as a physical site of pain and emotion as well as an instrument of violence on which the question of gender can be raised as a contrast to the highly emotional circumstances of the action, whether induced by gunfire or not.44 Tasker points out, “it is in forms like the action cinema (where) both male and female protagonists are often defined by their physicality” (original emphasis). 45 By physicality, Tasker probably means the stylization and choreographic design inherent in actions of violence, which can only be manifested on the body and performed by the actors’ bodies. The affect of violence is aestheticized, like a ballet or dance. On the other hand, as Tasker and other writers have shown, the body conveys certain ambiguities about gender notions of action. From a feminist perspective, the frequency of illnesses and infirmities afflicting To’s primarily male bodies can only be seen as a put down of the male heroic tradition (cf. Loving You, Lifeline, A Hero Never Dies, Running out of Time, Help!, Throw Down) — but perhaps only to emphasize the male plight of fighting back in a perennial physical and spiritual struggle capped by the fatalistic awareness of, and even insistence on, death.46 The strain of fatalism marking the noir milieu of To’s films — “Kowloon Noir” as I will call it — can be understood as the dark side of masculine values. Kowloon Noir therefore is To’s paradoxical take on fate in the action film, a site populated mostly by men who bond in millennial fatalistic fashion and among whom the women stick out like sore thumbs (cf. The Mission, PTU and Breaking News). Traditionally, film noir portrays fate in the form of the femme fatale but fate in To’s films is akin to the “Destiny-machine”, a term employed by Tom Gunning to refer to “larger, impersonal and often sinister systems” bearing down on the characters in the films of Fritz Lang.47 A similar Destiny-machine bears upon all of To’s characters such that no one survives in a work like Expect the Unexpected. I will appropriate Gunning’s term to suggest a timeless conceit of fate intruding into our modern age to affect — and recall into oblivion — the male and female protagonists of To’s films, while Gunning employs the term to refashion the thematic idea of fate in Lang’s cinema as “a profound insight to modernity” so as not to make fate appear an old-fashioned metaphysical conceit. 48 However, fate is an autonomous, synchronic conceit, if also a changeable entity, and it will find various manifestations in To’s films. In the generic field of Kowloon Noir, To works to alter and shift the priorities of the Destiny-machine, mostly to shape and influence the male heroic principles of the Hong Kong cinema in other generic realms of action.

12

Director in Action

Still 1.4

Kowloon Noir: the heart of To’s darkness

Kowloon Noir is perhaps best seen as a sub-category of the action film sublimating the genre itself as well as the largely male characters of To’s action cinema. Kowloon Noir is given shape primarily by To in the Hong Kong action cinema. It is highly localized noir (the typical setting being Kowloon, as exemplified by PTU and Breaking News),49 both a conceptual field and a style of action cinema where the characters exist in a network of shifting alliances, cross-alliances, misalliances, coincidences. It is neither old nor new noir, but certainly contemporary and of its time, the events always unfolding in the present from start to finish. The archetypal Kowloon Noir films The Mission, PTU, Breaking News have no flashbacks, no past recollections, only hints or traces of backstories that resonate on present relationships and circumstances: there is thus little of the mood of temps perdu which is one of the stylistics of American film noir noted by Paul Schrader.50 As Kowloon Noir is resolutely a time-period of the present, there is a historical underpinning to its dark elements, making it not only allegorical but often directly critical of the times. One stylistic it therefore shares with generic film noir is the element of compositional tension, as opposed to physical action. As Schrader explains, a typical film noir “would rather move the scene cinematographically around the actor than have the actor control the scene by physical action”.51 Any one of the action set pieces in The Mission, PTU and Breaking News would attest to this principle. Compositional tension, I would suggest, is also increased, however fleetingly, by the presence of women in Kowloon Noir, making the films somewhat variable as an action genre. The “measured pacing, restrained anger, and oppressive compositions” (Schrader’s words 52 ) suggest dark feminine values engulfing the maledominant genre. A case could be made to identify To’s action films as melodramas. Using James Cameron’s True Lies as his model, Gallagher argues that, “By synthesizing traditionally male and female genres, action films shape violence into affect and reconfigure emotional displays as violent spectacles”.53 Tasker

Introduction

Still 1.5

13

A portrait of feminine cool in Breaking News

declares that “to the extent that action is a mode, it is clearly a melodramatic one”.54 The quality of excess, an accent on domesticity or the family, social and personal conflicts (often between male and female roles), characterize the melodramatic mode of the action film. Based on these criteria, To’s films are clearly melodramatic: Casino Raiders II, The Big Heat, The Heroic Trio, Loving You, Lifeline, The Odd One Dies, Expect the Unexpected, Where a Good Man Goes, Fulltime Killer, Running on Karma, Election, Election 2, and Exiled. However, we are only speaking of a melodramatic mode of the action film, where action is manifested and supported by melodramatic excess, such as the scene of Andy Lau in Casino Raiders II crashing his motorboat onto a pier to save his girlfriend Wu Chien-lien from being drowned by the villain and his thugs (the boat explodes causing a frenzied series of explosions all around the pier clearly mirroring the hero’s emotions and the violence perpetrated on his woman). One may well ask whether there is an action mode of the melodrama and what the characteristics would be. Perhaps there is no difference. However, the inscription of gender politics into the genre by feminist critics, making melodrama identifiably a female genre, designates a genderized mode of action film, which applies to a handful of To’s works (The Heroic Trio and its sequel Executioners could be described as “female action films”) but not to the bulk of his action output. Some of To’s male-centered films feature strong female roles which function to pacify the male heroes or drain them of testosterone, as in Where a Good Man Goes and Running on Karma. However, the term melodrama, given its association with “women’s pictures”, may not sufficiently capture the male-centeredness of To’s action pictures. The term might even deny the male-specificity of his films, with their attendant homosocial, homoerotic qualities. Finally, if masculinity, as with violence, is the prerequisite of To’s action films, then one could point to his body as the final arbiter of action. In this monograph, we are looking at the body of the auteur, in both a metaphorical

14

Director in Action

sense and in the sense of a body of work: the essence of the auteur theory, as Wollen reminds us, is the structural analysis of a group of films forming the singular work of a singular director.55 It is the “body” of Johnnie To as the auteur in action that determines the special artistic and violent characteristics of the action. His “body of work” encapsulates the auteur’s body in its physical, psychological and aesthetic dimensions — and we will go on now to consider just how To shapes up as an auteur vis-à-vis the genre.

The Auteur Function The correlation of a director with a certain genre along the lines of Alfred Hitchcock and the Suspense Film, John Ford and the Western, Preston Sturges and Comedy, King Hu and the wuxia (martial chivalry) film, allows us to perceive the genre film through the eye of the director. The director’s style and mise-en-scène, his understanding and interpretation of the genre are a window of opportunity for us to engage the genre with more “auteuristic specificity”, indicating those special qualities that an auteur brings to genre films. Genre theorists such as Stephen Neale consider genre from the perspective of “cinematic specificity” indicating the special qualities of narrative codes specific to cinema.56 These codes derive from a “supra-textual” layer of production (the codes seemingly infinite and self-perpetuating), while it would seem to me that the intervention of the auteur — in the mode of what I have characterized as the “auteur in action” — is crucial in the modulation and the transformation of the codes to make them cinematic. It is the rationale of this monograph that we may therefore refer to those functions specific to the auteur and his role in mediating, altering and transforming the codes of genre.57 In genre theory, the director is not the causal source of genre. The question with which I am occupied is not who or what causes genre, rather it is the question of the outcome of the synchronic combination of the shifting elements which I epitomize as the binary positions and functions of director and genre. One could say that it is the combination of producer, writer, director, actors, the director of photography, the production designer, etc, interacting with the codes and conventions of genre that fashion a film. In referring to To as the auteur, I mean that he encompasses a variety of roles and egos: he possesses the egoistic elements of the writer, for example (in his case, he has a team of writers working to his specifications); he controls the actors and the director of photography; directs the production designer, determines the set-ups and the mise-en-scène; and, as producer, has final cut

Introduction

15

on most of his pictures. Some of these ego-functions are deliberately obfuscated in certain productions (for example, in the Milkyway films which To produced, he seemed to revel in the function of a hidden auteur). From this combination of director and genre, I hope to arrive at To’s auteur function, a slight rephrasing of Foucault’s “author-function” from the English-translated version of his essay “What Is an Author?” The focus of the auteur function is on the film director as an identifiable subject (a privileged position occupied by Johnnie To as the “author” of his films), so as to open up this discourse on the films of Johnnie To and a wider discourse on the Hong Kong cinema. For Foucault, the author-function arises because the name of the author remains at the contours of texts — separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence. It points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse within a society and culture. The author’s name is not a function of a man’s civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence.58

The auteur function is at the centre of the film texts in this study, with genre occupying a subordinate position coordinated into the texts, although as I will discuss below, genre exerts a constraint. One of the characteristics of the “author-function” denoted by Foucault is that it is not “defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures”.59 To’s auteur function is a seminal process of precise and complex procedures of enunciating texts. Enunciator is a term used by Tom Gunning to describe Fritz Lang. The director as enunciator “need not be thought of as a Judaeo-Christian creator ex nihilo”, Gunning writes, “but as an Aristotelian demi-urge who works with pre-existent material, and the nature of that material will always function as one of the causes of the creation”.60 Johnnie To might not be an Aristotelian demi-urge (he is perhaps a Deleuzian bodhisattva), but one can follow Gunning’s logic to determine his auteur status as an enunciator of pre-existent material. In this process, we can ascertain, 1) the auteur qualities specific to Johnnie To as the director of the action films that constitute the subject of this monograph, 2) the modalities of the genre characteristics, and indeed the nomination of genres, a complex procedure as we have seen above and a task made all the more difficult because no one has come up with any definitive study of the genres of Hong Kong cinema,61 and 3) the discourses within Hong Kong society and its film culture that the films generate.

16

Director in Action

To’s auteur function as enunciator makes him a paradox insofar as he apparently submits to the system or an orthodoxy of cultural values and questions them at the same time. His paradoxical role can be seen in those films which portray male values of dominance and homosocial solidarity but where he also disrupts the very existence of such values. Some critics dismiss To’s films as crude and misogynistic, wholly celebrating male dominance and homosocial values — which is of course simplistic and short-sighted. His films are far more complex, as I have endeavoured to show above and will demonstrate in the following chapters, and their complexity stems from his auteur function as enunciator. His complexity also lies partly in his personality. To’s films are complex because they are highly idiosyncratic. They all exert a certain quality that can only be identified as the personal touch of To. In part, this idiosyncrasy is the result of To working in a non-traditional way, that is, as seen from the vantage point of the Hollywood system. In this sense the Hong Kong cinema as a miniature Hollywood gives better scope to the filmmaker to make more personal or idiosyncratic films and probably explains why To has so far resisted the allure of working in the real Hollywood. Idiosyncrasy is essentially cultural, and the other rationale of this monograph is to consider the cultural specificity of the correlation between To and the action genre. As an auteur, it is part of To’s function to enunciate the cultural specificity of the work, and to substantiate a discourse on the local-cultural codes which operate either consciously or sub-consciously in determining the narratives of genre films. It could be this local-cultural aspect of his idiosyncratic style that also explains why To remains very much a “Hong Kong director” in all senses of the term. “Cultural specificity” renders a special coating to the films in terms of the cultural codes of discourse. It determines the way the films respond to the specific urban culture of Hong Kong, and how the characters’ behaviour drive the pacing and rhythm of the narratives: these are the issues informing my analysis of the films throughout this monograph. Both the auteurial function and the cultural specificity of the work are the engines of To’s idiosyncratic enunciations transforming his action genre films into artistic achievements. An average run-of-the-mill director might merely have relied on the formula and conventions of the genre to produce passable entertainment. The equation between To and the action film operates on the principle that To is the necessary coefficient by which the variable x of the action film is multiplied to increase the genre’s artistic and other excess value. Here the imagery of gunfire is a crucial denotation of To’s auteur function inasmuch as human agency is needed to fire guns (guns don’t fire themselves). To’s status as both producer and director of his action films affords us a model

Introduction

17

of studying a genre through the more uniform prism of the auteur and his idiosyncrasies — by this book’s definition, an auteur is an idiosyncratic artist.

The Constraint of Genre The proposition that To is an auteur has to be weighed against genre theory since, as Stephen Neale warns, genre itself is a constraint against the notion of auteurism. Neale ascribes auteurism to high culture but declares that it is inappropriate within the field of popular culture simply because the production conditions … are marked by certain constraints. Among those constraints are the conventions of genre and certain forms of dramatic narrative, which act to mediate between the artist’s self and the audience he/she addresses. Such constraints exist only because of the specific economic conditions or production, distribution and exhibition within the commercial cinema and of the size and heterogeneity of the audience involved, and hence because of the pressure on the one hand to facilitate ‘communication’ and on the other hand to maximise the profitability of capital assets and to repeat the formulae making previous financial successes.62

Neale also argues that “All forms of signification and meaning entail pressure” and that no one is free of this pressure. By “signification and meaning”, Neale is codifying genre as an integral part of commercial cinema, which ipso facto cuts out the auteur. The auteur-artist “is free of the constraints of commerce and of the conventional and formulaic nature of commercially oriented aesthetic forms”.63 Neale’s syllogistic argument holds that popular cinema is inappropriate for auteurism because of economic constraints, and because genre is denominated within popular cinema, the auteur is free of genre. Neale regards popular culture as the natural seat of genre but though he allows for the possibility of self-expression, directors are seen as somewhat unthinking craftsmen driven by scopophiliac and fetishistic desire who fill in lack “across the instance of the image itself” through mise-en-scène, colour, composition and framing.64 Seemingly, auteurs, a different breed altogether in Neale’s view, are somehow proscribed from the “drives and structures” of genre — their purpose being a higher form of culture driven by “personal vision, worldview and individual style”.65 For Neale, it is inappropriate to equate genre with

18

Director in Action

auteurism because genre is popular culture, and genre entails pressure. The genre of the action film, as commentators like Tasker and Arroyo have noted, has particularly low status because of its emphasis on spectacle. The genre is generally regarded with contempt by critics.66 But even if we accept the distinction between high culture and popular culture, there is no reason to believe that the auteur is free of anything, and that high culture is not constrained by the same production conditions that befall popular culture (Orson Welles’s Othello and Don Quixote are good examples of high culture constrained by production conditions, unless one were to argue that Welles took a decidedly low culture approach to Shakespeare and Cervantes). The specific economic conditions of the commercial Hong Kong film industry and those of its distribution and exhibition sectors could certainly result in constraints that act as “a counterweight to auteurism”.67 But I would argue that the reverse could also occur with the filmmaker utilizing the industry’s production conditions to free himself. Constraint can cut both ways, and To as his own producer and as a vital player in the industry (who enforces constraints in his own right) can be said to have harnessed the limitations of the Hong Kong film industry to his advantage. To called his series of action films, The Mission, PTU, Breaking News, “exercises” — indicating more experimental, formalistic works that he undertook in between commercial products. Broadly defined, these films are “major works”, a corpus, according to Todorov, which creates, “in a sense a new genre and at the same time transgresses the previously valid rules of the genre”.68 To this extent, genre conventions and dramatic narratives can only be mediated through the auteur, they do not wedge themselves willy-nilly between the auteur and his audience, blocking the progress of transgression and change. To’s auteur “exercises” fully justify Nicole Brenez’s claim that “in the industrial field, nothing now seems closer to experimental research than the action cinema of Hong Kong”.69 Where production conditions are marked by constraints, the conventions of genre can provide the liberating conditions for the auteur to move around or even transcend the constraints. Genre theory and its “specificities” on narrative modes carry the modalities for change, alteration or modification according to historical conditions and the intervention of the auteur and other agents of change (who are themselves marked by history). Gunfire, for example, connotes the susceptibility of To’s action films to become “urban Westerns”, but such susceptibility would be meaningless without acknowledging To’s auteur-function which puts the change into operation, and in other instances exchanges gunfire for a more abstract form of action, as in the judo movie Throw Down which is more a symbolic action film, or

Introduction

19

the eschewal of guns completely in Election and Election 2, which makes the violence in those films more primitive. To’s auteur-function allows him to skirt around the constraints of the economic system (not to mention other constraints in the form of immanent cultural differences between genres, e.g. the Western and the Hong Kong urban action-adventure), to set the conditions for and implement the change. To could only have fulfilled this function by remaining embedded within the popular culture industry and its genres. Thus by definition he can’t be called a “high culture” artist. To in fact grew up in an environment of criminal and gangster activity in the Kowloon Walled City and in such notorious “gangland” districts as Lok Fu and Ngau Tak Kok in the Kowloon part of Hong Kong.70 His action films, as Meaghan Morris has observed of Hong Kong films in general, “are full of lumpen-proletarians, … street-fighters, bodyguards, hired muscle, hitmen, prostitutes … trying to survive with the only assets they have, their bodies, their beliefs, and their street-smarts”.71 While I hesitate to call To a lumpen-proletarian artist, he is a “worker in the key structural position of producing commodities” and one who knows “that he himself is a commodity”.72 Drawing on Lukács, Morris explains that such a worker “is in a position to apprehend the totality of concrete relations under capitalism and he is also in a position to do something about it”.73 This is ultimately the basis of To’s auteur-function, but the “totality of concrete relations under capitalism” also influences the efficacy of To’s auteur-function. If anything, he should be called an uneven auteur whose essential characteristics are attenuated across genres. That the quality of unevenness is yet consistent with auteurship is not at all strange in auteur theory. Wollen shows that auteur criticism is based on a system of oppositions, “a whole series of shifting variations” in the work of an auteur.74 He cites the work of Howard Hawks, which is divided into maledominant action adventures and “crazy comedies” which are like the inverse of the former. To’s unevenness works in the same way: he makes action films and crazy comedies, which are sometimes hard to reconcile with each other. The movies are “still the bastard child of art”, Robert Warshow writes, “and if in the end they must be made legitimate, it will be a changed household of art that receives them”.75 To’s films constitute a “bastard child of art” by their very nature of unevenness: a result of his reliance on popular culture which compels him to follow the rules of whatever genre is popular, changing with the circumstances as he too attempts to change the rules of the genre. In a very real sense, the Hong Kong cinema is a changed household of artistic (and generic) bastards. (The view of To as an uneven auteur will be explored in Chapter 5.)

20

Director in Action

Neale is concerned with articulating a general theory of genre; he submits that genre is a system of “structuralist auteurism” that implies, indeed celebrates, the absence of the author. A general theory of genre is not the subject of this monograph, rather it is concerned with the auteur-function of To and how the auteur theory may be applied to a specific narrative mode of genre film to attempt several discourses — on the auteur-function, on the “cultural specificity” and on the “generic specificity” of the action film. Genre is subjected to the idiosyncratic treatment of an auteur, Johnnie To, working within the economic conditions of the Hong Kong film industry and the “constraints” they generate. To is both a producer and a director (in theory, one who constrains and the other who is constrained), and in the application of the auteur theory to To, it would seem to me that his particular role and standing in the Hong Kong film industry already modifies the theory to his specifications. His career is an apt demonstration of David Bordwell’s contention that “the compromises of business do not prevent mass entertainment from achieving genuine artistry”.76 The Hong Kong cinema can achieve genuine artistry only because it does not lack auteurs. The problem however is that To’s position as an auteur is tied to genre as both a focal and dispersal point of texts and discourses, but I contend that it is here, “situated in the breach, among the discontinuities”, that we may understand To as an uneven auteur and through this discourse of the vagaries of genre, better appreciate him as the singular auteur of a particular mode of genre film. The problem lies therefore in genre, being malleable, susceptible to change and to bending. The confusion in identification of genres may be a consequence of factors precipitated by the practice of genre mixing or genrebending, a very old practice, as Rick Altman points out. He views this practice as a “discursive problem”, meaning that the perception of genre mixing stems more from the way in which films “have been described, categorised and labelled” by critics, industry insiders and publicists and channelled to the public.77 On such a premise, we must allow for the possibility that culturallinguistic specificities play a role in the identification of Hong Kong film genres and that they may foster misunderstanding and misperception in critical genre studies. As the Hong Kong cinema, like Hollywood cinema, works on the principle of mixing and integrating whatever genre is commercially successful with other genres (kung fu fused to comedy, gangster films to adventure films, horror to martial arts, and so on), we must consider that historical changes in the social and industrial infrastructure will determine the pace and extent of genre mixing. Definitions of genre therefore shift and change as the infrastructural history advances in time. Both the filmmakers and the critics

Introduction

21

deliberately avoid specificity as a characteristic of the changes in the infrastructure and this is particularly manifest in the Hong Kong cinema where the industry seeks to add novelty to old genres by mixing genres, and critics play along by subscribing to the industry’s notions and descriptions of genre (and among academic circles, to redefine these genres), yielding the problematic ambiguity of Hong Kong genre cinema. We can either see a genre movie taking a life of its own because, as Neale has stated, it revolves around “particular matters of expression and the codes that traverse them”,78 where the movie is churned out by the industrial machine with the director functioning only as anonymous journeyman; or we can follow Jameson and see a genre movie as a work of “an individual consciousness to his historical circumstances, and as such, dependent on the vicissitudes of individual life”.79 On the last proposition, the matters of expression and codes are a pretext for how a director expresses himself, often to change or subvert the codes, and to substantiate an “ideological-generic structure”, in the words of Robin Wood.80 Wood takes the view that it is only through “the medium of the individual that ideological tensions come into particular focus, hence become of aesthetic as well as sociological interest”.81 When these tensions interact with the “defined particularities” of the auteur in certain works, these works are of “especial interest”.82 To’s works locate political and ideological tensions in the context of the action film and are therefore of especial interest. He is the most recent director in a line of Hong Kong directors (others being John Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark) who have achieved distinction through redrawing the codes of the genre and revising the gangster movie mythology with novel cinematic means and innovative mise-en-scène, and articulating the politics and tensions of gangsters, cops, professional hired killers or heroes. To’s role in this discourse on the genre film and the Hong Kong cinema therefore stems from the “infrastructural history” of the Hong Kong film industry. It does not rest solely on his creative contribution to the action film genre but also on his presence during an unpropitious period in the development of the Hong Kong cinema in the last decade of the twentieth century. It was To who filled in the aesthetic gaps in the genre opened up by the migration of action directors such as John Woo, Kirk Wong, Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark to Hollywood. With the absence of these directors in the Hong Kong film industry (though Lam and Tsui have since moved back to Hong Kong), it was To who continued the tradition of the action film that is character-oriented and aesthetically distinguished. This monograph retraces the history of To’s achievements within the genre and poses a historicist connection between To, the action film genre, and the Hong Kong

22

Director in Action

film industry. It is no accident that To turned to the action genre when the industry went into decline, for the genre was traditionally thought of as one of those commercial forms guaranteed to put life back into the industry and pull it out of its slump. But the task of reviving the industry through the genre fell into the hands of To in the post-97 epoch mainly because those directors who had made their names in the genre before him were no longer around to feed and nurture it in its most difficult period (the industry having fallen into an even deeper slump in 1997 following the handover and the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis). The critical prominence that To has earned in the genre is an inevitable consequence of history and circumstance, having come about as a result of a congruence of historical factors, genre evolution and his own presence. For To, the end of the 1990s was a fortuitous time although he had been around in the industry for quite a while. In fact, To’s career as a film director encompasses at least three periods in the Hong Kong cinema of the last twenty-five years. His very first film, The Enigmatic Case, was released back in 1980, when he was only 25. He then disappeared from the filmmaking scene, re-emerging in 1986, and quickly established himself as one of the industry’s top commercial directors. Though he was commercially successful, To’s critical record remained mixed for some ten years before he achieved high regard. He was initially known for his direction of comedy hits starring either Chow Yun-fat or Stephen Chow, and dabbled in melodrama before moving on to action films; but it wasn’t until the post-97 period that To came into his own as a director of excellence — an action auteur to be put on the same level as John Woo and Tsui Hark, and who has in fact surpassed both contemporaries in the post-97 Hong Kong cinema: Woo having settled in Hollywood making blockbusters that are not as highly regarded as his Hong Kong films, while Tsui’s career has since run aground.

Periods of Adjustment We shall now look at To’s three periods of development in some depth in order to consider the historicist connections that I have hinted at above and to see more clearly To’s accomplishments and status vis-à-vis his contemporaries in the Hong Kong cinema. The first very brief period only contained one film The Enigmatic Case, notable for being a film in the wuxia genre. The fact that To chose to make his debut in this particular genre placed him, incidentally, in the group of up and coming baby-boom generation directors at the time, namely Tsui Hark and Patrick Tam, who

Introduction

23

chose to make their cinema debuts in the same genre. Both Tsui and Tam made an immediate critical impact with their respective films, The Butterfly Murders, released in 1979, and The Sword, released in 1981. Today, both films are regarded as modern classics of the genre that heralded the rise of the Hong Kong New Wave, while The Enigmatic Case is largely forgotten. A comparison with Tsui’s and Tam’s films should make it evident why The Enigmatic Case was a failure. All three first-time directors had worked in television before moving on to feature films, but Tsui and Tam showed how accomplished they were as directors with an ability to direct actors and manage complicated action sequences in a cinematic fashion. The Enigmatic Case did not contain any remarkable action sequence, nor did it utilise special effects in the way that Tsui’s and Tam’s films did. Though To used a variety of techniques (such as an early use of the step-printed slow motion effect for the climactic fights), the film overall had an austere look and a fundamentally realistic style of martial arts choreography that made it altogether different from The Butterfly Murders and The Sword, which, in contrast, were spectacular visual productions with backing from major production houses. The Enigmatic Case was produced by a left-wing studio, which traditionally produced films based on ideological considerations, sometimes disguised under “artistic” imperatives. One of the first Hong Kong productions to be shot in China after the pronouncement of the “Open Door” policy in 1978, the storyline brought out a theme of corruption in high places which would have made it politically correct for distribution in the China market, while its other qualities of genre action would allow it to find an audience among overseas Chinese communities spread across the region. However, the film was a boxoffice failure, and if it is remembered at all, it is because of the fact that it is Johnnie To’s first film.

Still 1.6 Cherie Chung tries to come between two swordfighters: a scene from the climactic step-printed slowmotion action sequence in The Enigmatic Case

24

Director in Action

The failure of The Enigmatic Case led To to exile himself in TV. He returned to work in TVB (Television Broadcasting Ltd.) where he had started. To worked on mini-series, many of which were adaptations of martial arts novels (such as The Legend of the Condor Heroes [1983] and The Duke of Mount Deer [1984]). He continued to work in television for most of the 80s, and returned to feature films in 1986 by joining the Cinema City company to make The Happy Ghost 3. His absence in the world of Hong Kong feature filmmaking from 1980 to 1986 meant that he did not contribute to the New Wave cinematic renaissance in the Hong Kong cinema. This was a period distinguished by such films as Ann Hui’s The Boat People (1982), Allen Fong’s Father and Son (1981) and Ah Ying (1982), Yim Ho’s Homecoming (1984), Tsui Hark’s Dangerous Encounter — First Kind (1980) and Peking Opera Blues (1986), Patrick Tam’s Nomad (1982), and John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986). In the second period of his development, from 1986 to 1997, To worked steadily, achieving an early track record of hits in the genre of rollicking comedies, exemplified by the Chinese New Year movie The Eighth Happiness, starring Chow Yun-fat (1988) who gave a camp performance infused with a zaniness that rivals Stephen Chow’s. To’s critical stock remained mixed although he had by then established himself as a commercial filmmaker. His output in this period consisted of All about Ah Long (1989), The Big Heat (1988), Casino Raiders II (1991), The Heroic Trio (1993), Executioners (1993), and Loving You (1995), and the huge commercial successes of the Stephen Chow comedies Justice My Foot (1992) and The Mad Monk (1993). All were products of a hard-working craftsman, albeit one who had not yet apparently found his niche, oscillating between the comedy genre, melodrama, and the action genre. If To had made nothing else but these films, he might have been regarded as an interesting hack. These films offer an intermediate contrast with To’s third and most distinguished period, from 1997 to the present, which is the period of focus in this monograph, and which have yielded his best films so far. In truth, To’s career is one of contrast even now. He oscillates from the action picture to the kind of comedy genre or romance genre that marked his preceding periods. Thus Fulltime Killer (2001) and Running out of Time 2 (2001) jostle for attention with Chinese New Year comedies like Wu Yen (2001) and Fat Choi Spirit (2002); a film like Throw Down (2004) is alternated with a romance-comedy like Yesterday Once More (2004). This suggests that To still feels compelled to adjust his talent to the needs of the industry even after he has achieved some of his most iconoclastic works. On the other hand, the diversity of To’s works means that they are more difficult to pigeonhole. Needing You (2000), Help! (2000), Running on Karma (2003) and Throw Down

Introduction

25

(2004) are fascinating works, combining tragedy and comedy, pathos and bathos, complicating but not necessarily obscuring the vision of To as an action auteur.

Johnnie Gets His Gun My discussion above touched upon the possibility that To could have become a part of the New Wave if he had persisted in the film industry rather than returned to television. However, if we regard the New Wave not as an isolated burst of creative activity that took place within a brief period of time but as an extended process of cyclic developments, To’s status could be reassessed. Having missed out on the first wave (Tsui Hark, Ann Hui, Allen Fong, Patrick Tam, Yim Ho, Kirk Wong, Alex Cheung) and seemingly the second wave (in which directors like Wong Kar-wai, Stanley Kwan, Clara Law, Eddie Fong gained critical acceptance), we can see To spearheading a third wave, including directors like Wai Ka-fai, Patrick Leung, Andrew Lau, Edmond Pang, and Fruit Chan. But perhaps the truth is that To is really an outsider who doesn’t quite fit into the scheme of things. In this respect, his career path resembles that of John Woo’s. Both directors worked their way up the rank and file and never went to film school: Woo within the studio system (Cathay and Shaw Brothers) and To in the TVB studio. Both directors were ultimately integrated into the ranks of pioneering stylists in the genre of their choice and became honorary members if not full members of the New Wave club (Woo arguably has remained the outsider by migrating to Hollywood where he seems now to be permanently settled). Like Woo, To found that his métier laid in the gangster action genre, one that had a close affinity with the wuxia martial arts genre in which they also dabbled. To’s films supplement Woo’s notion of gangster chivalry and mateship — The Mission, arguably To’s most distinctive work, echoes The Killer (1989) or A Better Tomorrow (1986) albeit with its own beat and style, and in a very real sense, the movie responds to and counteracts Woo’s masterpieces. The trajectory from Woo’s films to To’s films imply an implicit association with each other and with a certain tradition. There is a historical inevitability in the paths of these two Hong Kong directors, though their careers progressed in different time periods. Woo entered the film industry in 1975, and To at the end of the 1970s. At this time, the Hong Kong cinema was preoccupied with kung fu movies following the Bruce Lee phenomenon, and martial arts action was de rigueur in other genres. Working in such an industry, both directors would naturally gravitate towards the action genres.

26

Director in Action

Their first films were martial arts pictures and they then digressed into comedy and melodrama, eventually reaching the field in which they now excel, namely the contemporary action film with gunplay. Woo’s and To’s careers have followed a certain historical destiny which directs them inevitably to the action genre. Thus To follows the path of past directors such as Zhang Che, King Hu, Wang Tianlin (a retired director of many martial arts movies and the noir musical Wild, Wild Rose [1960] who was To’s mentor during his television career and who has acted in minor roles in many of To’s films, most notably as the senior triad uncle in Election) and contemporaneous directors: John Woo, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, Kirk Wong, Ann Hui, and Andrew Lau. To’s contributions to the genre have exerted their own influences in the contemporary Hong Kong cinema: at least one critic has argued that the Infernal Affairs trilogy might not have been possible if To had not made his brand of action pictures.83

Still 1.7 To’s mentor, the avuncular Wang Tianlin (Wong Tin-lum, in Cantonese), as he appears in Election

While destiny might have guided Johnnie To to the forefront of Hong Kong cinema in the post-97 era, it cannot explain To’s method, his style, his preoccupations, and the way his work and influence have shaped the development of the Hong Kong cinema. This is the task of this monograph. In truth, though To has earned critical accolades and awards, in terms of critical appraisal he is still under-appreciated. The reason for this may be ascribed to the perception of genre as low culture and the fact that To’s career is highly uneven. That unevenness does not negate the need for analysis however, and it is possible to concentrate, as I aim to demonstrate, on one specific genre to determine the filmmaker’s strengths as a whole. Unevenness is a mark of how representative a career like To’s is, in the sense that To makes a wide range of genre films — another trait he shares with John Woo. Another reason is that To’s career is still developing and critics are hesitant to draw any conclusions about the director’s status. But by now it should be clear that

Introduction

27

To is a major filmmaker, particularly following the exposure of Election and Election 2 at the Cannes Film Festival. As the Election films demonstrate, To retains a capacity to surprise for better or worse, and while his reputation may rest on his handling of the genre of action films, his career is still developing and may not yet have reached its apex. To’s dedication to his craft also says something about the staying power of a film industry as its fortunes wax and wane. The work of Johnnie To demonstrates the inherent dynamism and creative energy of the industry as it appears to take its last gasps. To’s importance lies in his ability to harness the industry to his largely independent ends. He has managed to gain auteur status without betraying his commercial instincts or working outside the mainstream, which is perhaps the root of his unevenness. There is an imperative to examine how To exercises his craft to shatter the expectations of the audience and the industry. Films like The Mission, PTU, Breaking News and Throw Down are relatively low key, low-budget examples of action movies compared with the average run of Hong Kong (and Hollywood) action blockbusters. To’s films straddle the tradition of genre and that of art cinema and it is the purpose of this monograph to analyse the films in order to determine their specificities with regard to genre and to the auteurist qualities that render them extraordinary, distinguishing them from the average runof-the-mill genre product of the Hong Kong cinema. This monograph is a realization of what most people already know — that Johnnie To has produced a substantial body of work which more than justify a serious study. To deserves a book not only to discuss the artistry of his films but ultimately to recognise his contribution to the Hong Kong cinema. Monographs have been published on individual Hong Kong directors, including John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Wong Kar-wai,84 but To’s contribution to the Hong Kong cinema in the past six or seven years is arguably greater than any of these directors. To has made more attempts, and successful ones, to revitalise the industry while at the same time making personal films that are critically acclaimed. His survival throughout the lean years of the film industry’s decline is not necessarily a consequence of his style or genre preoccupations but is more due to his proactive skills in re-energising and shoring up the film industry, making films in such a way that satisfied both his own aesthetic needs and the commercial needs of the industry. In the end, this monograph strives to fill a need to understand and appreciate the symbiotic dependence of an important director on genre. To has emerged as one of the most fascinating directors at the start of the new millennium precisely because he has found a niche in the genre cinema of one of the sturdiest film industries in the world.

28

Director in Action

The monograph shows that Johnnie To has mastered the action film genre to further his own ends of formal experimentation and to espouse a romantic fatalism relevant to the times. I systematically analyse his key works as discrete texts in a body of work, finding their meanings from the function of the auteur’s intervention in the filmic texts and his re-writing of the codes and conventions. The monograph is composed of five chapters, a postscript and an epilogue, at the core of which is the textual analysis of To’s action cinema. In this chapter, the introduction, I have laid out the theoretical formulations, explaining the intricate associations between genre and the director from the viewpoints of genre and auteur theory. I have also provided the background of To’s early career in the Hong Kong cinema before he achieved critical prominence. The analysis proper begins in Chapter 2 with an examination of the key films in To’s career ranging from the period 1988 to 1997, The Big Heat, The Heroic Trio, Executioners, Loving You and Lifeline, which form a group of five films containing the blueprints for his later masterpieces analysed in Chapters 3 and 4. These chapters then address the two representative groups that formalize To’s contributions to the genre as auteur. Chapter 3 deals with the Milkyway films, Beyond Hypothermia, Too Many Ways to Be Number One, The Odd One Dies, The Longest Nite and Expect the Unexpected, all of which carry To’s name as producer, but as the chapter will make clear, To in fact directed many of the films. Chapter 4 deals with A Hero Never Dies, Running out of Time, The Mission, PTU and Breaking News which carry To’s name as the solo director. All ten films feature the action stereotypes of cops and robbers, professional killers and gangsters, and there are outstanding action sequences characterized by gunplay. But they are also notable for their inventive dramatic situations, experimental and formalistic use of camera and film techniques, offbeat pacing and characterisations. All of these factors revise our expectations of the Hong Kong action cinema, and they are the result of the artistry which To exhibits and which allows us to recognize him as an auteur. Each of the films in the two core pentads in Chapters 3 and 4 will be discretely discussed to determine To’s idiosyncratic handling of the genre. In Chapter 5, I discuss Needing You, Help!, Fulltime Killer, Running on Karma, and Throw Down, another group of five films which constitutes an “uneven pentad” from the point of view of genre and To’s direction. To’s artistry is spread throughout the action genre and in other generic forms of the Hong Kong cinema. Any comprehensive study is obliged to include his films in other genres that both have and have no connections with the action form. The justification for this wider discussion is that To’s status as an auteur must be judged against his prolific output. It is necessary to see how he has

Introduction

29

developed and in what way his films connect and feed on each other. Hence, though the nucleus of this study is the gunplay action film with a concentration on the gangster film or the cops-and-robbers thrillers, we shall also consider To’s contribution to the Hong Kong genre cinema in toto as much as possible. The concluding Chapters 6 summarizes this contribution to genre, examining To’s achievements from the critical-theoretical perspective of genre expectations, in particular the convention of the happy ending. The Postscript, inserted between Chapter 5 and the Epilogue, updates To’s career to the release of Exiled (2006), and deals with his three most recent films: Election, Election 2, and Exiled. The two panels in the Election diptych stand apart from the rest of To’s films because they contain new visions of violence and clear political implications in their narratives. To has put away his guns to devise ever more novel ways of articulating cinematic violence. They show To forever trying to top himself and dash the expectations of his public and the critics. Thus the films go a long way to defining his auteur status as a condition of tenacious autonomy. To may in fact live up to the words of Pierre Bourdieu, describing an artist as one “entirely the master of his product, who tends to reject not only the ‘programmes’ imposed a priori by scholars and scribes, but also … the interpretations superimposed a posteriori on his work”.85 If he chooses to invoke it, To has this right as an auteur, an autonomous film artist beholden only to his work, and it is perhaps best to bear this in mind upfront as one pointer into his methodology and thinking (my interview with To, in the appendix, serves to demonstrate this). As for the “programme” and “interpretations” of this monograph, they are entirely the author’s responsibility, constituting his own independence and autonomy 86 — the sum total of probing,understanding and appreciating a Hong Kong auteur of the contemporary era and the genre he works in.

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

31

2 From The Big Heat to Lifeline

Action in Various Guises The films to be discussed in this chapter were produced within a ten-year period from 1988 to 1997: The Big Heat (1988), The Heroic Trio (1993), Executioners (1993), Loving You (1995) and Lifeline (1997). In this period, To also directed The Barefooted Kid (1993), an action film in the martial arts genre. The Barefooted Kid is a Qing-period costume movie, a remake of Zhang Che’s 1975 Shaw Brothers kung fu masterpiece Disciples of Shaolin, re-engaging Lau Kar-leung, who had originally worked on Disciples as martial arts director, in the same capacity. The movie features Maggie Cheung, veteran kung fu star Di Long, and the then up-and-coming actor-singer Aaron Kwok as the eponymous hero. To’s focus on the narrative and the relationships of the lead characters (the father-and-son relationship between Kwok’s Barefooted Kid and Di Long’s anti-Qing revolutionary, the touch of romance between Di Long and Maggie Cheung) mark the film as a throwback to the classical martial arts genre with a tragic-romantic tone. In the end, all the lead characters, with the exception of Maggie Cheung’s female lead, are killed: a key indicator of the fatalism that will become more and more evident as we proceed into To’s career. Other than to note this quality of fatalism, The Barefooted Kid falls outside of the purview of To’s action films. Like The Enigmatic Case, it falls into another category — that of the period-costume martial arts film, and was made in the stage of To’s career when he was still struggling to form a distinctive style in any genre. It therefore appears marginal to To’s conception of the action genre as contemporary films marked generally by gunplay action (as its title implies, the action in The Barefooted Kid is characterized by the hero’s kung fu skill concentrated in the

32

Director in Action

use of his bare feet). The Barefooted Kid represents a rare foray for To into the cinematic martial arts genre and it appears so far not to be the kind of genre that To has a special feeling for (although he has made many martial arts drama serials for TV). Though films such as The Heroic Trio and Executioners are clearly indebted to the martial arts genre, they are conscious pastiches of period-costume martial arts movies as well as cops and robbers and gangster films. They are therefore included here as an integral part of the discussion of To’s action films. Only two films from this period, namely The Big Heat and Loving You, can be identified as cops and robbers movies, while Lifeline is a fire-fighting movie in the vein of an action-adventure. All three films can also be classed as action-melodramas, defined by realistic domestic scenes of marital conflict and “representations of conflicted masculinities”.1 The Heroic Trio and Executioners are, in this sense, action melodramas with the added feature of a trio of female action figures as central heroes who carry domestic concerns and female buddy-buddy dynamics into the traditionally male preserve of the action film, although To himself maintains that his action worldview is strictly male-oriented. To’s other films in this period, particularly the comedies, contain action scenes that are either of minor significance or have no relevance to our stated topic. For example, The Eighth Happiness (1988), a Chinese New Year comedy, contains a credit to Ching Siu-tung as martial arts director but it basically refers to minor scenes of Chinese-opera style swordplay choreography, and some scenes involving car collisions and crashes. The film does not otherwise have action scenes per se nor can it be described even remotely as an action film despite evoking a tradition of the Hong Kong rollicking comedy which can double as a pure action film in the style of the Aces Go Places series produced by Cinema City (the company which brought To back to the cinema and was responsible for The Eighth Happiness). The “action” credit in a film such as The Eighth Happiness, and in the melodrama All about Ah Long (1989), also produced by Cinema City where Ching is again credited along with Yuen Bun (who would work on most of To’s action films), points to a concept of integrative de rigueur action in pictures where action sequences and stunt work help to animate the narrative and move it along at a faster pace but do not necessarily form the essential element of the films. All about Ah Long tells the story of a single father Ah Long (played by Chow Yun-fat) raising a ten-year old son and fighting for the right to keep the boy when the biological mother, his ex-lover (Sylvia Chang), tries to reclaim him and bring him back to America, her adopted country. The film ends with Ah Long competing in the Macau motorcycle race, which is the

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

33

film’s only sequence that qualifies as an action sequence, climaxing in a crash and an explosion which kills Ah Long. Such a melodrama produced in an earlier era (the 1950s, say) would have no obligation to include action sequences. In the 1980s, virtually every film company in the Hong Kong film industry had an action director on their payroll and was thus obliged to put them to work; so every film of every genre had to carry one or two action sequences.

Still 2.1

Chow Yun-fat’s tragic end in All about Ah Long

The Stephen Chow comedies Justice My Foot! (1992) and The Mad Monk (1993) contain de rigueur action, but at least in these films, the action (kung fu fighting and swordfighting) is a function of comedy — exaggerated sight gags, which offset the verbal “nonsense” comedy that Chow is famous for.2 It is also justified in narrative terms since both films seek to parody the martial arts genre. In Justice My Foot!, the late Anita Mui plays the wife of a Qing Dynasty lawyer, played by Stephen Chow. Her main mission in life is to produce babies, but by some cruel stroke of providence, all her babies die before they reach their first birthdays. In between pregnancies, Mui is a female knight who saves her husband from tight spots as he goes about defending clients against the system of injustice. Chow is not above using unscrupulous methods to practise law, and he sees the fact that all his babies die as retribution. This is a rather perverse departure point for a comedy unless we see it as a spoof on the female knight-errant figure in the martial arts genre. Mui’s role in Justice My Foot! is essentially repeated in The Heroic Trio, which To made shortly after. Here, Mui’s housewife puts on a mask to become Wonder Woman rescuing kidnapped babies. The Heroic Trio will be discussed below, but it is mentioned here as an example of how To qualifies the figure of the action heroine from an out-and-out parody in Justice My Foot! to a more tragic expression of the same in The Heroic Trio.3

34

Director in Action

To’s unevenness as a director is already evident in this period. Even within the terms of a single genre, it is difficult to recognise a consistent quality in the works of this period. The Stephen Chow farces have period settings that consciously evoke references to modern lifestyle trends and events (a precedent that To obviously repeated in his 2001 Chinese New Year comedy Wu Yen), while the Chow Yun-fat comedies (The Eighth Happiness, The Fun, The Luck and the Tycoon) are the reverse of the Stephen Chow comedies, being set in the modern day but revolving around old-fashioned themes of courtship and marriage. The Eighth Happiness even contains a parody of traditional Cantonese Opera. From the genre of comedy, To then turns to making a high-flung melodrama like All about Ah Long, adeptly plying overwrought emotion (for which he earned his first nomination as Best Director at the Hong Kong Film Awards). To’s output is so prolific that I must confess to not having seen all of his films from this period (eighteen directing credits plus several more as producer). The unevenness of To’s oeuvre means that his work falls into distinct and separate genre categories which only discrete analysis can do justice to, and this might mean leaving some films out of this study (for example, Casino Raiders II, released in 1991, has action sequences of the generic contemporary type marked by gunfire, explosions, etc, but essentially belongs to a separate category of gambling movies). From this discussion, we can divide To’s films into at least four broad categories: comedy, melodrama, martial arts, and the contemporary action adventure. The thrust of his directorial work thus far appears to be in comedy of the zany, nonsensical type, a genre that he continues to work in, but if we follow the principle of the system of oppositions in Wollen’s formulation of the auteur theory, it is in focusing on the action film that To reaches the stage of his career where I contend that his real identity as an auteur begins to emerge.

The Big Heat: Slasher Policier The Big Heat, a loose remake of Fritz Lang’s 1953 film, is To’s first action picture (he shares directing credit with Andrew Kam) in the meaning implied by gunplay action functioning under the category of the policier or gangster film. The film follows the policier-cum-gangster movie convention established by John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986) and Ringo Lam’s City on Fire (1987). The action echoes the signature violence of gunplay in these two films (one could point to the “signature” of antagonists pointing guns at each other without necessarily firing, as well as the sensual choreography of gunplay,

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

35

which ties all three films together). The “signature” in The Big Heat is particularly notable because like its predecessors, it was produced under the aegis of Cinema City (Tsui Hark’s Film Workshop is the actual production company in A Better Tomorrow and The Big Heat, both films being distributed by Cinema City). To builds a solid policier on this foundation but he then constructs another layer to the film that changes the quality of the violence to make it more psychotic and deliberately horrific. In fact, the film is a typical example of genre-mixing evoking the slasher film in the horror genre, crossing the policier with slasher movies of the likes of Wes Craven (Nightmare on Elm Street) and Tobe Hooper ( The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), as well as Kubrick’s The Shining. The slasher motif is signalled in the very first image after the credit titles: that of an electric drill piercing through the palm of a hand. The image of the hand before we see the drill doing its bloody work recalls the opening image of the hand over the credit titles of Lang’s M which Tom Gunning interprets as the hand of suffering, with the letter M inscribed on it being “a wound, an insignia branded on the palm like an archaic punishment”.4 In this Hong Kong version, instead of the letter M, we have a drill that delivers the wound and the punishment. The image turns out to be a bad dream in the mind of Inspector John Wong (played by Waise Lee) who is sitting inside his car where he is dozing off, apparently waiting on some assignment. The dream context is significant insofar as To’s action cinema to come is concerned because it implies that the hand is that of fate and it is touching Wong. The violence that is inflicted on the hand is a symbol of fatalism, a motif that will mechanically thread its way through To’s films like a drill piercing through flesh — the dream image offers a violent, horrific, manifestation of the Destiny-machine.

Still 2.2 Violence and the Hand of Fate: an image of the Destiny-machine at work in The Big Heat

36

Director in Action

Inspector Wong wakes from his dream, and the radio then informs him of a robbery and hostage drama taking place in another part of the city. The mise-en-scène and the cutting enforce a speedy transition from one scene to the next (the character happening to sit inside a car so that he can quickly drive to where the drama takes place) without the need for character exposition through dialogue, which would be the conventional way of establishing both the psychological and physiological dilemma troubling Inspector Wong as symbolized by the dream. We later learn that Wong has an illness affecting the spinal nerves of his right hand that could paralyse it momentarily but the opening scene already telegraphs the illness and the hero’s central predicament: can he fire his gun when he is required to do so? In the hostage drama, he fires his pistol at the robber who is shielding himself with a hostage after suffering a fleeting paralysis; that he is able to fire at all appears to be a pure act of will. The film effectively merges the dilemma of the hero and his ability to act in one split second. In the action sequence, the hero must show his heroism in saving the hostage and at the same time demonstrate to us how his bad dream has affected his mental and physical capabilities. What is interesting in the velocity of the flow of scenes is the way that the film is able to work against the archetype of a Dirty Harry-style policeman-hero, depicting him from the first as a man caught in the grip of a physical disability yet discharging his duties in typical Dirty Harry fashion, managing to put down the hostage-taker and save the hostage. The speed and compression of action is a typical example of what Richard Dyer calls “speed in a story”5 — speed as a fundamental high concept of action films in Hong Kong cinema, embedding it within the narrative as an economy of style, making the film move faster than it normally would. While it is tempting to attribute this to Johnnie To, the fact of the matter is that it is a generic style of Cinema City productions. Cinema City was well known for its practice of creation by committee. The committee, comprising key creative members of the company (including founders Raymond Wong, Karl Maka and Dean Shek), carefully calibrates the pacing of their films on the principle that the audience should not be permitted to feel bored even for a second as the film unspools from reel to reel. Tsui Hark was another major source of creative input (and interference) into the project. It is worthwhile to note that Tsui himself had been put through the Cinema City grinder of creativity-by-committee, having worked for the company in the early 1980s before branching out to establish Film Workshop. Tsui’s films for Cinema City, All the Wrong Clues ( for the Right Solution) (1981) and Aces Go Places: Our Man in Bond Street (1984) were typically fast-paced exercises that followed the company’s

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

37

objective of making entertainments with contemporary settings that combined action and comedy. As an exemplary practitioner of the generic style of Cinema City filmmaking, Tsui impressed the dictum of speed onto The Big Heat but he was also responsible, according to To, for the gore.6 The film shows graphic scenes of a burnt corpse, a dismembered hand, a decapitation, a disembodiment in a lift shaft, and other grisly deaths. The gore is a sign of a kind of generic transformation,7 and if we see it as an example of a postmodern reworking of an original classic, it radically transforms Lang’s The Big Heat in which there is a tension, as Gunning notes, “between placid surface and hidden corruption structures”, “between those forces which try to keep the lid on, and those which want to force the hidden violence out into the open”.8 In this Hong Kong version, there are no placid surfaces and the lid is off, letting the hidden violence well out into the open. The violence is grotesque camp in contrast to the more realistic violence of To’s later films, with the exception of Running on Karma, Election and Election 2, all of which echo the gore in The Big Heat.9 Thus one wonders whether To was not being disingenuous when he disavowed the violence in The Big Heat (in my interview with him), attributing it wholly to Tsui Hark. However, despite the gory, horrific nature of the violence in his latter films, it is true to say that violence in To’s latter films generally took second place to character development. To became more interested in how human beings behave under stressful conditions, as exemplified by Anthony Wong’s bodyguards in The Mission and the night patrol squad in PTU, and under extreme conditions (the Tony Leung character in Election, and the Louis Koo character in the sequel). The two Election films are arguably less violent than The Big Heat because their instincts are less exploitative and they have more important things to say, while the violence in The Big Heat reflects the fact that To was a hired hand compelled to follow commercial trends (the success at the time of not only the action genre but also horror, and the imperative of marrying the two: Tsui Hark being instrumental in this aim since he produced two of the most commercially successful films of the 1980s, A Better Tomorrow and A Chinese Ghost Story). It is instructive to look at The Big Heat as an intertextual model of the Hong Kong action cinema, just looking at the creative team involved: Tsui Hark as producer, Gordon Chan as screenwriter, Waise Lee as star, Chu Kong in the supporting cast, and Johnnie To as director. Gordon Chan went on to direct The Final Option (1994) and Beast Cops (1998); Waise Lee was at this time a fixture in policier dramas, though not always on the right side of the law (he appeared as the villain in A Better Tomorrow); veteran

38

Director in Action

supporting actor Chu Kong (who plays the chief villain in The Big Heat) would go on to appear in John Woo’s The Killer (1989). There is also director Kirk Wong’s brief appearance in the film as the man whose fingers are blown off by his own gun as it backfires — his presence here signifying the corporative deal-making of the two production companies involved in the film, Cinema City and Film Workshop, both companies being responsible for the kind of generic violence and action manifested in The Big Heat (Wong made True Colours [1986] for Cinema City and Gunmen [1988] for Film Workshop). As a hired hand, To was given a quick lesson in synthesising action elements (speed and gore) and the handling of an allegory found in the plots of Cinema City policiers during the transition period to 1997. The Big Heat contains a political commentary on the 1997 issue, and according to Lisa Morton, this makes it a recognizable Tsui Hark film.10 The commentary comes in the shape of the villain (Chu Kong), a corrupt businessman, who tries to buy off Inspector Wong’s criminal investigation team with money, on the reasoning that in the few more years before the 1997 handover, like most people in Hong Kong, the Inspector would be obsessed with accumulating money, the better to immigrate to a foreign country if things went wrong. In another scene, the villain’s partner in crime, a Russian ship captain, toasts 1997 because it represents the best opportunity to make money through a mixture of “drugs and capitalism”.11 The final climax reveals that the villain’s enterprise to smuggle drugs was supported by a high official in the police department who faces Wong in the final duel (this corrupt official is splattered with bullets as his automatic shotgun backfires, and his arm is blown off by the impact, repeating the gore of the earlier scene in which Kirk Wong’s fingers are blown off ). Both the gore and the 1997 allusions have been absorbed into To’s system, such that when these elements are re-manifested in Election 2, they are recognizable as a generic tradition that the director has effortlessly brought to play in the action film. But To’s handling of the action sequences show a capability that go well beyond merely absorbing trends. A sequence set in a hospital during which a killer goes about assassinating a key witness and, in the process, guns down patients, nurses and security guards before escaping into a lift shaft, is the forerunner of the hospital shootout in John Woo’s HardBoiled (1992), which is the one film that sticks in the mind where a hospital is used as an action setting. The Big Heat introduces the hospital as a major setting in To’s action cinema, as we will discover — such a setting being conversant with his preoccupation with pathology and the theme of heroes struck down by illness or injury. But it’s clear that there was a lot of

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

39

intertextualizing going on in Hong Kong cinema between directors working in the action format. We also find the blueprints of To’s action cinema in the handling of the central character’s relationships, firstly with his investigative team, secondly, with his girlfriend, and thirdly, with the villain. In these three sets of relationships, To will develop a more rounded perspective of male-bonding teamwork in later films (Lifeline, The Mission, PTU ), a more in-depth view of man-woman relationships (Loving You, A Hero Never Dies, Where a Good Man Goes), and a deeper and more varied look at the psychological nuances of hero-villain or cop-and-adversary relationships (Loving You, Running out of Time, Fulltime Killer). In The Big Heat, the homosocial relationship of the hero and his team takes precedence over the other two sets of relationships, which are nothing more than auxiliary relationships to the hero, demonstrating that To was still finding his way into the genre, unable to balance the triadic relationship structure that he would eventually present more satisfactorily in Loving You. The focus on teamwork in The Big Heat complements the theme of corruption — the lower rank and file of the police department being depicted as basically honest and righteous while the upper strata is shown to be more corrupt. An interesting detail is the inclusion of a Malaysian cop in the hero’s team, adding a multicultural element to the proceedings, foreshadowing the pan-Asian settings of Fulltime Killer. The Malaysian, an ethnic Chinese, utters the Malay expression “cari mati”, meaning “looking for death”, as an admonition to the enemy, but in the wider context of the movie and To’s latter works, Election and Election 2, it functions like a slogan to “look for” even more novel ways to depict death and violence. We may finally also detect certain distinctive To touches in the techniques of the flashback and slow-motion, both techniques that To used in The Enigmatic Case. Flashback recollections of the past haunt the heroes of The Enigmatic Case and The Big Heat, and they both work to disempower the hero. In The Big Heat, the psychological frame is much darker because the flashbacks are poisoned by nightmares (as in the opening scene of the electric drill running through the hand) or are conscience-pricking attacks (as when Wong recalls his past association with the undercover cop whose murder he now investigates), both of which add to the hero’s feelings of guilt and inadequacy. To had experimented with slow-motion in The Enigmatic Case with quite unusual results in the final duel scene where the female protagonist (Cherie Chung) tries to stop the fight between the hero and her father by running into their field of action, interposing herself between the two adversaries (predictably she is accidentally killed). This slow-motion effect was achieved

40

Director in Action

with the step-printing frame-pulling method, somewhat ahead of its time — well before it became a trademark in the films of John Woo and Wong Karwai. In The Big Heat, To’s use of slow-motion was quite conventional because it had by then become a common technique in action cinema, but the objective remains the same as in The Enigmatic Case, which was to stretch out “suspenseful moments” in an action sequence, as David Bordwell points out in his analysis of The Big Heat.12 Bordwell examines the details of the final shootout, describing how the hero suddenly suffers paralysis as he is about to fire his gun at the corrupt law officer, and is only finally able to fire by looping a necklace with a crucifix (a gift from his murdered girlfriend) around the trigger and yanking it, “all in agonizing slow motion”.13 Bordwell admires the aesthetic beauty of the sequence, attributing it more to the generic expressiveness of Hong Kong’s action cinema: Like many Hong Kong sequences, this passage accretes expressive impact from variations in speed of movement. As the hero fires, the chain snaps and flies up in a slow-motion close-up, the crucifix twinkling. In an opposed slow-motion arc, the villain topples over stiffly. We never see the chain descend, but in a third shot the villain’s face hits the ground fast. Variations in camera speed have not only prolonged the suspense but have created a sensuous metaphor: the murdered woman’s tiny cross floats through the night, but the man drops as dead weight. Hong Kong cinema gives the smallest objects and gestures a kinetic thrust.14

Assuming that To is the metteur-en-scène responsible for executing the sequence, To’s skill in “stretching” the suspense of an action sequence is evident in the way he builds up the climax as a narrative of pure action. The hero appears on the scene to save a team member who had made a secret tape incriminating the villain (Chu Kong) and his connections in the police department. The villain and his thugs try to obtain the tape, first by torturing the hero’s colleague, then by staging an ambush to lure the hero and his team into the apartment to save the colleague who is rigged up as a human boobytrap set to explode once the door to the apartment is opened. Underlining the connection with Tsui Hark, this scene of an explosion inside an apartment was repeated by Tsui in Time and Tide (2000), but with only half the impact it had in The Big Heat because the explosion imagery in Tsui’s film was computer-generated making it look faked. Explosions in apartment buildings caused by grenades, gas canisters or mortars, remain a favourite visual device in To’s action cinema, as evidenced in Loving You, Expect the Unexpected, and Breaking News.

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

41

Still 2.3 Explosion in an apartment, a Johnnie To trademark patented in The Big Heat

In the climax, the tape player is dropped and retrieved and dropped again, making its way from person to person on both sides, like a football (To repeats this idea in The Heroic Trio in a scene where the trio and Anthony Wong fight over a tape player), while at the same time, the action heats up as the villain attempts to get away in a car. The tape player is another example of a small object which propels the action with a kinetic thrust, right up to the end where as Chu Kong’s villain is killed and the hero has seemingly triumphed and about to retrieve the dropped tape player, the report of a gun wounds the hero’s hand and stops him from recovering the tape, thereby signalling another climax in which another, more powerful, villain appears (the corrupt official), leading to the action sequence which Bordwell describes.

Still 2.4 The tape player: “a small object which propels the action”

The sequence ends with the tape player dropping out of the pocket of the dead official, accidentally switching on to play, and we hear the lines uttered by Chu Kong: about the need to make more money because of 1997, that implicates him and “important people in the government”. There is

42

Director in Action

admittedly an odd satisfaction to be felt from the direct allusion to 1997 as the background, and justification, for the violence — a case of the message justifying the action film (while in most cases, Hong Kong action films rely on action to justify themselves), particularly when the whole syndrome of the 1997 question yields up hidden corruption in high places. The violence is symbolized by the English title, The Big Heat, which, in Lang’s original, “refers to the pressure that will finally descend on the corrupt city and purify it”, as Gunning explains.15 In this Hong Kong version, the big heat exposes the hidden corruption in a highly melodramatic manner of violence that Lang’s film avoids, as Gunning points out.16 The violence manifests the big heat: an apartment blows up, a car explodes, a hand blown off, protagonists wounded with blood pock-marking their faces. The big heat is therefore the unrelenting pressure and eruption of violence. Violence as melodrama is excessive and indiscriminate (the heat is exerted both ways, on both the good guys and the bad guys) — and in fact, To would adopt this melodramatic style of violence in films such as Casino Raiders II, The Heroic Trio, Loving You, before fundamentally avoiding it in his mature auteur pieces (the mark of To as auteur of action is the way he enunciates violence across the span of his action pictures).

Still 2.5

The big heat visited on the corrupt villain

On an aesthetic level, the whole series of action sequences in the final part, beginning with the hero barging into the apartment to save his colleague, are admirably executed on the dictum of speed as economy of style and melodramatic excess, effectively communicating the suspense and administering the several coups de théâtre. The final violent sequences and the earlier one of mayhem inside the hospital are the most sustained examples of mastery of technique and narrative of pure action, attributable to a generic Hong Kong style as fashioned through the films of John Woo, Tsui Hark,

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

43

Kirk Wong, and Ringo Lam, before To came onto the scene. In the final analysis, the movie, whether one credits it to Johnnie To or to Tsui Hark, is far too determined to follow in the wake of this generic style, and much too dependent on gore to matter as a personal work. What The Big Heat represents is the necessary first step in which To had to embrace the generic forms of the Hong Kong action cinema of the 1980s in order to cross the threshold towards a more personal brand of action cinema as he entered the 1990s.

The Heroic Trio and Executioners: Women Warriors and Warrior Mothers To’s next action film The Heroic Trio is probably his most well known from this period, having achieved a cult reputation in the West. While the action sequences were actually directed by Ching Siu-tung, the movie holds together essentially on To’s direction and on his enunciating role in the action characterizations, and probably in the action sequences as well. Here, the action roles are taken by three female stars — Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung and Michelle Yeoh, and they are most likely instrumental in the film’s cult reception in the West, providing a key reference point for the “HongKongification” of Hollywood action films featuring what Marc O’Day calls “action babe heroines”, so called because of the “yoking together of the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ elements which comprise this fantasy figure”.17 A crucial crossreference of such a figure in To’s works prior to The Heroic Trio is provided by the knight-errant action heroine-cum-housewife played by Anita Mui in Justice My Foot!. In The Heroic Trio, Mui plays the masked “Wonder Woman” (despite the name, the character bears no relation to the Marvel comic heroine) who is a housewife by day. The Heroic Trio shares with Justice My Foot! an inherent characteristic of spoofing the martial arts genre — many of the action sequences combining traits of martial arts and contemporary gunfire action (exemplified in the scene of Maggie Cheung wielding a machine gun doing a splendid operatic side somersault as she goes into action against four swordsmen). On the other hand, there is an element of gory violence in The Heroic Trio that is familiar from The Big Heat illustrating the hybridized tendencies of the action film to incorporate other generic elements: horror and science-fiction being the two genres that are mingled here. The film is set in a vaguely futuristic period, in a Gotham-like Chinese city, and features a Chinese eunuch, dressed in ancient robes and possessing supernatural powers, who plans to restore monarchy to China. Ching, a female

44

Director in Action

Still 2.6

The eunuch beholds a future emperor

warrior (played by Michelle Yeoh) he adopted and trained from childhood, abducts babies at his instruction. She wears an invisibility cloak stolen from a scientist, her lover, and snatches the babies away to the eunuch’s underground hideout where they are brought up in a foul, hellish environment filled with methane gas. The eunuch’s plot is to choose a future emperor among these kidnapped children. The discarded ones grow up as cannibals, eventually to join the eunuch’s army of degenerate myrmidons. One such myrmidon, a monstrosity named Kau (played by Anthony Wong) conducts playful jousts with the eunuch and Ching. Each time he fights with Ching, Kau’s fingers are amputated. In one such clash, Kau simply picks up an amputated finger and puts it into his mouth.18

Still 2.7 Trio

Anthony Wong with a missing digit in The Heroic

This kind of gore in The Heroic Trio is cartoonish, lessening its capacity to horrify, but the film takes delight in breaking a cinematic taboo regarding the use of babies and children in the depiction of violence. To stages the babykidnapping scenes inside the maternity ward of a cavernous hospital, thus

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

45

reworking the precedent of the hospital sequence in The Big Heat, which assumes a lot more importance in this context. The Big Heat is clearly the dry run for the taboo-breaking action concepts of setting violence in a hospital and the eye-popping use of babies in the play of violence in The Heroic Trio, as well as in Woo’s Hard-Boiled, possibly influenced by the Japanese “Lone Wolf and Cub” series featuring a Ronin and his child, released in the early 1970s. In The Heroic Trio, released not long after Hard-Boiled, To pushes the boundary of the taboo as far as he can go by making a baby die. Following a fight scene in which Anita Mui’s Wonder Woman rescues a baby, she discovers it is bleeding at the back of the head: To cuts to a shot of a nail soaked in blood as the source of the baby’s injury: a shocking image by virtue of its montage-association with the baby. With blood spurting out of its head into her hands, Wonder Woman rushes the baby to the hospital but, too late, the doctors are unable to save it. Violence in To’s action cinema finds its most disturbing expression here, and no doubt, one can debate both the moral message of the scene and the ethics of the filmmaker in showing violence inflicted on a baby. Is such violence, which seems to pervade Asian cinemas generally, a form of exploitation and moral corruption?19 Would such a scene add up to what François Truffaut called “an abuse of cinematic power”?20 Or is it justified as an indication of the pathological aspect of Mui’s character?

Still 2.8 Blood drips out from the back of the baby’s head: a violent image in The Heroic Trio

In his analysis of why the Western has a hold on our imagination, Robert Warshow suggests that “it offers a serious orientation to the problem of violence such as can be found almost nowhere else in our culture”.21 The kind of violence presented in The Heroic Trio echoes the concept of “mythical violence” that Walter Benjamin outlined in his essay “Critique of Violence”. Benjamin draws on the analogy of the violence of mythical gods to focus attention on the problem of violence itself. Just as Warshow suggests, the

46

Director in Action

violence reorients our mind to the problem of violence in society. For Benjamin, mythical violence is not really destructive but constructive in that it brings a new law to men. “Mythical violence in its archetypal form is a mere manifestation of the gods. Not a means to their ends, scarcely a manifestation of their will, but first of all a manifestation of their existence”, he writes.22 Mythical violence is about the existence — and persistence — of violence, but if the gods are manifested, they are manifested only in myths, and cinema is the natural home of myth. The essay shows that Benjamin is prescient about cinema as an apparatus of mythical violence in the industrial age of mechanical reproduction. Mythical violence is another operation of the Destiny-machine — cinema itself. In the scene described above, the mythical violence that befalls the baby manifests the god-like appearance of Mui’s Wonder Woman. On the one hand, she represents Fate, and on the other hand, she represents the image of the bereaved mother, recalling Niobe from Greek mythology whose children were destroyed by Apollo and Artemis, the gods that Benjamin invokes in his article.23 Niobe was punished by the gods for her arrogance, but her suffering reveals the human-pathological face of her character. Benjamin argues that the violence visited upon Niobe “establishes a law far more than it punishes for the infringement of one already existing”.24 “Although it brings a cruel death to Niobe’s children, it stops short of the life of their mother, whom it leaves behind, more guilty than before through the death of the children, both as an eternally mute bearer of guilt and as a boundary stone on the frontier between men and gods”.25

Still 2.9 Niobe

Anita Mui’s Wonder Woman: a contemporary

I have appropriated the myth of Niobe as expounded by Benjamin to argue the case of mythical violence in this instance of To’s action cinema, and to emphasise that Mui’s character has a dual function: as Wonder Woman

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

47

(who evokes the myth in the form of Fate that brings down the law and the violence that manifests from it) and as a mother (who stoically receives the violence). The mythical violence that Fate, the Destiny-machine, metes out is in turn visited upon Fate herself, in the person of Niobe. It manifests her existence. The primary justification for Mui’s transformation into Wonder Woman appears to be her urge to become a proxy mother since she is a childless housewife trying to save the babies of this world — a conceit that To parodied in Justice My Foot! where Mui gives birth to thirteen babies, who all die shortly after birth, but yet finds the strength to become a female knighterrant. In the sequel Executioners (1993), the Mui character is rewarded with a daughter, demonstrating that the motif of babies (and by implication the maternal instinct) has overrun into the film from The Heroic Trio and that the employment of babies is an integrative part of the characterisation of the central heroine in that film and thus not a gratuitous conceit. The babies also underline the significance of gender in the action of The Heroic Trio, a key ingredient of its cult success in the West — a point demonstrated in an essay on the film’s three female stars by film scholars Anne Ciecko and Sheldon Lu, who assert that the performance of gender in Hong Kong action film narratives “in recent decades” marks “a crisis of masculinity and a subversion of the conventions of heterosexual romance”.26 The expression “crisis of masculinity” will recur in criticism on To’s films.27 Ciecko and Lu do not really say how such a crisis is manifested in The Heroic Trio, suggesting that it is more a subliminal force engendered by the heroic personalities and presences of the three female leads. I might suggest that the film could just as well be about a crisis of motherhood (thus a crisis of femininity) in a (futuristic) society where babies are kidnapped and where the central heroine longs to become a mother. Mui’s housewife persona is highly significant in conveying this crisis. The film opens with a picture of domestic bliss showing Mui’s housewife with her husband inspecting a derelict mansion in the countryside which they will buy as their new house. Mui’s housewife role gives no indication of her hidden identity as the nearsupernatural heroine Wonder Woman, while in fact the scene stresses the husband (Damian Lau) as a preternatural crime fighter. In the midst of inspecting the mansion, the husband suddenly gesturing for everybody to keep quiet, goes to the window and sees a thief attempting to steal his car; he swings down like Tarzan, using a vine, to catch the thief, eliciting an astonished reaction from the dorkish estate agent, whereupon a proud Mui remarks, “My husband’s a cop!”. However, this is really the only moment in the film that we see a man performing such a standard heroic feat: the men in the film are otherwise ineffectual, dying (Yeoh’s scientist lover), or are freakish

48

Director in Action

monstrosities (the eunuch and his army). The wholly-male police force is impotent against the baby kidnappers, who are led by an eunuch, no less. Confronted with such general male impotence (and the crisis of society that fosters crazed male baby killers at the same time), what can a woman do but be Wonder Woman? On the other hand, Mui’s longing for motherhood (and the familial crisis of her long-lost relationship with her sister who turns out to be Yeoh’s character) is a pathological reminder of gender and the friction between heroism and femininity in the action film. Yvonne Tasker states that in the action film, there is “a tension between the images of strength accruing to the female action hero and the narratives within which they are contained, narratives which frequently attempt to offer some explanation for her actions, to define her as exceptional”.28 Such a tension is apparent in The Heroic Trio in the presence of babies and the motif of motherhood which humanizes the exceptional god-like qualities of the heroines, particularly Wonder Woman. Tasker writes that the maternal is a recurring factor in action films featuring female action heroes, who are “constructed in narrative terms as macho/ masculine, as mothers or as Others: sometimes even as all three at different points within the narrative”.29 These explain the heroic nature (super-nature) of the women in The Heroic Trio. Each heroine embodies aspects of machomasculinity, motherhood and Otherhood — and the film shows that such a construct is unstable and pathological. While Mui’s character epitomizes the crisis of motherhood as a kind of ideal longing without the “horror” factor of reproduction (the horror in the film comes in the way that babies die rather than in the way they are born, and in the way that society seems to breed crazed male baby killers and abductors), Michelle Yeoh’s and Maggie Cheung’s characters are more about the crisis of femininity in their ambiguous gender identities as action heroines. Yeoh’s character is caught between a normative feminine and heterosexual desire for the scientist she loves and a transgressive role as a female warrior who carries out the eunuch’s desires. She also displays, if in muted fashion, lesbian tendencies towards Maggie and Anita. Cheung as the thief catcher, Chat, is easily the more memorable figure since she cheerfully embodies the cross-dressing heroine that Tasker identifies as the “butch femme” dressed in a distinct style of “women’s high-street fashion”.30 The way she is introduced in the film makes her a timeless, and narcissistic, “butch” figure, or the action babe heroine prefiguring Lara Croft (whose first appearance in a video game was in 1996): arriving on a hostage drama scene in a motorbike, dressed in a black leather jacket and shorts, wearing knee guards and dark wraparound goggles, she goes into action whistling “London Bridge Is Falling Down”.

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

Still 2.10 Trio

49

Maggie Cheung’s “butch” outfit in The Heroic

Cheung may epitomize the action babe heroine defined by Marc O’Day as no longer masculinised in the sense of having muscular bodies but “rather the slim yet strong body which may be excessively feminised or boyish”.31 In fact, all three heroines in The Heroic Trio are representative: taken together they offer a prototype of the action babe heroine who “combine elements of successful patriarchal femininity and masculinity” and who are, in an overt fantasy context, “professionals doing their job, who have to be competitive and violent in order to survive and win”. 32 The film is set in a society “where the institutional structures of patriarchy and/or, more directly, sick patriarchal men, prove to be the villains of the piece”.33 However, The Heroic Trio is missing from O’Day’s analysis, and the film is hardly recognized as a milestone work by Western commentators of the calibre of O’Day or Tasker who only acknowledge broadly the role of Hong Kong cinema in defining and developing the heroic prototypes of the action genre but do not go into case studies before the rise of the Western models (although admittedly Tasker does discuss the figure of Cynthia Rothrock in her book Spectacular Bodies). Following the tendency to equate a crisis of masculinity through a focus on the female as action heroine, a film like The Heroic Trio falls neatly into the group of Hong Kong action films of this period such as Ching Siu-tung’s Tsui Hark-produced Swordsman, Part Two (1992), Swordsman III: The East is Red (1993), and Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time (1994, all of which portray the crisis of masculinity as a reaction against feminine power (represented by the presence of Brigitte Lin). This crisis of masculinity is manifested through the ambiguous and fluctuating identities of bisexuality or trans-sexuality. However, sexuality is not the whole issue in an action film where there is a crisis of masculinity, as we have seen in The Big Heat, a movie that demonstrates its masculinity crisis through the physical pathology of its male hero and the theme of corruption. But given that sexuality or gender is the

50

Director in Action

prime motivating force of the “action babe cinema”, both The Heroic Trio and Executioners are direct and unambiguous proponents of female-gender power in Hong Kong’s action cinema, more in the line of the chivalric lady knight-errant movies of King Hu (Come Drink with Me, A Touch of Zen) — which is perhaps surprising considering To’s otherwise unabashedly homosocial orientations in the action cinema. He himself tends to see his heroines as “very masculine”,34 but despite this, we can see the three heroines assuming a gender-action identity infusing both feminine and masculine qualities that are beyond To’s control. As Judith Butler says, “the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author”.35 In this sense, the two films are unique examples of To’s enunciating role in modulating the genderized characteristics of the action film, following Chinese role-models of fantasy heroine figures and transforming them into contemporary, postmodernist (some might say, postfeminist) heroines that could inspire even Hollywood. The Heroic Trio and Executioners are traditional lady knight-errant movies disguised as urban actionadventures and recognised in the West as modern camp classics chiefly due to its three female stars, who communicate, according to Ciecko and Lu, a “profound self-reflexivity in the performances”.36 I would like to borrow the expression “self-reflexivity” to illustrate To’s enunciating-mediating role in his concentration of female characters in The Heroic Trio as a method of reflecting upon gender in portraying heroism. Firstly, the generic concept of women warriors in wuxia movies is put into greater relief — women are conscious of themselves as warriors or knightserrant who are equals to males (in The Heroic Trio they are clearly superior). Secondly, the psycho-pathological dimensions of the characters (principally the Anita Mui and Michelle Yeoh characters, who are connected by dreams that tell of their separation as sisters since youth, but also Maggie Cheung’s Chat whose butch femme persona hides her sensitive feminine side) come into stronger focus. On this level, they also reflect upon notions of the motherhood longing and the inadequacy of the male species (this last item is especially pronounced in Executioners where most of the male protagonists are killed, including Wonder Woman’s husband). The other level of “self-reflexivity” is much harder to pin down inasmuch as the three characters are an allegorical construct of the reunification of Hong Kong and Taiwan with China, as Ciecko and Lu and others have asserted.37 Ciecko and Lu cite the “triadic structure” of the characterizations which “beg somewhat allegorical readings of the three women warriors as representations of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China”.38 In my opinion, the political identities of the three stars in The Heroic Trio and Executioners are not credibly

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

Still 2.11

51

Women warriors battered but undaunted

“self-reflexive” nor can one work out who represents China, Hong Kong or Taiwan. The presence of Maggie Cheung in both films recalls her appearance in Stanley Kwan’s Full Moon in New York (1989), in which Cheung is one of three female stars in the film (the other two being Sylvia Chang and Siqin Gaowa), each one representing Hong Kong (Cheung), Taiwan (Chang), and China (Siqin). The three stars of Full Moon are more credibly “selfreflexive” because each one of them actually originates from the territory that each represents. The critics have drawn such allegorical meanings from The Heroic Trio, and particularly in relation to Executioners which seems to me to work less well than The Heroic Trio as an action film because it expends too much of its energy on plot and clumsy allusions to the politics of 1997 and reunification.39 In both films, the central villains seek to reunite a strife-torn China under a military dictatorship (the eunuch in The Heroic Trio actually seeks to restore the monarchy); but Executioners carries to a dizzying plateau its pre-97 subtext of “fatalistic millennial thought and representations of a chaotic, crime-ridden, fin de siécle Hong Kong in need of the restoration of order”.40 The film begins with a nuclear holocaust that has depleted China’s natural water resources. The population is attracted to a young religious cult leader (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) who is later assassinated in a conspiracy hatched by a mad, masked scientist. This monstrum horrendum sexually desires the young cult leader and even after he is killed, preserves his severed head in a box so that he can occasionally kiss and fondle it. The heroines find themselves separately implicated in another conspiracy to kill the country’s president, and then become involved in the last-ditch efforts to save the president’s life by distracting the conspirators with a double. One of the trio, Maggie Cheung, searches for a source of unpolluted water that will finally solve the crisis. The political metaphors are awkward at best and downright ludicrous at worst, and since The Heroic Trio is less encumbered by this kind of “self-reflexivity”,

52

Director in Action

Executioners must be regarded as the weakest and most risible of To’s action films (even Ching Siu-tung’s staging of the action sequences are well below his standard). Conversely, The Heroic Trio has to be recognised as possibly To’s most kinetic and purely enjoyable action film. The movie is a fusion of action styles incorporating all kinds of weapons from modern to ancient (firearms, explosives, darts, swords, flying guillotines, etc). It is also a fusion of fantasy and horror elements from Hong Kong wuxia movies (where the central concept is the flying hero or heroine) and from Hollywood high concept action movies (Batman, Superman, The Terminator, with a nod to old Ray Harryhausen adventures in the last sequence where the eunuch’s skeletal remains wrap around Michelle Yeoh, taking control of her body and gradually her brain). The stunt work and special effects are done effectively but on the cheap (the movie was made on the cusp of the advent of computer-generated imagery). Lastly, the movie’s narrative pacing is well sustained and balanced between camp and action — a formula that To could not quite master again in Executioners or in Wu Yen, his 2001 Chinese New Year holiday movie featuring another trio of female stars, including Anita Mui. With The Heroic Trio, To has advanced more confidently into the action genre. Having been freed from the constraints of Cinema City (which closed down in 1991), he competently orchestrates the different generic elements of Hollywood and Hong Kong action genres, and creates one of the most memorable, and influential, female-gender action movies in the Hong Kong cinema.

Still 2.12 The eunuch’s skeleton emerges from the fire in The Heroic Trio

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

53

Loving You: Fallout from a Bullet in the Head With Loving You, we come to the film that To himself considers the first to really carry his personal action signature.41 We shall reflect on what that really means by looking at its plot and its protagonist which is in fact a recapitulation of the theme of the pathological hero in The Big Heat and his dogged sense of mission. Lau Ching-wan, who would become one of To’s favourite actors, plays the cop-hero Lau Chen-hoi, an obsessed and arrogant detective in the beginning who is brought down by an injury after being shot in the head by an equally obsessed villain that he is pursuing. Though he miraculously survives and recovers sufficiently to return to duty, the injury has destroyed his sense of taste and smell (the Chinese title translates as “The Tasteless Detective”42 ). This leads to reconciliation with his estranged wife (played by Carman Lee) who has become pregnant by another man. In a mark of contempt for her husband, the wife tells him that the child is not his when they are having dinner in a restaurant, whereupon he slaps her and leaves. Yet, despite their estrangement, she faithfully nurses him back to health and practically makes him over into a new man. Later, the wife is kidnapped by the villain who has escaped to continue his personal vendetta against the hero. The climax takes place in a deserted TV studio which sees the hero valiantly rescuing his pregnant wife as he sets off an explosion that decimates the villain and the whole floor of the building. The wife, incidentally, then goes into labour pains precisely at this moment: this scene once again underscoring the connection between To and Tsui Hark (Tsui borrowed this idea for Time and Tide, although he was not involved in the production of Loving You; the film was produced by Mona Fong for a subsidiary company of Shaw Brothers). The first thing to note is that the film is hardly a typical action movie in terms of the heroic conception of its male protagonist. Lau Ching-wan’s hero both adheres to and departs from the “hero” (yingxiong) concept influenced by John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, the film which gave rise to the terminology “hero movies” (yingxiong pian, derived from the film’s Chinese title Yingxiong bense: “The Essence of Heroes”). Lau is the archetypal hero of this kind of genre insofar as he is a macho and determined cop, well capable of delivering justice to the law-breakers, as demonstrated in his pursuit of the ruthless villain (played by Taiwanese actor Tou Chung-hua) during which he suffers his injury. With blood streaming down his face and pouring out of his nose and mouth, Lau continues to chase after the villain and catches up with him who then continues to taunt him; in their scuffle, he manages to disarm the villain and handcuff him to his own right hand before passing out. In this scene, we have an expression of the double theme which functions, as Tasker informs

54

Director in Action

us, “to draw attention to the similarity between two apparently different, even opposed characters or terms within a fiction”.43 “In this process”, Tasker maintains, “the instability of supposedly secure categories of classification becomes absolutely central”.44 With this in mind, To’s aim is quite clear, which is to redraw the hero within the terms of the generic masculinity of the action film. Violence being gender-specific, To uses the same means to deflate the image of the hero. While the violence meted out to Lau in his dogged pursuit of the villain manifests the man’s heroism, he appears the very picture of a wounded god. In his fall, we see a shattered hero (here the notion of mythical violence exerts its critiquing capacities). In the final combat scene, we see the villain similarly wounded as a double image of the hero. In the sequences leading up to the hero’s fall, To built up scene after scene denting the image of his hero, presenting him as a surly, ill-natured officer who chooses to go by the book rather than overlook the shortcomings and flaws of his colleagues and juniors, and then as an unfaithful husband. To quite mercilessly portrays Lau’s failure as a man and husband as well as the pressures of work facing him. In an interesting scene, Lau drives home after the pub, stops at the red light, and while waiting for it to turn green, falls asleep at the wheel from complete exhaustion as his wife continues to page his beeper. A traffic cop wakes Lau up the next morning only to have him return to headquarters to face a crisis. The sergeant, Uncle Wah, whom Lau had refused the favour of releasing his nephew, a drug suspect, has holed himself up in the toilet with a gun, demanding to talk to Lau. When Lau turns up (foreshadowing Lau Ching-wan’s role as the negotiating cop in Running out of Time), Wah cheerfully mocks him for wearing a bullet-proof vest, and then walks out as if nothing has happened. In the next scene, Lau, seemingly unfazed by the experience, demotes one of his juniors, then goes to a restaurant to meet his wife. When she informs him that she is pregnant, Lau responds, “You forgot to take your pills, didn’t you? Has your brain gone rotten or something?” This line, with some modification, will be heard in To’s next action film Lifeline, while babies, pregnancy and what I would call the mother-to-be syndrome (which preoccupied the mind of the central heroines in Justice My Foot! and The Heroic Trio) also features in one of the sub-plots of Lifeline. The scene of an estranged husband and wife meeting in a restaurant will also be repeated in Lifeline. The scenes leading to the hero’s fall and those following his recovery transform the movie into a character study that is only incidentally an action film. They show a man coming to terms with his own emotional flaws and trying to make amends (for example, he offers Uncle Wah, fired from the force, his own compensation money of $200,000). The movie becomes a

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

55

fuller study of the pathological hero whose first appearance in The Big Heat was somewhat tentative, his physical and emotional sickness being swept under the carpet of action imperatives. Here, the hero’s pathos is fully depicted in a well-rounded fashion. His emotional problems stem from his obsession, inflexibility and bull-headedness in contradistinction to the stereotypical hero untroubled by devotion to duty. The price that he pays is his estrangement from his wife and the alienation of his staff. His eventual recovery of humanness (or in Chinese, renqing) re-establishes these relationships. The pathetic nature of Lau’s physical disability (his loss of taste and smell, conveyed dramatically in the scene where Lau’s wife feeds him in hospital) is painstakingly described (Lau Ching-wan’s performance in this film would establish him as one of Hong Kong’s major actors). By attending to the depiction of the pathological hero this time around, To has come up with a film that is able to integrate character study and action. His portrayal of the Hong Kong Police Department as a disciplined force is also realistically drawn: To’s lawmen are human entities, vulnerable to flaws and subjected to emotional instincts. Hence a theme which To will develop further in Lifeline and PTU concerns the conflict between discipline and emotion (both traits being personified by Lau Ching-wan’s character in this film). To’s focus on the pathology of the hero betrays his own predilection for human weakness. The flawed humanity of the law enforcers in Loving You contrasts strongly with the conventional super-heroic lawmen in The Big Heat. By concentrating on the pathology of the hero, the film attacks the superheroic and supernatural premises of the action cinema. What then about the final scene where Lau apparently displays superhero efforts to save his wife from the villain? In fact, this climax presents in an exciting but credible manner the portrayal of a man trying desperately to save his wife, rather than a superhero. Before the sequence, To establishes that Lau is suffering further complications from his condition as a result of his wound. Brain fluid leaks out through the nose, causing dizzy spells; and so, as in The Big Heat we have an unfit hero going into action. Here, To’s take of the final climax is quite novel. He gives us a sustained sequence of two desperate sick men trying to kill each other but in showing both the hero and the villain physically injured (the villain has one arm in a sling), To is reiterating the device of the double to show both men’s unfitness to occupy traditional generic roles. To is actively working against the clichés of the action hero and his final clash with the villain. He offers a more balanced duel by making them both handicapped (cf. the final scene in Throw Down where Louis Koo, blind, meets Tony Leung Ka-fai, who blindfolds himself in order to provide an equal match with his opponent). In the clichés of the genre,

56

Director in Action

it is the hero who is usually handicapped while the villain is not, thus making their duel more an exciting contest and the hero’s inevitable victory more of a triumph (see Zhang Che’s The One-Armed Swordsman, a classic example of the handicapped hero in the action genre45). This doubling concept is cleverly invoked by To as an action device, though it serves the function of expressing the Other through psychological mirroring which To will develop further in The Longest Nite and Running out of Time. The villain, who is mostly silent whenever he appears, is a mirror reflection of the hero. One can see the villain as a metonymic personification of the hero’s pathology. In wiping out the villain, the hero wipes out his pathology and redeems himself. The hero’s task is complicated by his brain condition. This condition reverses the cliché of the hero with the cool head, but he is nevertheless a resourceful man, finding his way out of a booby-trapped lift and ingeniously recovering his wife, tied to a wheelchair, by using a hook to pull the wheelchair away from the villain. As they make their escape, the villain discharges his shotgun — To adding emphasis to the plight of the couple by the use of slow-motion, an effect which seems to mock the apparent weakness of the hero and the condition of his pregnant wife who goes into labour at just this moment. (The idea of a pregnant woman in labour amid a fight scene was first used by To in Justice My Foot!, and, as I have mentioned earlier, it was reworked into the climactic episode of Tsui Hark’s Time and Tide set in the Hung Hom Railway Station.) Lau goes into a dizzy spell and loses his balance. As the villain is about to unload his shotgun on the wife, Lau cries out to surrender. In the face-off, the villain pulls the trigger only to run out of bullets and it is Lau who delivers the final shot to the villain. Because he has lost his sense of smell, Lau does not know that there is a leaking gas pipe. The villain, unaware of Lau’s loss of smell, thinks that he won’t shoot, and when he does, is taken completely by surprise. The shot sets off a chain of explosions covering the whole floor of the deserted building but the hero and his wife manage to escape by running ahead of the explosions: Lau pushing his wife on the wheelchair in a sort of running tackle in a rugby game. Loving You ends in a hospital (To yet again showing his disposition for hospitals) where the hero, bandaged from his second brain operation and sitting in a wheelchair, tries to locate his wife and baby. Though a bit sentimental, the ending is entirely consistent with the denting of the heroic image (we have in fact the final comeuppance of the hero).

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

57

Lifeline: Summation and Renewal Lifeline sees Johnnie To widening his examination of Hong Kong’s disciplined forces, shifting his focus away from the Hong Kong Police to the Fire Services Department (one of the world’s biggest and most efficient fire services). To is thus also shifting away from the policier and the gangster picture towards the action-adventure film, which arguably provides the context for greater realism in portraying heroism. Here, there is no gunplay action and its heroes are therefore a different breed of action hero. Because the mode of the action in Lifeline is fire-fighting, it changes the nature of the heroes. They are more thoughtful and vulnerable, as if such a disposition is dictated by the nature of the enemy itself. Lifeline shares superficial similarities with the 1991 Hollywood fire-fighting blockbuster Backdraft but develops into quite a different film. Backdraft concentrates on two feuding fire-fighting brothers and unfolds for the most part as a detective whodunit in which the younger brother solves the mystery of an arsonist who creates a series of fires in the city of Chicago systematically killing corrupt city politicians. The film contains several firefighting scenes denoting fire as a major dramatic element, indeed a character in its own right. Lifeline is more about the firefighters as a group, depicting a force that is trying to cohere despite the personal problems of its leading fighters and rise above its reputation of bad luck. The film offers a broader social look at the fire department, offering no false camaraderie or sentimentality but a basically honest portrait of firefighters trying to cope with the contradictions of personal lives and public service.46 The fire department is portrayed for about two-thirds of the film as an emergency, life-saving force and the scenes of action revolve around this fundamental representation. The spectacular fire-fighting action is all crammed into the last third of the film — a long, sustained sequence of drama and suspense. Despite its Hollywood

Still 2.13

Fire as a protagonist in its own right in Lifeline

58

Director in Action

allusions, Lifeline is an action potboiler in the true tradition of To’s policiers, restating the same themes and motifs that To developed in that genre. One could see it as a compendium of all the themes and motifs that we have seen up to now in the action cinema of Johnnie To — such that it sums up To’s career before the handover and the establishment of Milkyway (the film was shot towards the end of 1996 and released in January 1997; the handover occurred in July). There is, for example, a preponderance of hospital scenes. Sickness, injury and pathology recur throughout two-thirds of the film. The film opens with ambulances carrying the staff of the Tsz Wan Shan fire station in Kowloon to hospital. Practically the entire brigade is struck down — a mass case of sick heroes if ever there was one in the Hong Kong cinema. One action sequence later showing the brigade rescuing trapped workers inside a lift, and we are back in hospital again. This time, the station commander is injured, paralysed from the waist down — a result of having fallen six stories down, trapped inside the lift (note the frequency of action occurring in lifts in To’s films). The commander is put out of action, necessitating a replacement. We next learn that the ex-wife of the new station commander (Alex Fong) is dying of a terminal illness. Like the wife in Loving You, this ex-wife phones her husband to meet in a restaurant. The ex-wife wants to off-load their daughter onto Fong without letting him know that she is terminally ill, while he thinks that it’s a part of her irresponsible behaviour (he only finds out that she is ill when he visits her in hospital later). The hospital’s female doctor (Carman Lee, the wife in Loving You), tries to commit suicide by jumping off her apartment because of a failed affair with a male colleague in the same hospital. Lau Ching-wan’s character, the principal foreman known affectionately to his juniors as “Boss”, tries to talk her out of it (repeating his role as negotiator in Loving You, a role that he will repeat again in Running out of Time). She jumps anyway but lands onto the safety cushion and is hospitalised. She then begins a new affair with Lau (later when she realises that she has fallen in love with him, she gives him a necklace, a keepsake that assumes the same kind of significance as the necklace with the crucifix given to the hero by his girlfriend in The Big Heat). While Lau, as the chief hero of the film, suffers no major illness or pathology, unlike the heroes of The Big Heat and Loving You, a rookie fireman (Raymond Wong) is shown to have a phobia regarding the use of the slide. Meanwhile, Ruby Wong’s firewoman has an aversion to pregnancy, affecting her relationship with her husband. They quarrel during a lovemaking session because of her demand that he uses condoms. Wong is

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

59

so obsessed with her career that she is willing to sacrifice her role as a mother; it also aggravates the friction with her husband. Wong’s character is the female equivalent of Lau Ching-wan’s detective in Loving You who insists that his wife takes birth control pills, both characters sharing the same rationale that having children might impede their careers. Here, Ruby Wong’s occupation as a firewoman offers perhaps a stronger justification for her to remain childless; but she becomes pregnant anyway, eventually discovering that her husband had secretly poked holes in the condoms. She wants an abortion, but when it falls upon her to save a baby trapped inside a hole in the ground (she recovers the baby still alive but it later dies in hospital: a reprise of the scene in The Heroic Trio where Anita Mui rescues the baby only to have it die in hospital), the experience awakens her innate motherly instincts. She goes back to her husband and sobs on his shoulder, promising “to keep our baby”. Ruby Wong’s character embodies the inner confrontation between discipline and emotion or what the Chinese call “humanness” (renqing). Wong is seen in the beginning as adhering to the disciplinarian school, aligning her more with Alex Fong’s station commander and the divisional officer (played by Damian Lau) who makes an inspection tour of the station and tests the assembled firemen with questions requiring statistical answers. She then gradually moves to the side of Lau Ching-wan’s fireman who emphasises that statistics aren’t important, saving lives is (this becomes a motto for Lau, underscoring his reputation as a reckless fireman, jeopardising his chances for promotion). To’s treatment of this confrontation between discipline and emotion in Lifeline is apparently to reach a middle ground where the disciplinarians move towards accepting humanness (renqing) and where an antidisciplinarian such as Lau Ching-wan’s character accepts that those in charge “have their point”. To shows all his protagonists coming together in this middle ground where discipline and training supposedly interacts with the imperative of saving lives in one of the lengthiest and most sustained action sequences that he has ever filmed. This is the fire-fighting action sequence which lasts the whole final third of the movie beginning with the Tsz Wan Shan brigade being called into action to join other brigades to fight the huge fire in a weaving factory in Tsuen Wan — a fire set off by a pyromaniac (Lam Suet in a bit role). To’s actors were game enough to voluntarily take part in the dangerous scenes set inside the burning factory utilising real fire and smoke47 — which creates a sense of contemporary urgency about the sequence, increasing the drama and the perception of realism. In fact, the film was released a month after one of the worst fire disasters in the history of Hong Kong had occurred — the Garley

60

Director in Action

Building fire on Nathan Road in Jordan in November 1996, killing 39 people and injuring over 80. The Garley Building fire shocked Hong Kong, scenes of which were broadcast live on TV. It immediately made the public aware of fire safety in their buildings; at the same time, it probably helped to maintain interest in the film, ensuring that the disaster remained fresh in the public’s mind and conferring urgency to the climactic fire-fighting action sequence. This background of the real-life fire tragedy also keeps the film from being regarded too negatively as a knock-off of Backdraft. In this final sequence, particularly, one tends to spot the similarities with the Hollywood inspiration since fire as a dramatis persona is given the full rein — although To’s sequence is probably much better handled in terms of suspense and drama (marked also by a certain allegory about descending into the fires of hell) than the last climactic scene in Backdraft. The sequence shows the fire-fighting squad, comprising the characters of Lau Ching-wan, Alex Fong, Ruby Wong and their rookie colleague Raymond Wong, trapped on the fourth floor of the factory — they are known throughout the Department as a jinxed unit (the opening hospital sequences attesting to this squad’s susceptibility to bad luck). With few precious minutes of oxygen left, the heroes have not only to carry injured colleagues out of harm’s way but also to rescue two women workers in the factory and find an exit before being engulfed by flames from exploding canisters of calcium oxide illegally hoarded by the factory owner. The only safe space is inside a lift but it soon becomes a death trap. By now the lift in To’s films functions as a crucial part of his action infrastructure, a tool of death or an arm of the Destiny-machine, a location of danger. In this instance, the lift offers a momentary sanctuary, an effective life-saver, when the power is ordered to be switched on and the protagonists transported away from danger; but the lift drops the protagonists into the underground basement before the power is switched off and they come out of the lift into a sewer completely sealed off from the outside world, repeating a Dantesque motif from The Heroic Trio, where much of the action takes place below the surface of the earth. In this infernal region, the evil protagonists literally survive on methane gas but are able to shuttle back and forth between the surface and the sewer by popping in and out of manholes with supernatural facility. Here, the heroes being undeniably human cannot survive on methane gas and there are no manholes to pop out of. With only three minutes of oxygen left, it would seem that the team is well and truly jinxed. Hereby, Lau’s hero comes into play. He sets off an explosion using his oxygen tank, thus causing the ground to cave in and opening up an escape hatch.

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

Still 2.14

61

Fire consumes a firefighter in Lifeline

The whole sequence is marked by suspense. To succeeds in showing us his characters as natural heroes. There is no overt sentimentality but rather a stirring endorsement of life and the nobility of carrying on regardless of adversity; at the end, all his protagonists survive, including Lau Ching-wan. We see the mud-stained heroes standing to attention, giving the salute to their superior officer who says only “Well done!” They then wash off the mud with clean water, take refreshments, and fall in when the order comes for them to re-enter the towering inferno. Martial music bursts out as the heroes, refreshed, renewed, no longer a jinxed team, march off in slow-motion to do their duty. When To reaches the next stage of his career, namely the Milkyway films of the next chapter, such a stirring affirmation of heroism would be replaced by a stark sense of fatalism.

Still 2.15 Giving and taking the salute: heroes vindicated in Lifeline

62

Director in Action

Conclusion The action films in this period of To’s career show that he is concerned not so much with death as with the idea of physical impairment. His heroes — mainly the protagonists of The Big Heat, Loving You and Lifeline — seek to fulfil their duties despite impairments or flaws due to serious illness, injury or psycho-pathological causes. Character flaws such as arrogance, selfrighteousness and bull-headedness as well as other signs of phobias, are often echoed by their opposite sides, the villains. This is explicated most clearly in Loving You, which makes it the key work of this period. The female heroes of The Heroic Trio and Executioners are super-human Others inflicting the sort of mythical violence that Gods are capable of and yet have human drives of motherhood and having babies (indirectly connoting the sexual drive). Although as vulnerable as To’s other heroes, they are set apart by a comicbook supernaturalism. The heroes of Lifeline are clearly the most human of the lot in the sense that they must overcome phobia and pathology while daily exposing themselves to illness, suffering and danger. To’s action films are imbued with the characteristic of Hong Kong as a working city — its infrastructure of skyscrapers, streets, and emergency services. Like much of Hong Kong, To’s style is workmanlike and unpretentious. It is much less kinetic than the styles of some of his contemporaries who are equally defined by Hong Kong, such as Tsui Hark or Wong Kar-wai. The films are also very Hong Kong in the sense that it shows the dedication and hard work of its people. If we were to exclude The Big Heat from To’s oeuvre and see it as more a Tsui Hark film, and The Heroic Trio and Executioners (both action vehicles made in association with Ching Siu-tung as the action director), it is clear that To is a much more introspective director as demonstrated by Loving You and Lifeline. His introspective nature stems from an affinity for uniformed professionals doing their jobs in the police, hospital, and fire services departments. To is professional like his detectives, nurses, doctors, and firefighters and he clearly admires their doggedness and dedication. In terms of technique, the flashback and slow-motion are two oft-used devices in To’s action cinema. To used the flashback as early as The Enigmatic Case and employed it again in The Big Heat and The Heroic Trio but discarded it completely in Loving You and Lifeline. On all these films, To relied on slowmotion to accentuate movements and bits of business in his action sequences, particularly evident in the climactic sequences of Loving You and Lifeline. The absence of flashbacks in the narratives of both films conventionalizes them but allows To to spend more time on characters. They are largely driven by

From The Big Heat to Lifeline

63

character, with action sequences mostly concentrated in one huge set piece (though Loving You has several smaller set pieces). At this stage of his career, To’s films are violent, but they are violent in a generic manner of the Hong Kong cinema before the violence finds a more idiosyncratic expression befitting the way an auteur enunciates violence (Election and Election 2 are the most well-defined examples). I have identified the violence as mythical violence as in the out-and-out fantasy of The Heroic Trio and Executioners. In his other films, mythical violence invests their heroes with superhuman strengths enabling them to survive ordeals quite miraculously. Thus in Loving You, the hero literally refuses to be put down by the villain despite having been shot in the head. In Lifeline, the firefighters are trapped in the sewer but the hero delivers everyone to safety by blasting their way through to the surface. The characters in To’s films are defined by the kind of violence and destruction which in the end redeems them. This is the mythical violence that manifests heroes as gods, and the divine violence that expiates guilt and brings redemption. Mythical violence renders a fateful quality to To’s films, though at this stage, To does not appear overly preoccupied with fatalism. However, the films intimate this coming tendency, particularly true with the ending of The Barefooted Kid. His heroes are stoic, unafraid to die, and To seems to be saying that death should not hinder one’s path to heroism.

Nucleus of the Milky Way

65

3 Nucleus of the Milky Way

The Creative Producer In this chapter, we will discuss a cluster of action films that Johnnie To produced for Milkyway Image, the production company that he founded in 1996. Its first production was Too Many Ways to Be Number One, released in 1997. I will however begin the discussion with Beyond Hypothermia, a film released in 1996 and produced by To under a separate independent entity (the film was eventually affixed under the Milkyway banner after the setting up of the company and was released as a Milkyway film). We will consider how these films, Beyond Hypothermia, Too Many Ways to Be Number One, The Odd One Dies (1997), The Longest Nite (1998), and Expect the Unexpected (1998), corroborate, reaffirm, and depart from the sum and substance of To’s cinema as we have analysed it so far. Although To is not credited with the direction of these films, we can detect his hand, firstly, through his intervention as a “creative producer”, inducting new directors into the system and influencing the direction of their films, indeed, even directing some scenes himself; and secondly, through common themes and motifs, such as the sort of gunplay action that recall To’s previous films, linking them with the next pentad of films discussed in the following chapter. The handful of other Milkyway films To also produced that do not fit into the action genre are generally excluded from this study but may be mentioned where they have some bearing on the genre and the question of To’s auteurship). While the Milkyway company was the outcome of To’s desire to get on top of the system by becoming his own producer so that he could make more personal films of his own choice, he was also seeking to build a viable

66

Director in Action

production company that could supply the market with commercial products. To this end, he needed to produce films directed by others, but then he often exceeded his role of producer by taking control of the projects which he had handed to other directors, on the pretext of protecting his investors. The role of a “creative producer” is of quite long standing in the Hong Kong cinema, however, and it refers to an established director who branches out in the industry as a producer, initiating projects and overseeing productions under his name or the name of the production company of which he is chief executive officer, assigning films to younger directors employed in the same company or studio. Such a producer sometimes personally directs the film in association with a younger protégé (who can also be credited as an “associate director”, “executive director”, or a “co-director”), or in other cases, only directs several scenes of the film while the director, who is credited, is responsible for much of the picture but with the right to final cut reserved by the producer. In the past, under the studio system, directors such as Zhu Shilin, Li Hanxiang and Zhang Che have functioned in this role. In the 1980s, the success of Cinema City (established by actors Karl Maka, Raymond Wong and Dean Shek) led to a proliferation of independent or semi-independent production companies founded by actors and directors seeking to have greater creative control and financial stakes in their pictures (very often these independent companies were formed jointly with larger studios and companies, and the Milkyway films were mostly produced jointly with other independent companies and in the case of Too Many Ways to Be Number One, with Golden Harvest). To’s role as a creative producer may be likened to Tsui Hark’s in his Film Workshop company. To’s experience working under Tsui Hark on The Big Heat would have guided his own role as a producer on the Milkyway films. He first ventured into film production in 1990 with A Moment of Romance, a film co-produced by Ringo Lam and Wong Jing. The direction was credited to Benny Chan who later achieved his own fame as a director of distinctive action films, Big Bullet (1996), Who Am I? (1998), Heroic Duo (2003), and New Police Story (2004). The film, featuring Andy Lau as a petty gangster with an aptitude for motorbike racing who falls in love with the daughter of a rich family, ends in tragedy. It contains intimations of To’s latter obsessions, notably the fatalistic hero and his romance with a sympathetic heroine. Not surprisingly, To asserts that he directed much of the film, and he would allude to it fondly in Needing You by invoking those scenes of Lau on a speeding motorbike (scenes that were repeated also in Casino Raiders II, released in 1991, which featured Lau and Wu Chien-lien as the bike-riding hero and his lover respectively).

Nucleus of the Milky Way

67

A Moment of Romance is in effect a synthesis of the 1980s action mood and style of the likes of Ringo Lam, John Woo, Tsui Hark, and it should be noted, Wong Kar-wai’s As Tears Go By (1988) provides many inter-textual references to A Moment of Romance (particularly the ending). Interestingly, Benny Chan’s association with To on this film has its own inter-textual connections with To’s later work. Chan’s staging of an action sequence in Big Bullet, in which a police unit is brazenly attacked by a group of robbers led by a Mainlander prefigures similar sequences in Expect the Unexpected and Breaking News (2004). To was clearly borrowing from Chan, perhaps as a tribute to his former protégé but more likely appropriating and developing ideas from him in the spirit of marking inter-textual references in the free market of the Hong Kong cinema. Chan, for his part, would pay his own tribute to To’s Running out of Time in Heroic Duo, a thrilling work in its own right which refurbishes the theme of the double and gamesmanship from To’s film. The Benny Chan–Johnnie To connection in A Moment of Romance is the first of To’s creative partnerships in his role as a producer-mentor to younger directors. The recognition of To as a creative producer rests primarily on the Milkyway films. His associations here with younger directors followed the mould of the Benny Chan–Johnnie To relationship in A Moment of Romance. Like Benny Chan, these directors had had early experiences working with To as his assistant directors in films and also in television. The proposition of the Milkyway films, further discussed below, is that they are works crafted and created by a group of writers and directors but drawing consistency in style and theme from Johnnie To as the creative nucleus of the whole enterprise. This creative process was not without difficulty or tension as To insisted that certain directors do it his way and he was a tough man to satisfy. To admits that his system is a dictatorial “rule by force”, requiring his greener directors to submit to his wishes, although he would generously give them directing credit.1 Beyond Hypothermia was directed by Patrick Leung, who served as To’s assistant director on Loving You. Leung also worked with John Woo, and made his directing debut in 1996 with a boxing movie Somebody Up There Likes Me under Woo’s supervision as producer and mentor. He followed this up with Beyond Hypothermia with To as producer. His next film was Task Force (1997), a tribute to the action style of John Woo, but it has a looser, episodic quality in contrast to Beyond Hypothermia, and Leung’s subsequent films since then have been disappointing. Beyond Hypothermia stands out in Leung’s career so far because it gains from its association with Johnnie To and the Milkyway line of products rather than from any consideration of Leung as a singular

68

Director in Action

auteur. Similarly, Wai Ka-fai, who wrote and directed Too Many Ways to Be Number One also made his debut film, the Chinese Western Peace Hotel (1995), under John Woo’s mentorship as producer, but as with Leung, it is his association with Johnnie To that has proved more significant. All his films since Too Many Ways have been co-directed with To. Lastly, Patrick Yau, the most junior of To’s protégés, credited with directing The Odd One Dies, The Longest Nite and Expect the Unexpected, also served a substantive apprenticeship under To as his “associate director” on Lifeline, A Hero Never Dies (1998) and Where a Good Man Goes (1999). These “apprenticeship” works were made contiguous to the films where he received full credit as director; thus Yau’s work is closely tied to the spirit of To’s own work in both style and substance and he has yet to make his own impact in a production independent of To. In analysing the Milkyway films in which To eschewed the credit of director, my emphasis is on the interaction between To and a group of younger directors. Here, we may invoke To as the official enunciator of these films, actively working with other directors on their given materials. We will look at how these films are informed by To’s own action films discussed in the previous chapter and how they impact on his subsequent achievements in the next set of films discussed in the following chapter. In locating the Milkyway films as a bridge between these two periods in To’s career, I will show that the films of this chapter cannot be seen in isolation or detached from To’s presence. The chief characteristic of the Milkyway films that should immediately be noted is the dialectic between youthful vigour and a downbeat mood of despair and annihilation. Such a sensibility can be detected from the very beginning of the Milkyway project. On the outset, the films discussed here display an overall mindfulness about style and an emphasis on experimentation which is not as immediately evident in To’s films prior to the founding of Milkyway. The emphasis on style and experimentation is also self-evident in the English titles given to the films: Beyond Hypothermia, Too Many Ways to Be Number One, The Odd One Dies, Expect the Unexpected, which sound more “cool” than the mundane sounding English titles of To’s own films up to this point (The Heroic Trio, Executioners, Loving You, Lifeline). A profound sense of darkness and despair ingests the Milkyway films. In as much as the films offer a variation on the theme of pathology, the characters of the Milkyway films share some of the traits (obsessiveness, morbidity, sullenness) of To’s pathological characters; but while To focuses on physical impairment and illness, the Milkyway films go one step further by putting the focus on the circumstances premeditated by fate that lead to tragedy and

Nucleus of the Milky Way

69

death. The characters are occupied in professions (hired killers, cops, gangsters) where death is an ever-present reality, strikingly demonstrated in Beyond Hypothermia.

Beyond Hypothermia: The Icewoman Cometh The “hypothermia” in the title is a pathological state associated with the heroine, a female assassin (played by Taiwanese actor Wu Chien-lien), who has an abnormally low body temperature (indicated in the Chinese title, “32˚ Celsius”). As with the heroes of previous Johnnie To films who are afflicted with illness or injury, Wu’s female assassin functions as capably as though she is normal. But the film proceeds to show that she is in fact far from normal; she turns out to be an archetypal pathological hero in the Johnnie To manner.2 Hypothermia symbolizing a killer coolness is indicated by the use of ice, in the sequence following the introductory credits and the prologue. In the prologue, a wounded man picks up a stray bullet from the ground, loads it into his gun and fires the final shot in a great gun battle that has just ended. Thus the whole picture develops as a flashback, in which, immediately following the prologue, we see the chief protagonist, Wu’s character, being introduced. She enters an ice-factory and makes her way through to an alcove where she breaks open a block of ice to retrieve a rifle fitted with a telescope. She uses the gun to kill a foreign gentleman in the bar opposite. The ice motif, which recurs in another assassination sequence where the assassin kills a man in Thailand (and his young daughter), suggests that her hypothermia is the outcome of her profession — both a state of mind and an illness. The ice factory assumes the kind of role that hospitals play in To’s previous films — that is to provide an environment in which to affix the hero in his or her pathology. Coolness is the disease of the assassin’s soul and it will literally consume her body as well. Coolness is a professional requirement to ensure survival but it comes into conflict with the assassin’s emotional needs. She is in fact an orphan and wants to know about herself and her background. Herein lies the inner conflict at the heart of her psycho-pathology. Adding to her psychological burden is the compulsion to follow the five rules of her profession — no photos, no name, no identity, no past and no fixed abode. The assassin attempts to go “beyond hypothermia”: she takes photographs of herself, and we learn of her desire to have the other four things her profession forbids: a name, an identity, a past and a fixed abode. Following the ice-factory sequence, the assassin returns to her apartment, and walks past a little girl playing on a swing. The scene briefly suggests a backstory, her

70

Director in Action

remembrance of childhood (tentatively recalling Anita Mui’s character in The Heroic Trio — we might even see Wu as Mui’s long lost sister). Her gaze at the child as though haunted by memories suggests that the icewoman is capable of melting, but when she later carries out a hit in Thailand, she kills a little girl, the victim’s daughter who had inadvertently witnessed the assassination: her professional cold-bloodedness is unshaken. Back in her own apartment, the assassin burns her forged Malaysian passport. The film therefore brings us from ice to heat, a neat configuration of her dilemma communicated to us without any dialogue or voiceover. We next see her trying to relax inside her room, at first lying down on her makeshift bed after putting her pistol underneath the mattress. “I feel exhausted after a killing — as if I am a ghost!”, she exclaims to herself. And like a ghost, she becomes restless, getting up immediately to spy on a noodle hawker (Lau Ching-wan) through binoculars. She goes out and establishes contact with the hawker who eventually becomes her friend and lover. In their first scene together, she orders noodles, eats it silently, and then quickly disappears, leaving money on the table. Catching a glimpse of her as she walks away, the hawker is moved to call her “The Enchanting Ghost” (in Chinese, qiannü youhun, evoking the title of a ghost story in the famous anthology Liaozhai Zhiyi, known in English as Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, by the seventeenth-century writer Pu Songling, which was the basis of Tsui Hark’s production A Chinese Ghost Story). This is the appellation that the hawker applies to the assassin whenever she comes out of the blue to eat his noodles and then disappears afterwards like a ghostly apparition. Identity and the lack of it (conveyed by the ghost motif ) becomes the operating theme of the narrative as it unfolds. The assassin is a Cambodian orphan adopted by a man, now deceased, known as “Brother Ming”, who brought her up and trained her to become a professional killer. This information is imparted through the assassin’s liaisons with her minder, a Cambodian woman known as Mei (played by Shirley Wong). Mei sets up all the assassin’s contracts and hits, and is the only person who knows her real name and family background, information she will not divulge when she is probed. “What’s important is one’s life, not one’s name”, Mei says, emphasising the credo of the professional killer never to leave any traces of one’s identity behind. As we get deeper into the narrative, the relationship between the assassin and Mei becomes clearer (she really desires the assassin), and we sense that Wu’s Cambodian identity may be something of a red herring. In the end, identity is a trap that leads to the assassin’s destruction. In order to get her to do one last job, Mei finally tells the assassin her real name and

Nucleus of the Milky Way

71

gives her a photograph of herself as a child taken with her family. By giving the assassin a name, Mei deliberately imperils her life. Mei is betraying the very same code that she had imparted to the assassin. Her real intent is to set Wu up for an ambush. The assassin’s own professionalism and self-control gets her out of the trap, though she does not survive the final shootout. The theme of identity is interpolated with the notion of a professional code of ethics that is common to this type of genre cinema. What matters to a professional killer is one’s life and not a name, but what matters even more, the filmmakers seem to say, is professionalism and self-control, demonstrated in the final scenes where the assassin goes about exterminating all her assailants with her usual icy coolness. To an assassin, the identity that should ultimately matter is that of the icewoman. The theme of identity is also a device bringing out the theme of multiculturalism in To’s action cinema. Here we have a chief protagonist who is ostensibly Cambodian but implicitly pan-Asian (she could be Thai, Korean, Chinese, or Taiwanese), and we also have the presence of a Korean hitman (played by Korean actor Hon Sang-woo) as the icewoman’s nemesis (it is this character who fires the last bullet in the prologue). As a production of a newly established company, Beyond Hypothermia demonstrates To’s recognition of the economic fundamentals that underlay the Hong Kong film industry, its need to tap into the regional market of Southeast and Northeast Asia. Milkyway was founded on the eve of the greatest financial crisis to hit East Asia, a crisis that added to the woes of the Hong Kong film industry already mired in domestic recession long before. To’s prominence as a filmmaker has grown partly as a result of his efforts to revive the film industry throughout this period of depression. The strategy behind Beyond Hypothermia was to make an action movie that could utilise locations in Thailand and South Korea to boost the distribution of Hong Kong movies in those markets and turn around the declining fortunes of the Hong Kong film industry — although in the end, the film failed in the box office.3 Ironically perhaps, the choice of Thailand and South Korea was a prophetic sign of the emergence of both these cinemas as Hong Kong’s competitor in its traditional Southeast Asian market. The theme of multiculturalism works as a production strategy embedded into the narrative; hence major action sequences are set in the two countries supporting the killer’s identity crisis. Even if it is part of a production strategy, pan-Asian multiculturalism remains a striking motif in the films of Johnnie To (cf. The Big Heat, Fulltime Killer). Beyond Hypothermia stands out in other ways. It is much more stylish than To’s own action films up to this period, with brilliantly executed action sequences. One feels that Patrick Leung is edging closer to a vision of action

72

Director in Action

that is his own rather than To’s — its stylishness is akin to that in the films of Michael Mann (Thief, Heat) and John Woo (so that Woo was probably a more influential mentor). The final shootout is a long sustained action set piece marked by inventive stunts and cleverly choreographed action involving car chases and gunfights all coming together in a dance of death. In hindsight, this is an extraordinarily apocalyptic sequence that foreshadows the final shootout in Expect the Unexpected. The icewoman coolly shoots her way through the phalanxes of gunmen to reach her own exaltation in death. The scene is a testament of the struggle of an individual rebel against the whole jianghu, the mythic space of action in the genre, foreshadowing similar plights of lone individuals against the jianghu in The Longest Nite, A Hero Never Dies, Election. As the icewoman lies mortally wounded inside the car that Lau Ching-wan’s hawker (himself mortally wounded) has driven to the scene in an attempt to rescue her, she achieves the glory not afforded her in her identity-less existence as a hitwoman — she is reunited in death with her lover and as such achieves a nobility in death. The scene of driving a vehicle (a car, a motorboat, etc) to a site of danger in order to rescue one’s loved one is an emblematic melodramatic idea of violence, and typically, it is too late (cf. Casino Raiders II), but here although it is too late to save her life (the car in this instance functioning as a Destiny-machine) it is not too late for her to be joined with her lover (another manifestation of destiny, as the Chinese term yuanfen attests to the sort of destiny that binds lovers together even in death). The Korean hitman who fires the final shot is the human enunciator of the Destiny-machine, but in his own way, he too achieves nobility: he acquits himself in his quest for revenge before he too succumbs to the Destinymachine. Thus Beyond Hypothermia sets the tone of death and annihilation in the Milkyway canon.

Too Many Ways to Be Number One: Hard Times, Tough Choices Too Many Ways to Be Number One could well have been entitled Too Many Ways to Die as it heralds the theme of heroic death and variations thereof inherent in subsequent Milkyway projects. In either case, the title would have sounded like a surrealist’s manifesto setting out the creative aims of Milkyway, and indeed Too Many Ways to Be Number One is easily the weirdest and most iconoclastic of the Milkyway films, carrying its exaggerated action and black humour to heights seldom scaled in the Hong Kong cinema. It is an extraordinary, narratively rich and complex work — whether seen as a very funny spoof of the triad gangster genre, or as a farcical black fantasy in its own

Nucleus of the Milky Way

73

right. It centres on the lives of second-rate gangsters attempting to make it into the big league of the jianghu, here taking the form of the world of the triads bound by its own rules and hierarchies. Threading throughout is an experimental streak of filmmaking of such breathless audacity that it leaves the audience hardly any room to breathe: practically the whole picture is shot with a hand-held camera sporting a fish-eye wide-angle lens that packs a large expanse of space into a very tight enclosure. To convey the feeling of the film’s byzantine narrative (one which is likely to baffle even fans and aficionados of Hong Kong cinema), it is necessary to recount the synopsis in some detail. The film progresses as two fantasy variations in the life of one Wong Ah Kau (Lau Ching-wan), a petty hoodlum in the throes of a mid-life crisis that is developing its way into a full-blown psychosis. He is having his fortunes told, having reached a turning point in his life — his 32nd birthday. In the first variation, Ah Kau, who now sells wreaths for a living in front of a funeral parlour, is pulled into a get-rich-quick scheme to illegally traffic a fleet of Mercedes Benzes into Zhanjiang, a coastal town in Guangdong province. But no sooner has Kau joined six other petty hoodlums assembled to execute the scheme by his friend Tai Bo (Cheung Tat-ming), when things start to go wrong. The gang celebrates their partnership by having a meal in a teahouse restaurant and then enjoying themselves in a sauna and massage parlour. Ah Kau ends up with the tab but the second time around, he is unable to pay the $7,100 notched up by the gang. Consequently, they rob the joint instead. During their getaway, Tai Bo is accidentally killed and the rest of the gang carry out the plan only to have the whole scheme gradually come apart. Crossing into China by boat, one other member of the group drowns; his disappearance is only discovered when the gang reaches their destination. On delivery of the cars, instead of being paid by the local Zhanjiang gang known as the Black Stars, they end up with Tai Bo’s wife (Ruby Wong), who had been kidnapped by the Black Stars because Tai Bo owed them money. Thus the get-rich-quick scheme is really Tai Bo’s own plan to secure his wife’s freedom. Tai Bo’s wife then coerces the Hong Kong hoodlums to rob the Black Stars when the latter executes a robbery. That night, Tai Bo’s wife seduces Ah Kau and goes on top of him, reaching a sustained orgasm which kills her.4 The gang decides to go through with the robbery despite qualms: “We’ll come to no good if we rob the Communist Party”, one gang member says, to which Ah Kau replies, “We’re not robbing the Communist Party, we’re robbing the Black Stars”: the colour black, to symbolise criminals, thus acquiring an ironic edge because of its contrast with communist red — and the whole thing ends in a slaughter.

74

Director in Action

Wong Ah Kau is the butt of the China misadventure, slowly coming across as a pathetic figure epitomising the frustration and anger implicit in the failed lives of all the protagonists. Having reached 32 years of age, Ah Kau is conscious that he has wasted his life — 32 was after all the age when Bruce Lee died, as he is reminded by Tai Bo. Kau has been a loyal member of the Hung Hing gang since he was 14 years old, but as he is now approaching middle-age, he envisages becoming a “big brother” looking after his own gang within the Hung Hing family. However, in the first variation of his life (as told by the fortune-teller), he is a perennial loser, or at best a would-be hero who makes the wrong judgement by joining Tai Bo’s illegal scheme to run cars into China and whose personal flaws and ineptitude (he cannot drive, for example) effectively jinx the group and ultimately bring tragedy upon every member (even Tai Bo’s wife is not spared).

Still 3.1 The hapless figure of Wong Ah Kau (Lau Chingwan) in the China misadventure section of Too Many Ways to Be Number One

In the second variation, Wong Ah Kau is just as hapless but this time he shows more backbone by refusing to join Tai Bo in his China scheme and taking it on himself to cover the $7,100 bill at the massage parlour (by surrendering his designer watch) on the basis of keeping up the honour of the Hung Hing. This gesture wins him the notice and respect of a massage girl (Carman Lee) who offers to sleep with him, and it is his last chance because she is going to Taiwan the next day as business is so bad in Hong Kong. After making love, the girl manages to exact an emotional concession from him to see her off at the airport (because tough guys like him aren’t expected to show emotion). Touched, she gives him a Seiko watch, which, in a gesture of macho toughness, he throws away. At the airport, Ah Kau is waylaid by Matt (Francis Ng), one of Tai Bo’s petty-hoodlum mates, who manages to cajole

Nucleus of the Milky Way

75

him into going to Taichung in central Taiwan to carry out a hit on the boss of a local triad gang. Once in Taiwan, another misadventure begins. Matt discovers that he has mislaid the address of the man he’s supposed to kill. Lacking money, he robs a woman using the characteristic method adopted by local Hong Kong hoodlums of hitting the victim on the head with a brick. Ah Kau stops him from doing further harm to the woman, emphasising once again that one should keep up the good name and the chivalric spirit of the Hung Hing. Ah Kau and Matt then seek the help of the “Five Lakes” gang by revealing their Hung Hing credentials — the Five Lakes being the local branch of the Hung Hing. The gang’s boss, a fat man named Blackie, is sufficiently impressed and gives them a job to kill the boss of a rival gang who turns out to be Blackie’s brother, Whity. As it happens, Whity is the man who had originally contracted Matt to execute a hit — on Blackie.

Still 3.2 Wong Ah Kau (Lau Ching-wan) and Matt (Francis Ng) in Taiwan, with Ah Kau striking a characteristic hapless pose

Farcical mayhem ensues as the double assassinations are carried out, with Kau managing to stop Matt from killing his target at the last minute and forced to recant the contracts, admitting that everything has been a mistake. At the scene of the assassination, Matt is injured and so too is Carman Lee’s massage girl who is coincidentally present as one of the entourage of escort girls employed from Hong Kong to entertain the gangs (coincidence as a device will recur in the plots of the Milkyway films, as we will see). All parties converge at the hospital where the injured are brought, including both Blackie and Whity who are pronounced dead soon after. Pandemonium breaks out as the police are called in and Kau is arrested. In the prison cell, he meets the surviving members of Tai Bo’s gang who have fled to Taiwan as a result of

76

Director in Action

a failed robbery in Hong Kong, and have been caught as illegal migrants. Kau and the rest of the gang are bailed out by the local godfather, impressed by Kau’s efforts to keep up the good name of the gang. The godfather summons him to a meeting, which takes place in a hospital chamber where the godfather’s wife lies in a coma as a result of injuries incurred from being hit on the head with a brick by a mugger. Kau and Matt naturally assume that she is the woman whom Matt had hit earlier. Pre-empting the godfather’s wrath, Kau cuts off Matt’s and his own little finger, in the traditional sign of atonement among triad members. They are about to be killed when an underling barges in to inform the godfather that the real muggers have been caught — and they turn out to be the members of Tai Bo’s gang. In the final showdown, Kau is once more caught in the middle, pleading for mercy on the pretext that everything has been a misadventure. Shots are fired, and Kau is wounded by a stray bullet which penetrates the back of his head. Incredibly, he survives (just as Lau Ching-wan’s cop in Loving You survives being shot in the head), albeit in a near-paraplegic state wearing a neck brace. He is hailed as a hero by the luminaries of the Hung Hing gangs in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Finally, he is given his own territory to run and becomes his own boss. The film then returns us to the beginning where Kau is having his fortune told. He is given these two visions of his life and must now make a choice. As he walks out, he is confronted by Tai Bo who tells him about a new scheme running luxury cars into China and taunts him with being a failure. It seems a third variation is about to begin just as the camera fades out and the end credits roll.

Still 3.3 Wong Ah Kau, the luckless hero with a bullet in his head

Too Many Ways to Be Number One offers the hero a choice of survival in the characteristic Johnnie To vein of a wounded survival as befell the hero

Nucleus of the Milky Way

77

of Loving You also played by Lau Ching-wan. Here though, Lau’s hero has the advantage of foreknowledge of events, which is a more optimistic variation on the theme. Wong Ah Kau is more or less a proactive hero who tries to turn things around, even in the midst of the two misadventures, hoping that matters wouldn’t get worse. What shines through in the two episodes is the hero’s determination to evade his fate though he ultimately does not survive in the China misadventure and only barely survives in the Taiwan episode. Acceptance of one’s sorry fate is not for Wong Ah Kau and death is not the kind of epiphany he seeks (after all, he is reduced to selling funeral wreaths for a living and doesn’t want anything more to do with death). Kau simply wants to make something of himself, to get ahead, but the tough choices that confront him are predetermined by the hard times and his fate, which is unavoidably a life of mediocrity if not misery. In presenting two variations which are each set in China and Taiwan, the film is also saying that the times too are determined by politics, and the wild and woolly goings-on in both locations indicate the film’s brutal cynicism about 1997 (it was released some four months before the handover), and the sense that Hong Kong is caught between a rock and a hard place.5 The theme of 1997 as a syndrome resulting in depression or an anxiety about identity and allegiance can be detected in the spate of Milkyway productions released in the immediate pre-1997 period including Beyond Hypothermia, Too Many Ways to Be Number One and Derek Chiu’s Final Justice (released at about the same time as Too Many Ways: an interesting courtroom drama about a Catholic priest charged with rape and a murderous gangland boss with political ambitions who regularly confesses to the priest). In Beyond Hypothermia, the syndrome is personalised in the pathological coolness of the hero and her crisis of identity, but in Too Many Ways, the syndrome is manifested in white-hot hysteria — and the identity crisis comes not so much from a lack of one but from a choice of one: an identity with China or with Taiwan. In this regard, the film is astute as a farce-allegory about Hong Kong’s political choices over 1997. In addition, it is very perceptive about the economic depression in Hong Kong so that we have both economic and political factors combined in the 1997 syndrome. The characters set out on their misadventures in the hope of alleviating the materialist causes of the syndrome — the idea that getting rich in China or Taiwan might make it all worthwhile. Within the Milkyway portfolio, Too Many Ways is among those pictures (including Derek Chiu’s Final Justice and Vincent Kok’s Only Fools Fall in Love) that are the least identifiable with Johnnie To. It is difficult to imagine that To could have directed them. The spirit of the film also seems quite different from the other Milkyway films on view. The two collateral stories contain

78

Director in Action

a kind of slapstick zaniness that seems more outré but in the vein of a serious satire where the intent is not purely to send-up the material but to provide a cautionary tale. While To is no stranger to the slapstick genre, one can only contrast his treatment in The Eighth Happiness, or his “nonsense” comedies with Stephen Chow, to see that Too Many Ways is more distinctive and idiosyncratic in a way not immediately evident in To’s comedies. To would describe Wai Ka-fai as the “creative driving force” of the Milkyway company, the man who was better in creating stories than he himself was6 — and Too Many Ways certainly bears out To’s description on the matter of Wai’s creativity in the story department. However, the film is also a startling exercise in directorial style. On this point, To himself feels that Wai was “forcing it” but to his credit, did nothing to intervene by toning down Wai’s excess.7 But Wai has not made another film in quite the same manner, his creativity being mostly expended on Milkyway projects where he functioned as To’s writer, co-producer, and co-director, often wearing all three hats at once. Their films together haven’t re-captured the zing and energy of Too Many Ways. If Wai had not tied his career so closely with To’s, Too Many Ways would have been the work that advertised his independence from his mentor and business partner. It remains his most outstanding work as he has not had much of a

Still 3.4 Two views of the exaggerated visual style of Too Many Ways to Be Number One

Nucleus of the Milky Way

79

solo career since (and this seems a genuine loss, although lately, he appears to have branched out on his own, with To’s blessing8 ). It must be said however that the distinctiveness of its style owes a debt to Wong Kar-wai. The extreme fisheye perspectives, the camera work (with the camera occasionally going topsy-turvy to shoot whole scenes upsidedown), and the diptych structure of the narrative are conscious allusions to Wong’s Fallen Angels (1995) — and the reason why the film looks less like a Johnnie To work. Indeed, this and the next film in the Milkyway project The Odd One Dies (also written by Wai Ka-fai) are testimonies of Wong’s influence on his Hong Kong contemporaries (though To baulks at the suggestion that The Odd One Dies was influenced by Wong). Wong shot the whole of Fallen Angels with a 9.8-mm wide-angle lens,9 and Wai uses the same kind of lens to shoot Too Many Ways,10 but the perspectives somehow look even more extreme than in Fallen Angels and the two episodes are even more bizarre and trenchant tales than the ones Wong conceived for his film. Far out as the film may be, it finally works as the cautionary tale that it was intended to be — a tale about the lives of petty gangsters who might otherwise be archetypal Hong Kong “little people” (uneducated, workingclass battlers). There is a kernel of truth in the characterisations of 30something gangsters plagued by the reality of advancing age and hard economic times. The performances, particularly of Lau Ching-wan and Francis Ng, capture the right sense of the frustration and the desperation of hoodlums approaching middle age who have nothing to show for themselves in terms of advancement. They are living parodies of the gu-waak zai or “young triad kids”, a phenomenon spawned by the “sleeper” success of the low-budget Young and Dangerous in 1996 and its successive sequels. The guwaak zai trend emphasises the preternatural exuberance and confidence of youth while Too Many Ways seeks to undercut such heroes and their aura of heroic competence and comic-book invincibility. The film parodies the group structure of triad movies by portraying a dysfunctional group of has-been guwaak zai. As a parody of the genre, the film successfully subverts the notion of loyalty and hierarchy of the jianghu and the theme of redemption through chivalric behaviour. The hapless heroes are always caught wrong-footed in the rush of events and always trying to make the best of it, with counterproductive results. They retain their postures of wounded dignity even as they suffer the worst of indignities (this is symbolized by Lau Ching-wan eating a pile of dog shit lying on the road in the Taiwan episode — Lau forcing himself to eat shit as an indication of his own sense of pride while his world collapses around him). This theme of wounded pride is continued in the next

80

Director in Action

Milkyway film The Odd One Dies where the young hero (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) could well have come out of the same morass of depression that bogs down Wong Ah Kau and his group of dynsfuctional hoodlums.

Still 3.5 Takeshi Kaneshiro as the young hoodlum-hero of The Odd One Dies

The Odd One Dies: Killer Angels The Odd One Dies is on the surface even more of a Wong Kar-wai imitation than Too Many Ways to Be Number One. The presence of Takeshi Kaneshiro inevitably recalls Fallen Angels and Chungking Express (1994). Kaneshiro himself was reported as saying that his character was “very similar to the character in Fallen Angels”, referring to the fact that Wong’s film had established his screen persona as a likeable roughneck, the mannerisms and characterisation of which he was expected to repeat in The Odd One Dies.11 Visual and aural references

Still 3.6 Carman Lee as the dejected female assassin in The Odd One Dies

Nucleus of the Milky Way

81

to other Wong Kar-wai pictures are scattered throughout the film, for example Xavier Cugat’s “Jungle Drums” theme from Days of Being Wild is heard on the soundtrack, and there is a preponderance of inclining angles, hand-held camera work and elliptical jump cuts in the narrative to suggest more than one Wong Kar-wai picture. To, who directed most of the film, is understandably wary of suggestions that The Odd One Dies resembles Wong’s films.12 It should be acknowledged on the outset that the film is not a pastiche of Wong Kar-wai movies though it would be disingenuous to dismiss entirely Wong’s influence (more about this later). What is important is that Wong’s influence does not entirely lessen the film’s own value as another unique work in the Milkyway cycle about heroes in jeopardy. Indeed, the film exudes the quirky flavour of Too Many Ways and the same heroic conundrum of that picture. Kaneshiro’s character, a petty hoodlum himself, tries to overcome the same economic blues that engulf the petty hoodlums of Too Many Ways.

Still 3.7

The visual style of The Odd One Dies

We first see Kaneshiro in a prologue, out of luck, unable to win any money from mahjong games, and because of this he goes into a rage for which he is beaten up by the head bouncer of the mahjong parlour and thrown out

82

Director in Action

into the streets. Not willing to admit defeat, he doubles back into the parlour — and receives more punishment, an indication of the masculine identity of violence shaping the gender traits of macho “musculinity” that marks the other female hero of the film, played by Carman Lee (more on her shortly).13 He wakes up in a hospital, and on recovery, wriggles a contract killing from a South Asian middleman (a specific hommage to Chungking Express, which portrayed Hong Kong’s South Asian community in various forms of underground occupations based in Tsimshatsui’s Chungking Mansion). Takeshi (the character, being nameless in the film, will be so identified by the actor’s first name) is then brought to meet a gang but the right-hand man named Tony questions his credentials. Piqued, Takeshi attacks Tony with a knife who stops the attack by grabbing the knife with his hand, resulting in the amputation of his fingers. This becomes a running joke in the film as Tony’s fingers are re-attached and severed again in his several encounters with Takeshi where the grabbing of the knife is repeated (cf. the same running joke in The Heroic Trio). The boss is impressed and pays Takeshi a large advance to kill a Thai criminal big shot visiting Hong Kong. Takeshi then gambles with the money in order to get even with the bouncer who had beaten him up. He wins spectacularly and gets his revenge. With his windfall, Takeshi buys his own assassin to carry out the hit. He is directed to an embittered female assassin, Carman Lee, just released from prison. Surprised, Takeshi rejects her at first but then relents after she proves herself by slicing off Tony’s fingers in an exact replay of the earlier scene — only this time, Carman is wielding the knife. Here the scene is a crucial bit of business, inscribing the sensation of “musculinity”, referred to above. While I consider “musculinity” a rather clumsy term in the way that Tasker uses it to suggest how male qualities are written over the female body and at the

Still 3.8 Dies

A mobster’s hand grabs a knife: The Odd One

Nucleus of the Milky Way

83

same time drawing and implying feminist politics into the muscular structure of male heroes, I am evoking the word here because it conveys a visual quality of strength in this scene of Carman doing a virtual copy of Takeshi’s earlier scene with the knife in confronting the Tony character. Carman has to prove that she has the same masculine guts and ruthless ability as Takeshi, and the muscularity to carry it off: she otherwise doesn’t come across as a particularly muscular heroine but she approximates Takeshi’s qualities — which are not particularly muscular either — making them a good match for each other (in this sense, one could also apply “musculinity” to Takeshi to suggest a feminine quality in the male, except that the word is probably inadequate in signifying femininity). Carman slices Tony’s fingers off, whereupon she and Takeshi make their getaway, and end up in a cheap hotel (after trying to check in into a high-class one where they are rebuffed by the manager). There, they seal their partnership after a fashion. Carman, for virtually the rest of the film, reverts back to the manic-depressive state that we first see her in. The Freudian implications of the finger-slicing scene are practically suggestive of Carman’s psycho-pathological disposition — she is perhaps the most psychologically complex of the female characters in the Milkyway productions (perhaps second only to Wu Chien-lien’s female assassin in Beyond Hypothermia: next to her, Carman is of course a soul sister with some differences which I will elaborate below). While “musculinity” as a term is inadequate to convey the deep Freudian femininity of the character which informs her uneasy alliance with Takeshi, it resonates with how the relationship is established and how it unfolds. For example, in the next scene following their night together in the hotel, Carman disappears. Thinking at first that she has run off, Takeshi goes into a flurry but the phone rings, and it is Carman directing him into a mock run of the assassination on the actual site of the hit (the top floor of a skyscraper) to demonstrate that escape is

Still 3.9

Carman on the rooftop

84

Director in Action

virtually impossible. Takeshi is forced to run up to the roof after deliberately creating a disturbance in the restaurant and is chased after by security guards. Up on the roof, Carman is waiting for him, sitting on the edge of the roof as if she’s about to jump, but in fact she is demonstrating that the only way to escape is to jump to the roof of the next building (rooftop scenes will become common in To’s own films, as in Running out of Time and its sequel). To cuts elliptically from the rooftop scene to Carman and Takeshi inside a tram. He completely discards the whole chase narrative between Takeshi and the security guards — an example of the kind of compression or speed that superficially betrays the influence of Wong Kar-wai but in fact foreshadows To’s own tendency to experiment with narrative form and time-sequence in films like The Mission and Throw Down, forgoing whole scenes entirely which in this case would add to the spectacle of action. Thus, To has sacrificed action for narrative, with the effect of adding to Carman’s psychological relationship with Takeshi. Having demonstrated her point, Carman demands more payment and asks Takeshi to make contact with a man named Simon on the pretext of renting a Magnum for her to carry out the assassination. In fact, she has her own agenda to settle scores with Simon, her ex-lover, now a pathological drunk who owns his own bar. Simon gives Takeshi the run-around, gets him drunk and then attempts to rob him. An angry Takeshi decides to cancel the partnership but is touched by Carman’s tearful explanation of her past relationship with Simon, the man who had inducted her at the age of fourteen into a life of professional killing. He had also betrayed her after urging her to kill her own cousin in order to secure money for him to run his own bar. In a perverse way, Carman both loves and hates Simon. She now wants to give him the money from the job as a reminder of how he has tormented her. Disconcerted by her reaction, Takeshi flushes the money down the toilet. Carman later meets Simon in his bar, and fantasizes about shooting him down, but by now his pathetic state induces more pity than vengeance. This theme of love and hate transmutes into a growing love affair between Takeshi and his female assassin. Both protagonists move from a deep spiritual pessimism into a reawakened optimism that they can share a life and brighter future together. But there is the matter of who should carry out the job. In the end, it is Takeshi who accomplishes the killing after tricking Carman into thinking that she will do the job. He escapes to Japan, where he will wait for his new-found love. Consistent with the Milkyway preoccupation with death and existentialism, The Odd One Dies is nominally and thematically imbued with the shadow of the grim reaper, but the title also suggests a gamble and the element of choice in a game dealt by fate. Both the hero and heroine have

Nucleus of the Milky Way

85

a chance for survival and regeneration, and it is their choice to make. As a film about professional killers, the film bears some resemblance to Beyond Hypothermia. However, Takeshi is much less committed than the professional female assassin of Beyond Hypothermia, and Carman is more of an emotional wreck than a cool killer. Both characters are essentially weak heroes and hence more human in their pragmatic responses to the crises in their lives. The fatalistic mood carried over from Beyond Hypothermia is dissipated as The Odd One Dies slides into optimism at the end — it is the only one of the Milkyway productions to end on a happy note. Nevertheless, the tone of the picture for the most part is just as dark and discomforting in the offbeat manner of Too Many Ways. There is the same kind of black humour in the scenes of the mobster Tony whose fingers are repeatedly cut off (his bodyguards’ search for ice cubes to preserve the fingers each time they are amputated is a play on the ice motif in Beyond Hypothermia), and the same kind of incongruous, whimsical comedy in the scenes involving the hotel manager who first rejects Takeshi as a guest in his posh hotel, then gives him a room the second time he tries to check in — the manager’s principled stand and his humanity comes through in spite of his stiff upper lip. There are also whimsical bits of business involving Takeshi and lifts in the film (for example, in the mock run scene at the restaurant) — yet another example of action that recurs in and around lifts in the films of Johnnie To. Because the screenplay was written by Wai Ka-fai, his hand in The Odd One Dies is conspicuous. However, the film is less pointed and bizarre than Too Many Ways and one wonders how it would have turned out had Wai directed it himself. Ultimately, the film remains self-conscious of its influences from Wong Kar-wai, and again, one wonders how much of this could be attributed to Wai, or how much to To himself, or to the nominal director Patrick Yau. The film feels and looks as if its makers had wanted to clone a Wong style onto the standard Milkyway theme about pathological heroes seeking deliverance through violent action. Stylistically, it strives to fuse Wong Kar-wai with Johnnie To, the two most influential directors in the Hong Kong cinema today. Of interest is the passing resemblance to Godard’s Breathless (1959). We might liken Takeshi Kaneshiro to Jean-Paul Belmondo and Carman Lee to Jean Seberg. Godard might well have been a source of inspiration for Johnnie To, but one could also say that any reference to Godard could have come by way of Wong Kar-wai. I would argue that the influence of Wong is more perceptible since the movie is effectively grounded in the Hong Kong context (or perhaps Wong’s influence grounds it into the Hong Kong context). The tragedy and the redemption of the protagonists

86

Director in Action

in The Odd One Dies ultimately depend on this context. The characters are materialistic-minded depressives who reflect the economic condition of Hong Kong, a dynamic city trying to lift itself out of a depression (whereas Godard’s characters seem to me entirely nihilistic). Takeshi is really a conformist who wants the respect of his peers in the underworld, and Carman really wants the affection and love of Simon and then Takeshi. They fall in love out of a shared sense of chivalric virtue inherent in their occupations. It is this reassertion of (some would say regression into) traditional values that confers a more positive and optimistic tone on these fallen heroes, who could well have fitted into the company of Wong’s fallen angels in the film of that name (Fallen Angels is pessimistic by comparison though the Kaneshiro character in that film adheres to the same fundamentally traditionalist values). The film is essentially a postmodern conglomeration of styles and generic concepts from mainstream Hong Kong gangster movies including Wong Karwai’s — concepts such as honour, duty and loyalty, discernible in Beyond Hypothermia and Too Many Ways. On the one hand, such generic principles of the gangster movie render The Odd One Dies a more conventional Hong Kong picture than either the Wong Kar-wai or Godard allusions would suggest. On the other hand, the perceptible Wong Kar-wai influence also points to a definite trend of creative experimentation and craftsmanship in the kind of genre filmmaking that marks the Milkyway project (and on this score, Wong’s influence is benign and much more positive than To would want to acknowledge). As a Milkyway picture, The Odd One Dies is robust and imaginative, instinctively and simultaneously offsetting and complementing its immediate predecessors Beyond Hypothermia and Too Many Ways. All three films were made almost back-to-back and while they are united by the fact that To produced them all, they look different from each other. Though it shares a certain stylistic adventurism with Too Many Ways, The Odd One Dies possesses an emotional warmth that is missing from Wai’s and To’s own works up to now, and while it is tempting to credit this to Patrick Yau (who did say in an interview that The Odd One Dies was the one film he was most involved with of all the films he did with To14 ), it is more likely an indication of To’s multi-faceted broadness than of Yau’s input. Yau will be credited as director on The Longest Nite and Expect the Unexpected but both films are solid To works foreshadowing the manner and the material of the next cycle of To’s films discussed in Chapter 4. The beginning of To’s mature period is perceptible in the next two Milkyway films, where we see more facets of the auteur-inhiding.15

Nucleus of the Milky Way

87

The Longest Nite: Double Trouble The Longest Nite is a milestone in the Milkyway project because it contains those elements of To’s auteurship identifiable through the interplay of the cop and the killer. The film is clearly a product arising from To’s exertion of artistic control over the Milkyway company and its films. The Longest Nite is the progenitor of A Hero Never Dies and Running out of Time insofar as they are all films about doubles, and the latter two of which would be directed by To himself. Its theme of triad conspiracy looks forward to The Mission and the Election films; while the scenes of police brutality are later echoed in PTU. Patrick Yau’s credit as director is redundant. Wai Ka-fai, who co-produced The Longest Nite with To and rewrote the script (without credit), has confirmed that To directed much of the film. 16 In fact, To’s creative association with Wai Ka-fai would become more important as the Milkyway company advanced into its mature phase. To and Wai continued their partnership on Expect the Unexpected, A Hero Never Dies (1998), and Where a Good Man Goes (1999), the last two directed by To. They then went on to co-direct nine other pictures, including Fulltime Killer (2001), to be discussed in Chapter 5. The first tangible sign of To’s auteurship in The Longest Nite is the double theme. The basic premise of doubles (doppelgängers) is to reveal the basic nature of the robber and the cop. According to Leo Braudy, the double is the “most prevalent way of defining human nature” in film.17 For Braudy, there is also a structural underlining of the double which expresses “something of the inner aesthetic of films … a fleeting insubstantiality of the image”, implying that “character itself … is merely a construction”.18 This structural idea of the double is also at the heart of those of To’s films that feature doubles (Loving You, A Hero Never Dies, Running out of Time), and one can certainly see this as a fundamental conceit in Hong Kong’s action movies involving cops and robbers (or cops and hired killers, as in John Woo’s The Killer). To had always been fascinated with the similarity between cops and robbers and the complementarity in their roles in society. One of To’s later musings on the subject was the refrain that “Without the cop, there would be no robber, and without the robber, there would be no cop”.19 To had previously presented his most explicit treatment of the double theme in Loving You, through the opposition between Lau Ching-wan’s cop and the villain played by Tou Chung-hua. The idea there was to muddy the moral line between the cop and the villain, but Loving You was all about the redemption of Lau’s cop, and consequently, the Tou character comes across as an abstract signifier of Lau’s moral decline. In effect, the villain remains symbolic throughout

88

Director in Action

rather than a fully-fledged character. The film finally reaffirms the separation of the identities of the cop and the villain, thus in a way undoing the double theme. The theme is better accomplished in The Longest Nite because both doubles are given substantive roles, equal and complementary parts (played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Lau Ching-wan as the cop and the killer respectively).

Still 3.10 Face to face with his double: Tony Leung and Lau Ching-wan in The Longest Nite

Set in Macau, the film takes place over a hectic day and night and describes the efforts of Leung’s corrupt cop, Sam, to stop assassins from carrying out the assassination of a gang boss named Mr. Lung as he arrives from Hong Kong, and thus to prevent them from claiming the “dark bounty” (the meaning of anhua, the film’s Chinese title) of five million dollars that Lung’s rival, Mr. K (to whom Sam owes allegiance), has apparently put out on the killing. The background of the picture is explained in a prologue, immediately evoking the real-life gang wars that erupted in Macau from 1996 to 1999, the date of Macau’s own handover to China. The wars were waged mainly by two main gangs, the 14 K and Shui Fong (the rival gangs portrayed in the film are a barely disguised reference to these two gangs), to gain control before the handover of the casino business that is the mainstay of Macau’s economy.20 Sam rounds up all would-be assassins who are converging in Macau and ensures that they are incapacitated by breaking their hands. In the midst of this violence, clues emerge to implicate Sam himself as the culprit responsible for issuing the bounty. Sam realises that he is being framed; he becomes the chief suspect for murders that occur around him (the corpse of a headless man is found in his apartment and another corpse is later found in the boot of his car). The frame-up is part of the conspiracy put into operation by Lau Chingwan’s bald-headed professional killer, Tony, who is ostensibly one of the assassins. In fact, he is the instrumental cog in the wheel of the conspiracy masterminded by a senior godfather named Mr. Hung to rub out the two

Nucleus of the Milky Way

89

rival gangs. Tony has already secretly eliminated Mr. K, all along carrying his head in a bag which he deposits inside a locker at the ferry pier. The plan is to frame Sam and force him to carry out the assassination of Mr. Lung as he arrives back in Macau from Hong Kong. Tony is symbolized by a rubber ball which he carries and bounces against the wall in his prison cell (à la Steve McQueen in The Great Escape) after his arrest by Sam that was all part of the plan. Later, when he is beaten up by Sam, he tells him, “We are like bouncing balls; it isn’t up to us to choose where to go or when to stop”. Thus Sam is manipulated into a series of events leading to the inevitable. He goes to the ferry pier, hoping to escape to Hong Kong just as the target arrives, then discovers his boss’s severed head in the locker. Earlier, he had discovered that the body in the boot of his car was that of his boss’s hottempered son. Surrounded by police and trapped into carrying out the assassination, Sam kills Mr. Lung and is himself shot but survives (because he is wearing a bullet-proof vest). He escapes to confront Tony inside an abandoned warehouse stocked with mirrors. He has become the exact double of Tony, complete with shaved head. Sam plans to kill Tony and assume his identity in order to make his getaway from Macau, already pre-arranged. The final shootout, reminiscent of the shootout in the hall of mirrors in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1948), is also the completion of the double theme. The use of mirrors pinpoints the narcissistic element in the double theme. 21 Both Sam and Tony are doubles of each other but there is a metonymic function to this doubling — one man must take the other’s

Still 3.11 The final duel in The Longest Nite , set in a warehouse of mirrors

90

Director in Action

identity by shooting at and shattering the mirror-image of his double. For Sam, shooting at his double and replacing him is tantamount to a pathological realization of his real self, the killer. The narcissistic element of doubling “guards against death”, as Yvonne Tasker has remarked on the subject, invoking Freud’s concept of the uncanny.22 However, the narcissistic self is rarely put in positive light, much less when it is an uncanny effect of doubling. “Though the double may begin as a narcissistic assertion of self, it is ultimately through repression, transformed into a site of negative qualities”.23 Ultimately, the negativity of the narcissistic self overrides the psychological guarding against death. One of the essential features of the double motif, as Otto Rank points out, is “the impulse to rid oneself of the uncanny opponent in a violent manner”.24 The whole film is fundamentally a description of Sam’s impulse to slay his double, which is “really a suicidal act”, as Rank informs us,25 since “the life of the double is linked quite closely to that of the individual himself”.26 What underpins the accomplishment of the double theme is the straightout portrayal by Leung as an irredeemably bad and utterly corrupt cop. The character himself owns up to being a bad cop (“You can always buy me with money”, he says). Sam is not only a cop on the take, he is also a member of a triad society and thus beholden to the rules and engagements of the jianghu. He is not the kind of hero we expect to find in an average cops-and-robbers thriller or in the triad-gangster mythology. In fact, he is probably To’s most psychopathological character, going about the job of incapacitating the assassins with sadistic relish (breaking hands, pulling nails) — and it is his capacity for the sort of violence that we usually associate with the bad guys that marks the first half of the film. There is an element of subversion in Tony Leung’s portrayal of the cop as the bad guy. His casting against type was obviously a ploy to dash the expectation that his character would naturally be the hero. Leung’s cop is contrasted with Lau Ching-wan’s calculatedly cool killer, who at first seems like a figure the audience could empathize with. In prison, Sam beats Tony up with a stick. Sam appears more and more like a wounded bull; we decry the corruption and the brutality of the police and our hearts go out to Tony. However, as the conspiracy becomes clearer and Tony takes on a darker hue, we recognize him for the vicious killer that he is. Our sympathies then shift to Sam as he then becomes the victim; but by then the film has succeeded in shifting and muddling our notions of good and evil characters. The end result of the double theme is to satisfy the conceit that the cop and the killer are morally and physically one and the same. Rene Girard speaks of “the monstrous double”, making the point that there is “no

Nucleus of the Milky Way

91

double who does not yield a monstrous aspect upon close scrutiny”, and that “the double and the monster are one and the same being”: “doubles are always monstrous, and duality is always an attribute of monsters”.27 Violence is the instrument that intertwines the monstrous double. It is the Destiny-machine in this instance: “the divine force that everyone tries to use for his own purposes and that ends by using everyone for its own”.28

Still 3.12 Lau Ching-wan as the “monstrous double” in The Longest Nite

The second tangible sign of To’s auteurship is the idea of the game which augments the double theme. Tony seems to be playing a zero-sum game with Sam. The motif of the game is certainly apparent in Loving You in the relationship between Lau Ching-wan and Tou Chung-hua, and it is also apparent in The Odd One Dies in the scene of Carman Lee forcing Takeshi Kaneshiro to run through a mock assassination in order to find an exit route. In The Longest Nite, the game is combined with role-playing. Tony is performing a role in a show stage-managed by the triad grandee Mr. Hung, and Sam grudgingly plays his role as the anointed killer when, from the perspective of Mr. Hung, he has no other role to play. Sam and Tony are the principal protagonists of the show, but there are other players, such as the bar girl Maggie (played by Maggie Shiu) who gives Sam away at the ferry pier. Maggie plays the part of a traveller who chances upon Sam, her real role being to force him to carry out the assassination and to give him the directions of his escape route. The game and the role playing will be further developed in A Hero Never Dies and Running out of Time, films which therefore form an unofficial trilogy with The Longest Nite. The Longest Nite is a dry run for A Hero Never Dies and Running out of Time, where arguably, the theme of the double and the motif of the game reaches its apogee. Of the trilogy, The Longest Nite has the most elaborate plot, one that hinges on coincidences. In writing the scripts, writers Yau Nai-hoi and Szeto Kam-yuen (they also wrote Expect the Unexpected and A Hero Never Dies

92

Director in Action

together) could well have in mind the popular Chinese saying, “Without coincidences there would be no stories”, equally true not only of The Longest Nite but of the subsequent films that define To’s own directing work (PTU, Breaking News). A motif of coincidence is also at work in Too Many Ways to Be Number One, in the Taiwan episode where Lau Ching-wan and Francis Ng carry out their bumbled assassination and Carman Lee’s massage girl happens to arrive on the scene. In The Longest Nite, a complex network of coincidences supports the game motif itself. The outcome of the film is dependent on Sam’s discovery of coincidental occurrences as well as the choices he makes. Though the outcome may be a bit too pat, the plot is fundamentally sound and very clever, if perhaps too clever for its own good — and one could say the same of the plots of Beyond Hypothermia, The Odd One Dies and Too Many Ways to Be Number One. The Longest Nite therefore shares with these Milkyway productions the feature of complex narratives and complicated plots (though, it must be said, Beyond Hypothermia, written by Szeto Kam-yuen, is the least complicated of the films discussed here — a sign that it is somewhat less of a Milkyway film than the others). This is a crucial difference between To’s own films and the Milkyway productions that carry the credits of other directors. To’s own films on the whole have simpler narratives, and Yau Nai-hoi wrote most of them (often in collaboration with other writers). One can possibly conclude from this that To did allow his protégés leeway to tell the stories and to brandish their own styles despite his “creative” interference. The picture finally belongs to Johnnie To in the moral end-game and political implications of the double theme. There is the near-religious devotion to fatalism that marks To’s action films. Although To claims that there’s no heavy message in the movie,29 the feeling of fatalism tied to the idea of the “dark bounty” carries a political criticism targeting the jianghu, a trope indicating the political association between the secretive world of the triad and the secretive world of the Chinese government, both naturally prone to conspiracies. The extra-textual references to the political debate about the 1997 handover and the anxieties of the populations of Hong Kong and Macau are highly palpable. Macau’s own handover to China would not take place until 1999, but the anxieties over Hong Kong’s reunification with China were certainly rolled over to Macau, and these anxieties at the time were exacerbated by the widespread feeling of insecurity as a result of the gang wars. The doubles are wiped out as a result of the machinations of a grandee who represents the political power ruling over the jianghu in both Macau and Hong Kong (doubles in real life as both would be taken over by China, the political grandee in real life).

Nucleus of the Milky Way

93

Fatalism emits the message of acceptance of one’s just deserts. In this respect The Longest Nite is a highly moral tale. Otherwise, its political message would be construed as rather cynical. The grandee Mr. Hung (seen only briefly at the beginning and at the end of the film) is the ultimate winner of the game. With the rival bosses wiped out, peace will now reign and the objective of violence is to gain peace not only for the triads but for the community as a whole. Somehow, the violence, which is the most extreme in To’s cinema since The Big Heat, and which will be topped in Election 2 (a film that resembles The Longest Nite in more ways than one), helps to reinforce the morality of the tale. The violence, qualified by fatalism, determines a just end or punishment for those who perpetrate and beget violence. Both the bosses of the rival gangs and the two lead protagonists get their moral comeuppance (just as he beheaded his victim, Tony is himself beheaded, and Sam is betrayed and shot by the very same criminal organisation that he had defended and protected). Thus the ending, without smacking of moral censorship (the feeling that bad guys shouldn’t be seen to get away with their misdeeds), is a neat encapsulation of fatalism and very appropriate to the film.

Expect the Unexpected: Love and Bullets Perhaps the first hint of the unexpected in Expect the Unexpected is the way the film opens with a shot of a restaurant and a woman cleaning the window, followed by a shot of rain falling down on the roof of a car, intimating the premise of a romance conceit intermixed with the fatalistic death theme that we have got used to from Beyond Hypothermia to The Longest Nite. It might seem that the film’s soft romantic core would be at odds with its hard action core, oscillating as it does between scenes of drama and comedy, action and romance, melodrama and tragedy. That this formula seems to work in a strange and unconventional way is a sign of the creative teaming of To, Wai Ka-fai and Patrick Yau. Wai was co-producer with To on this project, and Yau once again received the director’s credit although he could only have directed it with deference to To. Ultimately, the film is another milestone in To’s journey to auteur land. His auteurship is not a matter of doubt since if the film now looks and feels more familiar to us, it is because of obvious linkages with PTU and Breaking News such that all three films form another unofficial trilogy. All three films present police squads in clashes with groups of robbers and gangsters not necessarily linked to each other. The chief protagonists of Expect the Unexpected are the members of a squad

94

Director in Action

in the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau (OCTB) of the Hong Kong Police Force. Their antagonists are two gangs, unconnected with each other but brought together entirely by coincidence. The first gang enters the restaurant which we see in the opening shot where they order drinks, behave boisterously and make lewd suggestions to the female attendant, Mandy (Yoyo Mung). One of their company is sleeping inside an apartment building nearby (this gang breaks into apartments and holds the women captive, raping and killing them). The action in the first half-hour of the film takes place in and outside this apartment block and around the café located in Kiu Kiang Street, northern Kowloon in the Cheung Sha Wan district.30 One of the factors that link Expect the Unexpected with PTU and Breaking News is the supposed Kowloon locations in which all three films take place. However, as I will demonstrate in my discussion of PTU in the next chapter, the Kowloon that is depicted is more a mythic space, an abstract Kowloon, than one based on real geography. The members of the first gang witness the robbery of a jewellery shop carried out by a second gang of three Mainlanders. The robbery is botched and during the escape, one of the robbers strays inside the apartment block which is then surrounded by police. Thus the action that occurs relies on the motif of coincidence — the first gang simply being in the vicinity where the second gang stages the robbery. The first gang then alerts by means of mobile phones their colleague inside the apartment who then blasts his way out; he is wounded and captured by the police who are in fact looking for the Mainland robber (later found hiding on top of the lift: here again the lift, the housing estate, the streets, are an integral part of To’s infrastructure of violent action). As he is carried out, the wounded fugitive of the first gang is rescued by his colleagues in a bold, head-on attack of the police (which To repeats in a more elaborate fashion in the opening sequence of Breaking News shot in one long extended take). The rest of the film is about the efforts of the OCTB squad to find and capture these two gangs.

Still 3.13 A minor explosion in an apartment, from a scene in Expect the Unexpected

Nucleus of the Milky Way

95

Running parallel with the narrative concerning the search for the violent outlaws is the romantic aspect of the picture. This centres on Mandy, the young waitress in the restaurant. Mandy appears to have an old schoolgirl crush on Ken (Simon Yam), the leader of the squad, whom she first sees on the TV news and remembers from the time he and his colleague Sam (Lau Chingwan) had given a talk in her school. Mandy then meets Ken and Sam when she gives an eyewitness account of the incident in the police station. In their encounters, Sam begins to think that Mandy is in love with Ken and tries to bring them together by using a wallet Mandy had left behind in the station and he had found and returned. He then asks her for this wallet which he gives to Ken to return so that he can have a date with Mandy, but in fact Mandy really loves Sam, and we learn this from more side business involving a key purse. Mandy leaves behind the purse containing the keys to her apartment in Sam’s car. He misses the purse until she calls him and tells him to return it (a similar key purse is later found in the car of the gang of serial rapists after they have been waylaid and killed, leading Sam to rush to Mandy’s apartment, believing the worst). Meanwhile, Sam also thinks that his female colleague Macy (Ruby Wong) is in love with Ken but it turns out that she only respects and admires him and is really in love with Jimmy (Raymond Wong), the junior member of the unit and a ladies’ man. All in all, the romance plot relies on the motif of misunderstanding and false conclusions while the action component relies on that of coincidence and chance encounters. The interaction of both motifs brings about a theme of opportunity — the opportunity of finding love that the hurly-burly of life in the police force usually denies the protagonists (the theme of Loving You). Because fatalism is such an overriding theme in the Milkyway pictures as a whole, the film seems to say that the opportunity to love should be grasped when it comes along before it is too late; the element of danger and death in the life of a cop renders love all the more precious. “You must master every second and every minute of your life because you never know what will happen tomorrow”, To says.31 In Loving You, Lau Ching-wan finds love and redemption only after he has returned from the dead as it were (he survives after being shot in the head). In The Odd One Dies, the opportunity to love was given to Takeshi Kaneshiro and Carman Lee after both take on the job of a contract killing. In their case, fatalism was put in abeyance, so to speak, and the lovers could live. In Expect the Unexpected, all the protagonists die in a shootout (between the OCTB squad and the two remaining fugitives of the Mainland gang) that recalls the final shootout in Beyond Hypothermia and in fact repeats the tragic ending of To’s martial arts picture The Bare-Footed

96

Director in Action

Kid (1993) where all the protagonists die except the female lead played by Maggie Cheung (similarly here, the only survivor of the main cast is the female lead). Such wholesale slaughter is therefore recurrent in the cinema of Johnnie To, the message being that if the opportunity to love is not grasped, it is lost forever. In Beyond Hypothermia, it could be argued that death did not seem meaningless as it reaffirmed the love encounter between Wu Chien-lien and Lau Ching-wan. Both protagonists were at least given the privilege of dying together as one lover tried to save the other. However, the deaths in Expect the Unexpected of virtually the entire corps of protagonists and antagonists (“the good and the bad and the worst and the best”, to use the words of Edgar Allan Poe from his poem “The City in the Sea”) is nihilistic in its impact, cancelling out love and life. For once, fatalism in a Milkyway picture delivers a counterproductive punch. The ending of course can be criticised for being too negative and To showed that he was well aware of this charge, by reacting to it.32 He took care in his forthcoming films to correct the negative implications arising from the ending of Expect the Unexpected. Both PTU (2003) and Breaking News (2004) can be seen as responses to Expect the Unexpected, which effectively makes it the first work in a police trilogy. PTU has a relatively happy ending in which all the cops survive after a massive shootout with various gangs converging at the fateful site totally by coincidence. Likewise, the ending of Breaking News sees the survival of the cops. Breaking News is also about the perceived incompetence of the police in dealing with violent gangs and the force’s attempts to redress the negative image and publicity in the media by manipulating the media itself. To defended Expect the Unexpected by explaining that the film is about the impermanence of life (rensheng wuchang) rather than fatalism (suming lun).33 The idea of impermanence (wuchang) stresses the “unexpected” nature of events and the change and variability of life. Structurally, Expect the Unexpected incorporates this thought by being a disarming film. For example, the heroes are some of the most light-hearted in To’s cinema, certainly his least pathological. They are self-interested and obsessed with the pursuit of personal happiness and this blithe spirit infuses their duties — Lau Ching-wan’s character, in particular, is a far cry from his tough cop image in Loving You (no bullet in the head needed to soften him up, but lest anyone misses the association with his character in Loving You, there is a scene of Lau in hospital waiting upon news of a wounded colleague, while playfully sitting in a wheelchair, that recalls the closing scenes in that earlier film). The cops hardly seem fazed by oncoming dangers or the real prospect of death or indeed by the scenes of death and violence that is a part of their

Nucleus of the Milky Way

97

lifestyles. In a brief but revealing scene, a baby discovered dead, bundled inside a washing machine (the handiwork of the gang that assaults and rapes women in apartments), by Ruby Wong’s character barely elicits an emotional response from her — this in contrast with the devastation felt by Anita Mui in The Heroic Trio and by Ruby Wong in Lifeline over the deaths of babies. In other instances, however, Wong does react strongly when her colleague Jimmy — the man she secretly desires — is wounded, and to the increasing body count exacted on the police by the gang of loathsome rapists, but she soon falls into the pattern of blithe-spiritedness that imbues the squad. The light romantic currents in Loving You and Lifeline flow into Expect the Unexpected in a major way. On an aesthetic level, this creates a certain tension with the action tone of the film — the result of the discrepancy between genres but possibly of a division of work between Yau and To. Yau has acknowledged being more personally involved with the romance, pointing out that he was influenced by Japanese soap opera, hugely popular on Hong Kong television.34 This soap-operatic romanticism is qualitatively different from the macho romanticism in To’s own work (cf. the A Moment of Romance trilogy, Loving You, Where a Good Man Goes). The Japanese cultural influence might have inadvertently caused the unbalancing, to some extent, of the film between its romantic and action aspects. Another Japanese influence, that of Akira Kurosawa, has a formalistic application, channelled evidently through To, who has paid stated tributes to the master in The Mission and Throw Down (2004). Kurosawa’s influence is evoked by To through the use of rain as the chief textural motif in many films, as if he wanted to reinforce Gilles Deleuze’s claim that “Kurosawa is one of the greatest filmmakers of rain”35 (other signs of Kurosawa’s influence will be discussed in the next chapter in the segment on The Mission). Fountains of water pour down as rain in the climactic action sequences of The Heroic Trio and Executioners. Rain falls in key dramatic sequences in Loving You (Lau Ching-wan’s clash with Tou Chung-hua where Lau is shot in the head) and Lifeline (Ruby Wong’s rescue of the baby). Rain features in the climax of The Longest Nite; but Expect the Unexpected is awash with rain throughout the film. What is the significance of this pervasive rainfall? If it is to provide texture, the romantic sequences might just as well benefit from more sunshine and no rain at all. The rain is so dominant that no one can possibly miss it, and at least one critic has devoted a whole article about the film’s consciousness of rain, making the perceptive point that the rain symbolizes an “expectation of death”.36 The prevalence of rain at the climatic slaughter also signifies the universality of death. Thus, in the end, like the wheel of fate that the film itself is designed to turn, the symbolic matter of the rain returns us to death

98

Director in Action

and the thought of impermanence (wuchang also signifies the Messenger of Death). The title of the film warns the audience to expect death, the unexpected. It is the most fatalistic of the Milkyway pictures, although To insisted that the intent of this fatalism was to emit the message that “life is important”.37

Still 3.14

The fatalistic end of Expect the Unexpected

The overwhelming fatalism at the end of the picture and the theme of impermanence sums up the phase of the Milkyway enterprise in which To supervised rather than directed the productions. This chapter accordingly fades out under the shadow of the very grim reaper. Fatalism itself, in the form of an obsession and an expectation of death, will continue to resonate in the films that will be the subject of the next chapter.

Conclusion The Milkyway films constitute an extraordinary outburst of creative filmmaking in the years 1996–1998 — the period of the immediate run-up to and after the 1997 handover. They are all the more outstanding in that they were made in a spirit of creative freedom and apparently not much constraint over market considerations — a case where having a producer who is himself a director certainly throws the balance in favour of creativity. To be sure, the objective of the Milkyway Company was to make commercial films as part of a wider mission to alleviate the slump in the film industry, but the films were box-office failures. In retrospect, they look more and more like arthouse pictures and less convincing as commercial products. The Asian financial crisis, which broke out immediately after the handover, would cause Hong Kong to fall into an even greater depression. Part of the critical worth of the Milkyway films lies in their commensurability with the downcast spirit of this period in Hong Kong history (perhaps the reason for their commercial

Nucleus of the Milky Way

99

failure). They reflect the uncertainty of the times but in the same breadth, they demonstrate a pertinacity of human endeavour in the way the protagonists resist the ill fortune delivered by the times, or by fate. The theme of fatalism, impermanence and death is overpowering in a pre-possessive super-egoistic fashion. There is thus a didactic quality about the theme that sets it apart, as if the filmmakers are trying to make a point about the quintessence of existence and impermanence, and we can roughly define this didacticism as a morality of death. The films cohere around the end-point of death no doubt as a sign of the characters’ submission to providence or the Destiny-machine, but the complexities and sheer energy of their narratives indicate the presence of other texts, denoting other forms of final submissions — to the ideal of love (Beyond Hypothermia, Too Many Ways to Be Number One, The Odd One Dies, Expect the Unexpected ) or to the corruptive power of cynicism ( Too Many Ways to Be Number One, The Longest Nite), with death figuring either as retributive justice or redemptive deliverance, depending on the nature of the protagonists. Violence is a prerequisite of the theme but whereas To’s films in the previous chapter denote a mythical, divine sort of violence where the characters survive in often miraculous terms or have god-like powers that deny death, the violence in the Milkyway films are theatrical, often absurd, senseless, and inevitably tragic. So tragic that in some sense, films like Beyond Hypothermia and Expect the Unexpected have a tone of condolence at the end, advising the audience to restrain grief and accept the hand that destiny has dealt. The Milkyway films contain strong story lines and ingenious plots (the exemplary works are Too Many Ways to Be Number One, The Odd One Dies, and The Longest Nite). The narratives are cleverly told, evincing a delight in the art of telling stories, suggesting that the role of Wai Ka-fai, To’s main partner in the Milkyway enterprise and a scriptwriter by training, was crucial (the input of other writers such as Yau Nai-hoi and Szeto Kam-yuen should also be acknowledged). However, the Milkyway films are evidently put together by the team work of producer and director and a company of writers, albeit with To, the producer predominant. There is an amazing unity of ideas and themes that bind the five films in this chapter into a closely knitted pentalogy even as the styles show differences from one film to the other. While their directors cannot be ignored, the final praise must go to Johnnie To as the common bonding factor of these films. Without To the films might never have been made and all the directors to whom To gave their opportunities might not have had their chances to direct. One could say that To was directing the directors, an absurd or even radical proposition if we ignore the fact that To himself is a director, and that

100

Director in Action

part of his function as a producer included the artistic direction of his films — a vagary thrown up by the Hong Kong system of film production but hardly unique to Hong Kong. As I have noted elsewhere, the idea of the creative producer is consistent with the old-style Hollywood system on which the Hong Kong film industry was modelled (Hollywood producers who have taken on functions of the auteur include David O. Selznick and Val Lewton — and here the word “author function” might be instructive if we apply it to producers who possess the ego of the director; I am on the other hand, applying it to To, a director who possesses the ego of the producer). Before the Milkyway films, To was known mostly as a director of highly commercial fare and he had not yet made a breakthrough film that would confer on him the status of auteur. The Milkyway films earned him his greatest critical acclaim thus far but, ironically, he was credited on these films as producer. Following the critical recognition they generated, To himself increasingly took to centre stage to re-claim his role as the true director of the films that he and Milkyway would produce — and thus he embarked on the next stage of his career that formalizes his status as auteur.

Directed by Johnnie To

101

4 Directed by Johnnie To

Coming Out The year 1999 saw a retrospective dedicated to Johnnie To organized by the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the first such retrospective on To, and the first official recognition of To as a major filmmaker in the contemporary Hong Kong cinema. The focus of the retrospective was on the Milkyway films where his credit of producer did not prevent critics from identifying him as the real auteur of these films. As critical acclaim began to flow his way, To put off any pretence of letting others direct his films or to bestow the director’s credit on younger protégés (though he would continue to co-direct films with Wai Ka-fai and to work with an “associate director”). The five films in this chapter A Hero Never Dies, Running out of Time, The Mission, PTU, and Breaking News all carry To’s solo credit as director. They represent To’s “coming out” as auteur. This cluster of five films overlaps with the Milkyway pentad of the last chapter. A Hero Never Dies was conceived and shot before The Longest Nite and Expect the Unexpected but was the last to be released, in 1998.1 It heads the discussion in this chapter for the reason that it marks the phase in the Milkyway company where the credit “Directed by Johnnie To” re-appears after a brief period in which To functioned as the chief executive overseeing the production of Milkyway’s films rather than merely directing the films. Running out of Time and The Mission were both released in 1999 in the wake of the HKIFF tribute, and both films had the effect of confirming To’s newly found status as a stand-alone auteur. These two films are essentially To’s breakthrough films, and they would also be recognized by the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2000, winning for To the Best Director Award (for The

102

Director in Action

Mission), and Andy Lau the Best Actor Award (for Running out of Time). PTU and Breaking News, released in 2003 and 2004 respectively, are mature examples of To’s work in the genre and they show a tendency towards formalism — a sign that To was taking his status as auteur much more seriously than he probably did in his Milkyway phase or in his early period as a director. In 2000, To was involved in the founding of a new company named 100 Years of Cinema under the flagship of China Star, a major production company with Mainland connections. The new company was another attempt to rally the forces of the Hong Kong cinema (among other directors also involved were Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, Gordon Chan, and Fruit Chan) in an effort to level out the crisis in the industry and to “establish a new order and foundation with new opportunities appearing before us”.2 Although the new company was not spectacularly successful in its objective to rejuvenate the industry, To was nevertheless regarded as an important, respectable figure capable of turning things around and was accordingly entrusted with executive and creative responsibilities. Milkyway would continue to exist and To would continue to make films under its independent logo. From 2000 to 2004, To made many other films of different genres departing from the mode and manner of the action picture genre. These “other films” will be discussed separately in the next chapter as befitting To’s prolific record that demands at least a chapter devoted to his miscellaneous works in the non-action field. He would also make other action films, such as Fulltime Killer and Running out of Time 2, both released in 2002. Running out of Time 2 is discussed in this chapter as it is obviously a sequel to Running out of Time, but Fulltime Killer will be treated in the next chapter. There are also films more difficult to classify, such as Where a Good Man Goes (1999) and Running on Karma (2003). I will put off discussing Running on Karma for the next chapter, but Where a Good Man Goes merits a brief assessment here, as a prologue to the critical investigation of the five films selected for discussion. Where a Good Man Goes was granted the honour of opening the HKIFF in 1999 at the time of the tribute to To, and it is an interesting study on the softening of the macho hero as personified by To’s favourite actor Lau Chingwan, coming on the heels of the Milkyway films featuring Lau in the toughest of his tough-guy roles, The Longest Nite and A Hero Never Dies. Lau plays a highly volatile and edgy character, an ex-con just released from the Macau prison, who goes to stay in a hotel run by a widow with a young son (played by Ruby Wong, a member of To’s repertory company of favourite actors) and is gradually humbled and humanized by his contact with the woman. Hounded by a Javert-like cop much too eager to put him back in prison (Lam Suet, coming across like an Oriental Charles Laughton), Lau’s character

Directed by Johnnie To

103

traverses the usual path of anger and violence that a hero of his type is expected to go through but is finally delivered his emotional comeuppance by the widow. He goes back to prison and she waits faithfully for him until his release. Though female action figures are certainly not lacking in To’s action cinema (The Heroic Trio, Lifeline, Beyond Hypothermia, The Odd One Dies, Expect the Unexpected), To’s films have on the whole concentrated on the male expression of heroism as an innate characteristic of the action film. With the exception of The Heroic Trio, the female hero is in the main subsidiary to the male in To’s action cinema — and this is true in Where a Good Man Goes which is intrinsically a melodrama where the female hero appears in the more traditional house-wifely role, creating a friction between her role and that of the male hero. The melodrama intrudes into the action genre and its feminine qualities triumph over the masculine instincts of action: the woman redeems the male by domesticating him and freeing him from his obsessions and violence. Where a good man goes is home. Such a theme is present in Loving You, Too Many Ways to Be Number One, The Odd One Dies (in all three films, the redemptive female is personified by Carman Lee). In the majority of To’s pictures, the male protagonist is the consistent model and reference point of heroic fatalism. Where a Good Man Goes breaks with the theme of fatalism by reverting to the melodramatic line of All About Ah Long: its Chinese title Zaijian A Lang, meaning “Seeing Ah Long Again”, consciously evokes this early work from To’s late 1980s period. The Ah Long stereotype as interpreted by Chow Yun-fat in the earlier film denotes a rough and uncouth man given to emotionalism (Chow manifests in his character certain feminine characteristics of the melodrama; it is the female character, played by Sylvia Chang, who remains mostly cool), but as Lau Ching-wan interprets him, it looks as if he could have drifted in from the set of The Longest Nite (both films are set in Macau) and from A Hero Never Dies, which was in fact made and released prior to Where a Good Man Goes. Thus Where a Good Man Goes is another indicator of To’s paradoxical enunciating role of masculine identity in his action cinema. While To himself acknowledges that he sees the world of the action hero totally from the male perspective,3 the female protagonist in Where a Good Man Goes functions as the human bearer of his enunciating vision — the female as calibrator of the male pre-eminence in his cinema, beginning at this stage of his career with A Hero Never Dies which is a near-classic treatment by To of the philosophy of the male hero and the female’s redemptive role in his predestined life of heroic fatalism. When we get to Breaking News, To will have evolved his view of women as he progressed from one film to the next in this pentad, such that finally, at the end of Breaking News, the female protagonist (Kelly Chen) plays

104

Director in Action

the role of the hero — an illustration that To’s heroic worldview is far from rigid, it being subject to the idea of impermanence, rather like his career itself.

A Hero Never Dies: Revenge of the Hired Hands While A Hero Never Dies is certainly fatalistic, we sense not a kind of providential fatalism at work but rather a fatalism determined by the codes of behaviour in the jianghu world of professional killers. Like the Gestalt invoked by Jameson to indicate a frame or “an overall organizational category within which the various empirical innerworldly phenomena are perceived and the various innerworldly experiences take place”,4 the jianghu is the inner world of the gangster which operates with its own law. Heroic fatalism in the jianghu is determined by the vagaries of human behaviour — treachery and betrayal, loyalty and faithfulness. The heroic fatalism of A Hero Never Dies is modulated by the belief of deliverance through rightful violence. In the film, both heroes are wounded, one fatally, and they are unable to act as agents of deliverance for a time until they recover (the fact that one hero dies is not an impediment in the final act of deliverance — and this is the meaning of the film’s title). Both heroes are helped on the road of recovery by their girlfriends (Yoyo Mung and Fiona Leung), and in this sense, deliverance is symbolized by the female presence in the film. Since the men are already marked by heroic fatalism, death is a prerequisite, which makes the theme of deliverance all the more fascinating. From the Milkyway films, we have seen that the heroes are killed off quite mercilessly. The exceptions are Lau Ching-wan’s hapless hero in the Taiwan episode of Too Many Ways to Be Number One and the couple of The Odd One Dies: Lau is shot in the head but survives, winning glory for himself and his gang, while Takeshi escapes his fate and supposedly goes on to live happily ever after with Carman. The heroes of A Hero Never Dies gain a reprieve from death — and it is their women who gain them this reprieve — only to do what they have to do to fulfil their fatalistic desire to die with honour. The plot of the film is simple. Two professional killers Jack (Leon Lai) and Martin (Lau Ching-wan) shoot each other down in Thailand during a duel while the former defends his triad master Yam (Yam Sai-koon). Both men are severely wounded; they then discover they were betrayed by their respective bosses who had been engaged in a gang war but had then patched up their differences at the insistence of their Thai overlord. Jack and Martin are nursed back to health by their girlfriends. Yoyo saves Jack from a pack of assassins while he is in hospital but she suffers burns which destroy her looks.

Directed by Johnnie To

105

Fiona prostitutes herself in order to bring Martin, both his legs amputated, back home to Hong Kong (Lau Ching-wan again in the pathological mode of the crippled hero on a wheelchair: cf. Loving You and Too Many Ways to Be Number One). She demands recompense for Martin from his ex-boss Fong (Fong Ping) who responds by killing her. Martin recovers and takes his revenge by assassinating Fong — his first attempt fails and he is injured. He dies before he can carry out his second attempt. Jack returns to Hong Kong and in a last shootout, during which he wheels in Martin’s corpse as his partner in vengeance, kills the bosses and their entire corps of bodyguards. First off, there are certain similarities with the plot of The Longest Nite which also deals with a gang war and a duo of assassins. As already mentioned, A Hero Never Dies was conceived and shot before The Longest Nite and if we stick to the original time-line of the genesis of both films, the latter is in fact a much more intricate variation of the former. However, as the first film in this chapter, it compels us to see A Hero Never Dies as a latter reflection of The Longest Nite, and from this retrospective point of view, we note that the plot of A Hero Never Dies is much more reductionist. It proceeds from a gang war and becomes a simple revenge tale. The plot of The Longest Nite proceeds from a gang war and turns into an elaborate conspiracy in which two assassins try to assume the identity of the other. The double theme, so prominent in The Longest Nite, is not as developed or as fully realized here. Jack and Martin are more like rivals rather than doubles but there is definitely an element of doubling in the mise-en-scène, which I will come to later. At this point, Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry is more pertinent. Pairs or doubles (the subject and the model) begin as friends, with the subject admiring the model and wanting to be like him or her. As the subject begins to desire what the model desires, conflict begins as the model seeks to remove himself from the relationship. They fall out and rivalry escalates. In this way, “violence becomes simultaneously the instrument, object, and all-inclusive subject of desire”.5 In To’s films about rivalry between doubles (here and in Running out of Time), the reverse seems to occur, i.e. two men start out as rivals and in the rivalry process achieves a kind of bonding. But in both Girard and To, there is the common theme of mimetic violence between doubles, with one seeking to outdo the other. “When all differences have been eliminated and the similarity between two figures has been achieved, we say that the antagonists are doubles,” writes Girard.6 Girard is more concerned with the idea of violence as a sacrificial substitution: a means to control violence in a ritualistic fashion in order that society may be governed harmoniously. In A Hero Never Dies, the violence between doubles is ritualistic, underwritten by codes in the moral grid of the

106

Director in Action

jianghu: loyalty, righteousness, and justice, all of which we may summarize in the one word of yi. This constitutes a throwback to the “hero movies” of the late 1980s which the film’s title deliberately evokes. A Hero Never Dies could be To’s tribute to John Woo, but its immediate aim is a bit more modest, which is to reflect on the fatalistic hero as portrayed within the canon of the Milkyway films and To’s action cinema. In its own right, it is a tribute to the hero as one who is conscious of his or her own fatalism (what I have called heroic fatalism) as opposed to the hero whose destiny is invariably affected by fatalism (what I would call mechanical fatalism in the sense of a mechanical wheel of fate, worked out in a series of events flowing one from another, that eventually catches up with the hero: in fact the very image of the Destiny-machine). The majority of To’s heroes are ruled by mechanical fatalism, but in at least a couple of instances, in Beyond Hypothermia and Too Many Ways to Be Number One, we see cases of heroic fatalism. Wu Chienlien’s female assassin in Beyond Hypothermia is the model of heroic fatalism that is duplicated in the persons of the professional killers Jack and Martin. In Too Many Ways, Lau Ching-wan’s hero is conscious of his fatalism through the fortune-teller who gives him two variations of his destiny. A fortune-teller also appears in the beginning of A Hero Never Dies but the heroes already know their destiny. A Hero Never Dies is an expansion of the heroic fatalism displayed in these two films. In To’s hands, the concept of heroic fatalism takes on a more definite edge while the heroes of the previous two Milkyway films may be fatalistic heroes but we sense that they are also pulled along by the mechanical wheel of the Destiny-machine. Unlike Wu Chien-lien who agonizes over her identity, attempting to wind back her fate but nevertheless unable to do so and therefore accepting it, Jack and Martin are self-assured to the point of supernaturalism. Their selfassurance is as a natural outgrowth of their heroic fatalism. In short, the heroes themselves will determine their road to fatalism. When the fortune-teller in Thailand tells the triad boss Yam and his chief bodyguard Jack that their odds of survival are not good unless they do as he says, Jack indignantly points his gun at the fortune-teller and asks him to predict whether or not he will shoot. The old man replies “No”, whereby Jack fires a bullet into his foot and delivers the punch-line “God is the man with the gun”. This scene is effectively “doubled” later when Martin, in order to get information about Yam’s whereabouts, sees the same fortune-teller who now comes out with his foot bandaged. Martin instinctively recognizes Jack’s signature, and, while trying to control his laughter, he too points his gun at the fortune-teller and asks him to predict whether or not he will shoot. The old man replies “Yes” and Martin fires a bullet into his other foot.

Directed by Johnnie To

107

This doubling effect aligns Martin with Jack in an unwritten code of heroic fatalism conjugating them in a mimetic form of rivalry that is deadly yet bonding at the same time. “They seem like friends,” Jack’s girlfriend Yoyo says to Fiona, Martin’s girl. Fiona replies, “That’s how they are — they are friendlier to each other than to their women.” According to the code, both men are set upon to kill each other, their confrontation theatricalized and formalized in the scene where each man drives a car pass one another down the same street, eyeballing the other like gunfighters. Martin even wears a cowboy hat as if to emphasize the connection with the Western (and in fact, the cars and the setting convey the essence of the urban Western); but the Western convention is subjected to To’s enunciation. The heroes ram their cars against each other repeatedly in front of their favourite bar and when the engines are completely down, they get out. But they don’t start shooting at each other. Instead they amble into the bar where they engage in a different kind of combat — breaking each other’s glasses of wine with coins (American coins, naturally, in keeping with the Western theme). The code of heroic

Still 4.1 wine

The duel in the bar with coins and glasses of

108

Director in Action

fatalism operates around a higher-order theme where the two men can only kill each other under the right circumstances and conditions. The “duel” in the bar is like a game. Each man takes turns to toss a coin at each other’s glasses of wine placed across the long table, and then below the table, rivalling the other in skill and difficulty of the throw. The sequence is set, nostalgically, to music adapted from Kyu Sakamoto’s popular Japanese hit song of the 1960s “Sukiyaki” (originally “Ue o Muite” or “I Look Up When I Walk”). It is one of To’s most stylish sequences — the kind of stylishness not fully evident in his earlier period but already a familiar feature in the Milkyway period covered in the last chapter. This duel of the wine glasses is a variation of the mirror duel at the climax of The Longest Nite — a sort of post-mirror stage where there is no need to look at each other in the mirror for a re-identification of the ego. Here, the visual device of the shattering of the glasses is only a representation of killing each other — the director resorts to the game motif and combines this with the double motif. “Sooner or later, they’ll kill each other,” says Fiona. “Who will win?” asks Yoyo, accentuating the game motif. “You’ll know only when you know who the opponent is,” Fiona replies. With that answer, Fiona is giving us a foretaste of the end-result of Jack and Martin’s heroic fatalism. Both men win even when one is dead because they know who their opponents are; in a sense they have killed each other only to be betrayed by their own triad masters, a pair of secondary doubles (Yam and Fong). Significantly, during their duel when they gun each other down, Jack and Martin shoot through a wooden wall which breaks open from the impact of the bullets to reveal their presences to each other — no mirror or symbolic wine glasses here. The upshot is that they both survive as if they can’t really kill each other because there is no mirror-image to echo their respective fatalisms, no mirror for either of them to shatter each other’s psychotic “double”. They have become one in the sense that they are on the same side. However, this does not in itself signal the end of the psychotic double, but rather a shift. In the final duel, To repeats the visual device of shooting at the mirrors from The Longest Nite, but in this instance the doubles are one in body (Jack’s body, naturally, since Martin is a corpse) and their images are not reflected in a hall of mirrors. Instead, Jack shoots through glass edifices at their betrayers. These glass edifices are not reflective but rather they hide the true images of Yam and Fong as the other pair of psychotic doubles, or perhaps they refract and distort their images because they represent the treacherous side of heroic fatalism. The edifices shatter into shards (actually paper particles that give the impression of glass shards) like the mirrors of The Longest Nite to reveal the true selves of Yam and Fong so that they may be destroyed.

Directed by Johnnie To

Still 4.2

109

The final duel in A Hero Never Dies

The shattered glass is also a political allegory connoting the shattering of the entire illusion that the top echelons of the jianghu share the same heroic and chivalric fatalism that enjoins the two heroes. Yam and Fong do everything they can to ensure their own survival. In the end, they do not survive — an outcome of the heroic fatalism driving Jack who then becomes the Destinymachine in human form delivering the two triad masters to their fates. Jack’s maxim that “God is the man with the gun” assumes more weight in this context. In view of the complexities of the inner-world jianghu conflict, the maxim might be modified to “God is the hero with the gun” since not all men are heroes. Ironically, because Jack succumbs to heroic fatalism, the hero also dies, but at the same time, as the title suggests, A Hero Never Dies. Martin is the literal representation of this axiom. It is he who fires the last shot.

Still 4.3 Leon Lai wheels in Lau Ching-wan’s corpse to fire the last shot in A Hero Never Dies

To’s view of heroic fatalism is essentially romantic. The idea of heroic fatalism presupposes a heroic model or archetype, and not necessarily a moral construct in which the hero represents good in a traditional binary opposition between good and evil. But because To’s view is romantic, the hero in this instance can be a vicious killer who assumes the moral construct of good. Jameson tells us that “romance unfolds beneath the sign of destiny, either

110

Director in Action

benevolent or malign”, and “romance is metaphysical” because its elements relate to magic.7 As a romance, A Hero Never Dies acquires some of the resonance of the “magical narratives” that Jameson analyses in his article. Magic is associated with heroic fatalism in the manner of a heroic struggle between two forces traditionally thought of as good and evil or what Jameson describes as “white magic and black magic”.8 In To’s films up to A Hero Never Dies, the magic has the power of a theurgical force. Thus we see Lau Chingwan survive despite being shot in the head in Loving You and Too Many Ways to Be Number One, or Takeshi’s flying leap in The Odd One Dies which freezes in mid-air, a cine-magical touch to denote the hero’s escape from his pursuers and ultimately, his survival against the odds and against fate. Retribution and revenge are the key motifs of this struggle. In A Hero Never Dies, heroic fatalism is a counter-active theurgy that executes just deserts to the “black magic” of the fortune-teller and to the blackguards of the triad ruling class. If romance is metaphysical, A Hero Never Dies never quite attains that status. Nor does it quite attain the status of tragedy if we go by Robert Warshow’s insight that the gangster film “has been a consistent and astonishingly complete presentation of the modern sense of tragedy”.9 Parts of the movie are too banal and some of the secondary roles (Yam and Fong, the old fortune-teller) are too badly-acted for it to ever reach the abstract heights of high romance. In addition, Leon Lai can’t capture the essence of the tragic hero. To’s direction here simply lacks the more complex nuances of The Longest Nite. The film is not able to apotheosize its heroes and this flaw becomes a virtue by default — as Warshow says, “once the hero is apotheosized, variation and development are closed off”10 — but the film’s great moments, including the duel of the wine glasses and the climactic gun battle, carry the idea of magic as an inherent property of heroic fatalism into the realm of romance. It is obvious that magic lodged itself in the mind of To as he entered the new millennium. He adopted a romantic-millenarian approach in his action cinema by transforming heroic fatalism into magical fatalism. He does this in Running out of Time where the hero (Andy Lau) engages in an elaborate game with a police opponent and turns into a magicalfatalist figure, forever going in and out of spaces and identities, outplaying and out-manoeuvring his targeted double (Lau Ching-wan).

Running out of Time: Magical Fatalism The fatalistic hero of Running out of Time, the Andy Lau character (nameless in the film and herein known as Andy for the sake of convenience), has cancer

Directed by Johnnie To

111

and is given only four weeks to live, so we are led to believe. This is the ostensible basis of his fatalism, but the magical source of his fatalism may be traced to the idea of treating life as an object, after the fashion of Barthes, “a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life)”.11 With the death of the hero acting as the hook of the plot, life becomes a game of trickery and deceit, like a magic show — and death itself is a subterfuge.

Still 4.4 Andy Lau, running out of time and standing on the edge of a rooftop

In the course of the film, the hero executes an elaborate scheme to steal a diamond from an international bald-headed criminal known simply as Baldy (Waise Lee) and extracts a twenty-million-dollar ransom which he will give to a children’s charity. To carry out his scheme, Andy uses as bait an inspector from the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau Ho Sheung-sang (Lau Chingwan) known for his skills as a negotiator in hostage-taking situations. Andy pretends to rob a finance company located in the same floor as the jewellery company run by Baldy, where the diamond is located. Holding the manager of the finance company hostage, Andy demands to negotiate with Inspector Ho on the roof of the skyscraper. Andy tells Ho that he wants to play a game with him for the next 72 hours. Andy’s bluff tactics disarm Ho and the surrounding Special Forces unit dispatched to take him out if necessary; he escapes by jumping into a ventilator chute, and then assuming a number of disguises, walks out of the building. Having baited Ho into the game, Andy now switches to his real objective of stealing the diamond. Ho is lured back into the building to investigate a clue deliberately planted by Andy, who sees everything that goes on since he had previously installed secret cameras in strategic areas of the building. Andy then orchestrates a diversion by blowing Ho’s cover and he is subsequently chased by Baldy’s gang, forcing the evacuation of the diamond

112

Director in Action

which lands in Andy’s hands (Andy having disguised himself as Baldy). Andy demands the ransom — which is handed over in a bowling alley, and having pre-arranged for Ho to exchange the diamond for the money, Andy, disguised as a woman, upstages Baldy and Ho (and thus the police) and manages to get away with both the money and the diamond. Baldy, however, is arrested, hence completing Andy’s scheme, which we sense is as much a revenge on Baldy as it is a game with Ho. In the epilogue, Ho learns that the money has been donated in his name to a children’s cancer charity. He boards a minibus and sees a female passenger (Yoyo Mung) wearing the same diamond that was stolen by Andy. “My boyfriend gave it to me, but he’s since gone away,” she says. “Hang on to it,” Ho advises, “he might just startle you by suddenly turning up.” The plot suggests that it was vaguely influenced by a number of Hollywood action-adventures released in the period prior to Running out of Time, such as Phillip Noyce’s The Saint (1997) where Val Kilmer’s hero adopts a number of disguises to foil a Russian Mafia chief plotting to take over the government, and The Negotiator (1998) where Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey play the doubles who are played in Running out of Time by Lau Chingwan and Andy Lau. Such intertextuality is reciprocated by Hollywood as evidenced by Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006) which recalls Running out of Time and its sequel as well as a film such as Breaking News. Though Inside Man superficially (and deliberately) reminds the viewer of Sidney Lumet’s 1975 hit Dog Day Afternoon, it is more evidence of the generic influence of Hong Kong action cinema as formulated by To’s “excercises” in the genre — and it shows that Running out of Time is a key work in this latter generic influence. Inside Man is playful and dark at the same time — a link to To’s own obsessions with magical fatalism and the game. The magical fatalism of the hero is suggested in the character’s various styles of entry and exit, modifying the idea of the game and integrating it with that of a stage play or a show (the element of a magic show is actually more pronounced in the sequel and not as apparent here, yet the fact that To went on to emphasise the magic in the sequel is evidence of the magic element which To blueprints in this version). Andy’s appearances are typified at first by a cinematic idiom of speeded-up motion signifying that he is running out of time but also giving the impression of someone moving like an apparition. Then he appears in a variety of disguises, which emphasise transience of identity but also transience of time and space — Andy being seen in different spaces in different identities (cf. The Saint). Much of the character’s appearing and disappearing acts take place inside cars. The car therefore assumes an allimportant role of transporting the magic actor in and out of space and time.

Directed by Johnnie To

113

Throughout the film, Ho manages to catch Andy three times inside a car. Andy sets the rule of the game: “If you take me in to the police station, you win.” But Ho never takes him in, because Andy always manages to stop the car. After their first contact on the rooftop, Andy makes his getaway and jumps into a taxi with Ho posing as the taxi-driver. Andy forces Ho to stop the taxi by blindly shooting into the crowd with a silencer, and he disappears like willo’-the-wisp. The second time, Ho gets away in Andy’s car as they are chased by Baldy’s men after the robbery of the diamond. Ho seems now to have his man, but Andy deliberately crushes the car and walks away in a daze like a drunken Tinker Bell. In the third instance, after Andy successfully obtains the ransom, Ho catches him again and handcuffs him to the car. Andy apparently passes out after puking blood onto the windscreen and bluffs Ho into thinking there is a bomb in the car. Ho stops the car and gets out as the device counts down to zero but instead of blowing up, it automatically ignites the engine. Andy revives, removes the handcuff, and drives away — with the diamond and the money. Left in the lurch, Ho resigns himself to the fact that he has lost, perhaps feeling himself to be the victim of some metaphysical force of magic.

Still 4.5 Andy Lau and Lau Ching-wan as the odd doubles of Running out of Time

The situations in the car recall two scenes in The Longest Nite where To uses it as both the instrument and the setting of violence. In the first scene, Lau Ching-wan’s Baldy is escorted by a Macau cop and ordered to depart the territory. Baldy, who is driving, uses his head to break the windscreen in order to obscure their view of the road ahead, then frees his hands from the steering wheel while stepping on the accelerator, daring his passenger to shoot. In the second scene, Lau and Tony Leung shoot at each other from their cars

114

Director in Action

running parallel, the bullets striking the cars as if they were armour plates protecting the heroes. The car is definitely a part of To’s infrastructure of violence, which includes tall buildings, rooftops, lifts — all of them coming into play here but all already familiar from previous To films (the action on rooftops and lifts particularly recall The Odd One Dies). The car assumes a special status as the favoured vessel of magical fatalism in Running out of Time. But though the car might function like a magic coach, it has clear limitations. For example, it is not a time machine that turns back time or prolongs time for the hero. Andy disappears finally because he has run out of time and the car denotes his exit, though To ends on a tongue-in-cheek note that allows for the possibility that Andy may appear again. However, in the sequel, Running out of Time 2, Andy does not re-appear and his role is taken over by a new protagonist (Ekin Cheng), which suggests that Andy is well and truly out of the picture. It is as if he has been permanently misplaced by his own magic. Running out of Time is possibly To’s most accomplished movie because of its magical elements which he incorporates faultlessly into the narrative. The narrative is the most involved and complicated among the films that carry To’s single name as director. The script was written by two Frenchmen Laurent Courtiaud and Julien Carbon, and re-written by Yau Nai-hoi.12 The film offers us subtle variations of To’s obsessions, thus the figure of the fatalistic hero as personified by Andy Lau is transformed into a wholly sympathetic and romantic character. The double theme is much less obvious or reflexive because Andy is not a psychotic personality (he is neither a vicious killer nor a corrupt cop). Andy and Lau Ching-wan’s inspector are mutually appreciative of each other (both actors incidentally give marvellous performances, and Andy Lau’s was rewarded with a Best Actor Award in the Hong Kong Film Awards). There is less conflict between the two “doubles” in the sense of a psycho-pathological struggle which occurs in The Longest Nite and A Hero Never Dies, both also featuring Lau Ching-wan, playing opposite Tony Leung in the former film and Leon Lai in the latter. What we do have is an interplay between Andy Lau and Lau Ching-wan through which facets of their characters are revealed. The good-humoured quality of the interplay brings out the game aspect of the relationship. Lau’s character therefore comes across as a sympathetic hero, a complementary double to Andy’s fatalistic hero. As a double, he empathizes with Andy and assumes his fatalistic qualities which make him sympathetic. The magic also transforms the action somewhat. There is much less gunplay (and none at all in Running out of Time 2). Instead, much of the action takes the form of a cat-and-mouse game or a game of wits that is played out

Directed by Johnnie To

115

in a more elaborate fashion than the more deadly and conspiratorial game in The Longest Nite. Disguises are an integral part of this action, as are pretence and bluff, and this is really the first time that we see disguises employed in a Johnnie To picture. The disguises, an old conceit in detective stories, reemphasize the crisis of identity that To’s fatalistic heroes are prey to (cf. Beyond Hypothermia), but the disguises themselves contain interesting facets of psychological and sexual identities that have not been explored in To’s films until now. For example, Andy appears as an older man, whom we are told is his father, and later he is disguised as a woman. These patriarchal and gender identities point to oedipal wish-fulfilments in Andy’s psychological make-up, the closest perhaps that Andy’s character comes to being the pathological hero. There is a gay sub-theme that accompanies Andy’s appearance as a woman vis-à-vis Lau Ching-wan’s character, who is earlier suspected of being gay by a female colleague (Ruby Wong in a cameo). Though understated and graciously played by Lau Ching-wan, Ho’s interaction with Andy in drag is one more touch of the complementary double motif. It is essentially comedy, a genre which according to Jameson “brings into play desire and the obstacles to its fulfillment”.13

Still 4.6 Andy Lau, disguised as a woman, and Lau Chingwan playing out a gay sub-theme in the double motif of Running out of Time

This comedy element sees To at his most sophisticated in the genre (there are other comic moments in the narrative involving the characters played by Lam Suet as a dumb henchman in Baldy’s gang, and Hui Shiu-hung as Ho’s bumbling superior officer, which smacks of slapstick), and helps to modify the generic action of the picture by pushing it into the realm of an alternative action picture, one much less dependent on heroic archetypes and not at all on gunplay action. Andy Lau’s hero is the most unusual hero in To’s action

116

Director in Action

canon; on the one hand, he vomits blood, spattering it onto walls and windscreens like graffiti (blood as a denominator of the action genre), and on the other hand, he appears as a woman, elegantly putting new meaning into the notion of generic change if not gender identity. From an apparently dying man to a femme fatale, the hero’s transfigurations and changes of identities is the essence of the magical narrative that is the centrifugal force of Running out of Time — but the identity changes also symbolize the way the movie literally changes before our eyes. The magical narrative in the first place obscures the genre identification of Running out of Time just as it obscures the real identity of Andy (it is ambivalent as to whether his father was ever a real character, thus we remain unsure of his origins), but finally, it is Andy’s character and his fatalism that defines the film. Fatalism implies that the hero does not have free will but that his will is conditioned by death which no magic can turn around although To maintains that the hero survives.14 To stresses that the whole film is a game, death being a part of the game. But Lau’s performance is so subtle that his death-ruse becomes more and more like a death-wish, driving the narrative with its own energy and conviction, leaving it ambiguous at the end — no matter that To intended the film to have a happier ending as compared to the bleak endings of A Hero Never Dies, Expect the Unexpected and The Longest Nite. 15 To my mind, ambiguity is intrinsic to the magical narrative, symbolizing To’s continuing obsession with the narrative rather than the fate of the hero, which is perhaps the reason why To chose to make a sequel. Running out of Time 2 was co-directed with Law Wing-cheung, To’s assistant director on the first edition. The film features a different hero, Ekin Cheng, who calls himself a magician this time. Ekin steals art objects from an international insurance company and demands a ransom. Lau Ching-wan reprises his role as Inspector Ho, who, in one of his close encounters with Ekin, says he detests magic shows and nothing would make him happier than to catch this magician-hero and put him away. Ho hasn’t basically learned his lesson from his encounters with Andy, and the lesson is: where the hero’s powers are foreordained, he can’t be caught. Ho has become cynical and less prone to empathizing with the hero and that is because Ekin is a less developed character. He is a magical-fatalist hero to be sure, but his is a smiling and inscrutable kind of theurgical fatalism. Because we are not quite sure where the hero is going, the tone and rhythm of the film is variable and uncertain. In part, it’s also because the filmmakers inject even broader and feebler comedy involving Hui Shiu-hung’s bumbling Inspector Clouseau-like character (Hui is like the permanent court jester of To’s repertory company, usually playing fools in To’s films, given to incontinence, constipation, or flatulence.)

Directed by Johnnie To

117

The best scenes are those of Ekin playing catch me if you can with Lau Ching-wan, both men running around Central and racing on bicycles as if the magic coach has turned into two rickety bicycles which disintegrate at the end of their race. But the smiling hero’s attention is not altogether focused on Inspector Ho. He is also obsessed with another cop, Ken (Lam Suet), a gambler heavily indebted to loan sharks who publicly humiliate him with beatings.16 Ken is the first police interlocutor who negotiates with Ekin as he sits on the edge of the rooftop looking like a man about to jump. Ekin then turns the situation around, engaging Ken in a toss-up game of heads or tails in which he always loses and just as he is about to jump, is saved in the nick of time by Ho. Thereafter, Ekin and Ken meet periodically to play toss up in which Ken will never win, the objective being to emancipate him from his addiction and to turn a new leaf. Ekin thus has both an oppositional role vis-à-vis Inspector Ho, and a redemptive role vis-à-vis Ken. But the film only very loosely ties both strands together and Ekin’s smiling hero becomes more and more obscure as he is inscribed by a number of surprising political symbolisms: an American bald eagle that is associated with Ekin from the start and which we see circling around the skyline of Hong Kong’s CBD, “The Internationale” which is sung as Ekin jumps down one of the CBD’s buildings after his first encounter with Ho, and “The Red Flag” (the anthem of the British Labour Party sung to the tune of “O Tannenbaum”) heard at the end of the film in the form of a Christmas carol during which Ho learns that the ransom money has been donated to starving African children. The symbolisms are clumsy, somehow suggesting that there is a link between global capitalism, communism and democratic socialism with Hong Kong’s post-1997 financial decline. Thus, to use the words of Richard Slotkin, the film is “tremendously rich in implication but confused in achievement”.17 Ekin’s hero disappears in a cliff-hanging situation at the end, and perhaps this calls for another sequel that could make things clearer (To might wish to call it Back to Running out of Time 2). But Ekin, like Andy, is too ephemeral for his own good. Magical fatalist heroes, it seems, do not last. It is in their nature to disappear.

The Mission: The Abstraction of Action After focusing on doubles or semi-individualistic heroes in A Hero Never Dies and Running out of Time (not to mention the majority of the Milkyway pictures), To returns to the configuration of the group in The Mission. The

118

Director in Action

film features protagonists (and antagonists) — professional bodyguards and assassins — who function best in disciplined teams, bringing us back to the team work of Expect the Unexpected, Lifeline, The Heroic Trio and The Big Heat. Lest one feels that the return to the group is retrogressive, the English title The Mission sounds like a manifesto of some kind. The Chinese title Qianghuo means “Gunfire” or alternatively “Smoking Gun”, both of which certainly sounds more apposite to the generic element of gunplay in To’s action cinema (and indeed, The Mission possesses the classiest gunplay of all of To’s action movies). The premise of To’s rise to prominence as an action auteur is his redrawing of the action genre and his sense of missionary purpose in rejuvenating the Hong Kong cinema. Could one therefore detect a metacritical significance to the English title? Or does it simply imply the mission of the protagonists in the picture, as To would have it — the protection of a triad godfather by five bodyguards and the search for the mastermind behind the assassination attempts, a mission they accomplish with remarkable skill and cool though not without twists and turns that by themselves are an interesting take on the fatalism that normally entwines To’s heroes. Thus The Mission continues the past obsessions of To’s action cinema, but To does have an artistic mission in breaking with the past and with current practice, by refashioning the shape of the genre, and it is quite clear that he intended The Mission as one such exercise. To’s mission in The Mission is to come up with a new approach to action, and I will show that this approach is to render the gunplay action as aesthetically abstract as possible. There is a Japanese-like essence in the formalism of the film particularly when we remember that the major influence on the film is Kurosawa, which To has readily acknowledged.18 First off, To utilizes the tenet of inaction within action as the substance of his formalism. To says he drew from Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), referring vaguely to Kurosawa’s ability in that film to capture “movement within stillness”. In such a state, characters emit energy just by standing still.19 Kurosawa achieved the impression of movement within stillness through the use of slow-motion, as exemplified in the scene in Seven Samurai of the duel between the master swordsman Kyuzo and his irate challenger who demands a rematch when he was defeated in the first simulated duel with fake swords. Kyuzo easily cuts down his opponent who falls in slow-motion. However, Kurosawa’s influence in itself does not lessen the innovativeness of To’s approach. He does not use slow-motion, for example, and achieves the tenet of stillness completely naturally but with a reliance on music, sound effects and montage (as we will see in the “shopping mall” sequence, to be discussed later).

Directed by Johnnie To

119

Kurosawa’s influence is integrated into the contexts of To’s own artistry and the standards of the Hong Kong cinema. The inaction-within-action principle has a relevance which can only be appreciated when we pitch it against the maxim of speed and fast-paced action that is standard practice in the Hong Kong cinema. This is a formalistic idea of generic intertextuality. A public consciousness of gunplay action texts that have become familiar through other films by John Woo, Ringo Lam or Tsui Hark, determines the innovative effect of To’s antithetical reaction. To counterbalances speed with stasis, achieving it through his measured direction of the actors, his masterly application of film techniques, and the tautness of his narrative, rather like Kurosawa does (the primacy of Kurosawa’s influence with regard to all forms of action from stasis to movement is a fact of cinematic life in Hong Kong; practically all directors of To’s generation profess admiration for the Japanese director and we should not be surprised that directors like Woo, Lam or Tsui Hark are influenced by Kurosawa on the matter of movement). The narrative’s tautness is epitomised in the opening section, right from the catching fanfare-like prelude over the credit titles, the score sounding like a bugle call for the protagonists to fall in, as it were.20 The music itself and the Kanji character fonts of the credits (not accompanied by English appellations) are quite derivative of Kurosawa (the font type will be repeated in Throw Down, a film actually dedicated to Kurosawa). To then introduces his five characters who form the core group discharging the mission (the structure of the group also an essential concept of Seven Samurai), showing each character in his own individual circumstance before they are called in to work together. The characters are enjoined by the visual device of wipes (a favourite device of Kurosawa) as Lam Suet’s handgun expert James (who is first introduced dancing to the beat of a video dance game) walks past each protagonist in his own civilian setting: Curtis (Anthony Wong) is a hairdresser, Mike (Roy Cheung) is a bouncer-cum-pimp, Roy (Francis Ng) runs a nightclub that is marked as a hot spot of trouble, and Jackie Lui is Roy’s junior “brother” Shin. We are transposed suddenly to the main title by the loud report of gunfire reinforcing the relevance of the Chinese title — and from this, To cuts directly to a close-up of a semi-automatic pistol firing two more shots, the large-caliber reports echoing on the Dolby. The reports segue to the Super Bowl Restaurant, the scene of the attempted assassination of Lung, the godfather (Eddy Ko) whose bodyguards are shot down and the last remaining bodyguard deserts, leaving Lung to fend for himself. He successfully evades his assassins by hiding inside an oven in the kitchen and calling for help on his mobile phone. The assassins withdraw when Lung’s right-hand man, Frank (Simon Yam), arrives to rescue the godfather.

120

Director in Action

The rest of the film describes the group’s efforts, under the leadership of Curtis, in protecting Lung. There are three assassination attempts under their watch, the first almost successful, but all the assassins are wiped out and the group finally finds out who the instigator of the assassination is: he turns out to be the godfather’s close associate, Fat Cheung, the owner of the Super Bowl Restaurant (played by ex-director Wang Tianlin). Fat Cheung is eliminated and the group has apparently completed their mission successfully, except for a catch. During the mission, Shin had had an affair with the godfather’s young and pretty wife (which is never depicted in the film) and Curtis is compelled to make amends. The wife, I will submit, is a paradox. She appears fleetingly around the margins of the group, and her role is obviously a subversive one, which is to undermine the integrity of the group and its survival, although she is seemingly an example of perhaps the most expendable role ever played by a woman in a Johnnie To film, illustrating the unabashed dominance of the male in To’s cinematic worldview. I will touch more on the woman’s paradoxical role shortly, but for the moment, she demonstrates the apparent truth of male dominance in The Mission and the principle of misogyny that underpins it. The film, however, is about apparentness which hides deeper layers of truth. Because Shin is Roy’s junior, Roy is obliged to protect him under the code of the jianghu. However, the same code demands that Shin must pay for his transgression with his life. On the night that the matter is to be settled around the dinner table in a restaurant booked for the occasion, Roy and Curtis are unable to reach a compromise and there is a standoff between them in the iconic manner of Hong Kong action protagonists pointing guns at each other. Curtis points his gun at Shin (inebriated out of the proceedings) in order to shoot him down, and Roy points his gun at Curtis to stop him. This provokes James and Mike to take sides — James pointing his gun at Roy and Mike at James. The group is in danger of wiping itself out through a chain effect and much depends on how one or the other individual reacts to the

Still 4.7

Gunmen executing the law of the jianghu

Directed by Johnnie To

121

execution of the code. Curtis fires his gun at Shin, apparently downing him. An exasperated Roy opens fire but the bullets fly past Curtis and hit the plates behind him. The code is satisfied, and the group survives, its honour intact. The survival and the integrity of the group is To’s central message in The Mission, which contrasts with the killing off of all the protagonists in To’s last group picture Expect the Unexpected and To’s tendency towards fatalistic endings in most of the Milkyway pictures. Survival is dependent on the function of the group and this in turn depends on unity. The tautness of the narrative stems from this premise, To tersely showing how the group coheres through telling scenes of silent solidarity. One such scene at the beginning is itself fundamental to the genre: James reassembling handguns for the use of the group, and as each member picks up his gun to test it, we hear a medley of mechanical sounds (the slamming of the recoil, the cocking of the hammer, the pulling of the trigger). Mike, who will prove to be among the coolest of the cool in the group and no slouch with guns, uses his wrist to test the slide and the tension of the recoil. He hands back the gun to James, saying with a straight face, “Add two more pounds to the recoil spring”. On this note, To wipes to a telephoto shot of the group walking straight to camera (yet another favourite Kurosawa device). It is as if the group itself is reassembled and complete, unified behind the mission. But there is a discordant voice in this otherwise laconic group, that of Roy talking regularly on his mobile and receiving adverse information about someone known as Rat who is muscling in on his nightclub during his absence. Roy is the most volatile member of the group and his edginess builds tension that could threaten the function of the group. For one thing, Roy’s volatility means that he is not prone to receiving orders from Curtis, which proves to be the case in the first of To’s abstract action set-pieces during which Lung is shot (but not hurt because he is wearing a bullet-proof vest). The essential element in To’s abstraction of his action set-pieces is an immediate cutting off of the outside world once the action begins. All the protagonists are automatically enclosed within an inner world that no one from outside (apparently not even the police) can enter or has any recourse to intervene in the action or to stop the violence. I have previously invoked the term “inner world” from Fredric Jameson to refer to a world of pure perception and experience or “phenomena within the narrative”21 The “inner world” as the locus of To’s abstraction of action is a phenomenological cocoon. However, it is useful to know that To himself refers to the term “inner world” (neixin shijie) with a more psychological signification to support his recurrent theme of fatalism, stressing that like most of his protagonists, the five bodyguards cannot determine their destinies. Their will is controlled

122

Director in Action

by fate and “grand circumstances” (da huanjing).22 I will argue that To’s formalist-abstract approach to his action sequences transforms space from one of objectively-determinate space (the apparentness of things) to one of subjectively-indeterminate space that changes the predilection of his characters towards fatalism23 (it is as if the bodyguards have willed their own survival; in fact To has sought deliberately to change the fates of his characters). Yet the notion of fate itself is not inoperative in the concept of the inner world, as I will show shortly in my analysis of the paradoxical role of the woman. To’s reference to “grand circumstances” is a metaphor of fate, to which all the protagonists are naturally subjected. At the same time, they are also subjected to their own subjective senses and their code (which I have already called the code of the jianghu), implying a presupposed pattern of behaviour or a tacit agreement of practices between the denizens of the inner world. By this code, I mean not only a moral or ethical system, or more precisely, an antinomian order, but also a professional standard inasmuch as the action is ordered and controlled, rationalized and professionally executed by both sides. The professional code of the bodyguards and the assassins offers the closest structural linkage in To’s action films to the Western along the line of the “professional plot” structure outlined by Will Wright in Sixguns and Society. Wright makes the point that in the professional plot Western, the lone hero of the classical Western is transformed into a group of fighting men who “exist independently of and apart from society”. Furthermore, they have “little or no interest in women except insofar as the women become part of the group”.24 Wright could have made the point that the presence of women, who stand for irrational and subjective factors intruding into the world of professionals, could determine whether the men live or not. In The Mission, a woman ultimately breaks apart the harmonious homosocial existence of the bodyguards (though in other To films, Lifeline, Expect the Unexpected, PTU, and Breaking News, women are a part of the largely male group as if taking to heart the axiom of the professional plot Western as defined by Wright). According to Pang Laikwan, the “entire homosocial structure” of the group is destroyed by a “nameless woman, a femme fatale”.25 I take Pang’s point about the woman’s anonymity but as a femme fatale she has a definite identity and role to play. I have made the point that she is a paradox, which Pang sort of underlines in recognizing both her anonymity and her fatale identity. Effectively she represents To’s own paradoxical role as the enunciator of masculinity in his action cinema; on occasion, To is the enunciating mediator who stands between male and female action heroes, deciding on where to throw the balance, as I will show in my analysis of Breaking News below. Pierre Bourdieu makes the point that women, who are “weak in themselves and

Directed by Johnnie To

123

(are) sources of weakness … are also strong, armed with the weapons of weakness, such as devilish cunning … and magic”.26 The woman’s anonymity represents her weakness while her fatale-ness represents her strength. Her presence in the environment of the male group obsessed with masculine professionalism arouses a certain anxiety that will ultimately disrupt the group. Bourdieu points out that masculinity “is an eminently relational notion, constructed in front of and for other men and against femininity, in a kind of fear of the female, firstly in oneself” (emphases his).27 Professionalism is the visible sign of masculinity in the group which Curtis has gone to great lengths to secure and maintain (killing Roy’s nemesis Rat, for example, and not retaliating when Roy hits him in a fit of anger following the first assassination attempt, which I will address shortly). While the woman indeed destroys the homosocial structure of the group, I would argue that her paradoxical strength in weakness is not enough to destroy the professionalism of the group. Her paradoxical role is to stress the negative side of masculine values (her fatale-ness making her the embodiment of the Destiny-machine) but being conscious of weakness, Curtis ensures that professionalism at all times will see the group through. In this way, the men ensure that fate will not intrude into their professional lives. It does anyway, in the form of a woman, but ever the professional, Curtis keeps a cool head at all times, and though Roy is emotional, he too succumbs to his professionalism in the end. The woman is totally an outsider and not part of the professional group and this is consistent with the sense of the group operating in a subjective world that is cut off from the objective one. I might invoke the concept of Kowloon Noir here as the representation of the “inner world” (The Mission can be regarded as an example of Kowloon Noir though it may be argued that it takes place outside the identifiable areas of Kowloon; here Kowloon acts as an edifice, the encapsulation of noir practice in To’s films). The woman’s misconduct or folly which brings about the group’s dispersal was to seduce Shin, the most junior of the bodyguards. The essence of homosociality is effectively the professional conduct of keeping out women as a means of having sex. Kowloon Noir in this instance is a sexless, professional environment (homosociality of course does not imply homosexuality), and it is the reason why we do not see the sex act committed between Shin and the woman. In fact, To subtly indicates how sex is like a taboo in the ethical world of professional killers, the modern inheritors of the tradition where martial arts practitioners are instructed to avoid sex altogether: he shows Mike expressing disgust after a former client phones him to request for girls.

124

Director in Action

To’s shutting out of the real world in the action sequences is a mark of Kowloon Noir’s professionally-coded and sexless atmosphere; it heightens the aesthetic impact of the action, all the more so, it seems, when the action takes place in the context of real settings. Here again apparentness is only the surface of things. The first action set-piece occurs in a back street, which is naturally deserted. Lung is shot by a telescopic rifle fired from a distant tall building, and the bodyguards are pinned down. James, Mike and Shin cover each other in order to get closer to the assassin, firing continuous rounds that eventually drive the assassin away. Roy, against Curtis’s orders, runs off to chase a second assassin whose passing shadow he had glimpsed, and when he gets back to the scene finds that the others have driven off, leaving him in the lurch. As if on cue, the outside world enters in the form of a taxi: Roy blocks the taxi, which conveniently delivers him back to the group, as if prearranged. A Hong Kong critic has pointed out that Curtis had in fact arranged the taxi, and he also later arranges for the same taxi to drive James to meet the godfather and plead for leniency on behalf of Shin during the restaurant stand-off (James of course witnesses the killing of the godfather’s wife and returns to the restaurant without seeing the godfather).28 This is a remarkable insight that reveals To’s capacity for formalism and narrative compression leaving out much detail (no time is wasted on exposition). Following on this insight, the taxi is a symbol in my view of the outside world that enters the scene of the action only on the orders of Curtis; it otherwise cannot do so while the scene is enclosed in its inner world of action. The enclosure of the inner world evaporates once the action ends, and we return to the group and its functions, courtesy of the taxi. The taxi testifies to Curtis’s planning and his penchant for orderliness which reflects the deterministic element in the narrative, or in other words, the almost rectangular precision of To’s formalism. On his return, Roy immediately confronts Curtis and beats him up. Curtis does nothing to defend himself, for in doing so, he might jeopardize the unity of the group and the mission. Curtis’s non-response is completely rational. Similarly, when he next acts, his response is rational. He kills Rat, the man who has been niggling Roy all the while he is on the team, thus putting an end to Roy’s inner tension. With this tension resolved, the group then becomes a perfectly coordinated team, functioning with the kind of coolheadedness and skill that Curtis had intended from the beginning. The coordination and cool-headedness of the team is illustrated in the “shopping mall” sequence, the second assassination attempt on Lung’s life during the group’s watch, and in the third action sequence following the third and last attempt, in which the group follows the enemy back to a deserted warehouse

Directed by Johnnie To

125

and kills all but one of the assassins. These sequences demonstrate a celebration of masculinity before the “masculine structure” of the group starts to crumble. The last action sequence is also a remarkable demonstration of compressing time in the narrative flow, showing how the bodyguards now work as a precisely coordinated team, executing a plan of attack apparently without any need for spoken orders or commands. They deliberately let one assassin run out of bullets, thus capturing him alive and therefore enabling them to find out who had contracted out the assassination. In between these sequences, the group is seen indulging in acts of camaraderie to underline their tacit unity and solidarity — carrying out a prank on Curtis with a spiked cigarette, for example, or playing soccer with a paper ball as they wait for the boss. Hence it is Curtis’s pivotal position and his efforts to ensure that the group stays united and concentrated on its mission without any distractions which ultimately determine the group’s fate. Curtis is in effect To’s alter ego. It is Curtis/To who changes the fate of Shin at the end of the film, after going through the motions of “killing” Shin therefore observing the “form” of the code. However, the formalism is pretence, an inverted formalism showing that form is only appearance, designed to deceive. In the end, Curtis’s/To’s formalism implies a dimension of human will and planning that is not as rigid as it seems. There is always an element of surprise or abstraction, or what To himself calls the unexpected nature of impermanence (wuchang), as he tried to show in Expect the Unexpected. The formalism of The Mission in the sense of To’s search for an abstract form of action is crystallized in the “shopping mall” sequence (shot in the Tsuen Wan Plaza in the New Territories). To conceived it as the centrepiece of the film and evidently, he was proud of the sequence, even going so far as giving it prominence through a shot-by-shot analysis published in City Entertainment a week before the film’s release. To argues that the central theme of the sequence, inspired by Kurosawa, was to re-configure gunplay action through the use of static shots. He writes: Most importantly, the aim of this gunplay sequence is not to display gaudy action but a kind of numb excitement, an atmosphere of risking everything in one stroke. The shots focus on the vastness of the shopping mall and those split seconds of waiting on the part of the bodyguards before drawing their guns and action erupts. The “reverb” and “flange” effects of gunfire on the soundtrack aim at reproducing the subjective atmosphere of the gun battle so that the audience can directly experience the danger faced by the bodyguards.29

126

Director in Action

As in the previous action set-piece involving the group, once the action erupts, the subjective inner world of abstract action becomes operative. All the actors (the bodyguards and the assassins) are completely concentrated on “risking everything in one stroke” and they are the only players on the scene. There are no outsiders or innocent bystanders (the supposed outsider — the janitor wearing earphones who nonchalantly wheels a cleaning cart onto the scene — turns out to be an assassin in disguise). Indeed, the reverberating echo and the flange (an effect that gives an airy sound) of gunfire on the soundtrack is a good symbol of the abstraction of action because To emphasizes space and the geometry of erect figures standing still in their respective positions without moving, only firing their guns. The bodyguards stand mostly immobile and emotionless, and this way, they pin down the assassins who also respond by keeping still behind giant pillars. Like the pillars, the erect human figures are object-symbols making up architectonic patterns in To’s conception and realization of abstract action, almost uncannily capturing the quality of “static violence” described by Gilles Deleuze in The Movement-Image, an “originary violence” of the impulse which “gradually penetrates a given milieu”.30 To’s milieu is the inner world of the Hong Kong jianghu: the context for the expression of his poetic and dream-like impulses, giving form to the “static violence”. Space and time are distorted not by any apparent indicator of cinematic effect (such as slow motion), but by stasis.31 The sequence is impressive and it stands as evidence of the aesthetic potential that often lurks in Hong Kong’s popular genre cinema awaiting directors like To to mine it. It certainly boosted To’s auteur credentials, and the film as a whole is still regarded by many critics in Hong Kong and around the world as To’s best achievement to date (it deservedly won To the Best Director Award in the Hong Kong Film Awards). After the achievement of The Mission, To would change genre direction and he would go on to make a number of non-action entertainments that only confirmed his unevenness as a director. But To would fall back on The Mission as the yardstick that would redirect him to make what he called “exercises” — the more formalistic and personal works that were not expected to make money — which he felt the need to make every two or three years interspersed between his more commercial projects.32 In fact, The Mission marks an outstanding phase of formalism in To’s work within the gunplay action format that includes the next two films of this chapter, PTU and Breaking News. Henceforth, we can see these three films as another unofficial trilogy that are built around collective groups and on action sequences characterized by formal staging, editing, and camera movements.

Directed by Johnnie To

Still 4.8 The stasis of action in the shopping mall gunfight in The Mission

127

128

Director in Action

PTU: Kowloon Noir’s Ground Zero In 2000, To began shooting PTU (an acronym for Police Tactical Unit, a blue-bereted division in the Hong Kong Police Force that patrols the city’s streets tackling crime and security situations) but only completed the film in 2003. To had planned to finish the film within a two or three month shooting schedule but he abandoned the original scenario and could not come up with a new one in time before he had to start work on another project.33 A bout of illness which hospitalized To for over a month also interrupted his plans. As he was lying in hospital, To claimed he found the direction and method of telling the story of PTU. He had clearly intended the film to be another of his path-breaking “exercises” in the action genre. As it turned out, it is an even more abstract “exercise” than The Mission, the whole film virtually taking place in an inner abstract world albeit in the recognizable space of the urban milieu. The narrative unfolds over one night (a dramatic scenario that To had handled before in The Longest Nite), detailing the efforts of a PTU squad to track down four punks in order to find a missing gun belonging to a detective in the Anti-Crime Division, and the detective’s own frantic quest to find his gun while fending off a CID squad under the command of a female officer trying to solve a murder that is connected to the missing gun.34 The film culminates in a shootout at four o’clock in the morning. The whole film is set in Kowloon, with the bulk of the action supposedly concentrated in the Tsimshatsui area east of Nathan Road (Cameron Road, Granville Road, Minden Avenue, etc) and the final shootout at Canton Road on the west side of Tsimshatsui. The plot actually begins in Kowloon City, some six or seven kilometres to the northeast of Tsimshatsui, with the Fong Wing Kee hotpot restaurant acting as the landmark that launches the series of events. The detective Lo (Lam Suet, excellent in a semi-leading part) goes to the Fong Wing Kee restaurant to have a meal and meets the young punks led by a triad hoodlum nicknamed Ponytail. Following a silent intimidation routine by Lo, the punks retaliate by vandalizing Lo’s car and leading him into a chase supposedly down Kowloon towards Tsimshatsui where they eventually end up in a back alley. There, Lo slips on a banana and loses consciousness. Meantime, Ponytail is attacked inside the restaurant, stabbed through the chest by an assassin posing as an innocuous customer of the restaurant. Despite his injury, Ponytail still musters the strength to run out into the street to commander a taxi to drive him to hospital. Upon seeing that his passenger has a knife stuck through his chest, the frightened driver

Directed by Johnnie To

129

flees and Ponytail, now bleeding profusely, has to drive the taxi himself. He ends up crashing the vehicle in Hanoi Road (which is several miles away from the nearest hospital, not to mention several miles away from the Fong Wing Kee Restaurant) just as his punks run past the taxi without recognizing him. Lo is found by the PTU squad led by Sergeant Mike Ho (Simon Yam), recovering from being beaten up by the punks, and without his gun. Thinking that the punks have stolen his pistol, Lo asks Mike to give him until dawn to find it, otherwise it would be reported and go against his record, affecting his chances of promotion. Mike and his squad help Lo to locate the punks, with some members of the squad voicing dissent over helping Lo but nevertheless falling in behind Mike. As To films it, the whole geography that spans the area from the Fong Wing Kee Restaurant located at Hau Wong Road in Kowloon City to the back alley somewhere near the vicinity of Hanoi Road in Tsimshatsui’s west side (where the film also ends up since the final shootout takes place in Canton Road35 ) is compressed and deliberately muddled. The shots of the back alley were in fact taken in a location in Hong Kong Island, which is clear from the background view of a tram running past (trams do not run on Kowloon). PTU thus takes place in a highly conceptual Kowloon where the distance from Kowloon City and Tsimshatsui is a cinematic stone’s throw. In this way, the film is a solid example of Kowloon Noir, a cine-geographic time frame that turns real locations and the action taking place within them into the subjective inner world of abstract action. Real locations mean that Kowloon Noir is not strictly geographically based (since Hong Kong locations were used to represent Kowloon) but that it operates as a spatial conceit that employs Kowloon as an abstract essence, a body without a face. The “real” in this instance “is never more than a code of representation (of signification)”, in Barthesian terms,36 while Kowloon is, following Warshow, “that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world”.37 The noir city is both a “mythic space” and a “real” scene of urban crime, illustrating Richard Slotkin’s thesis that “genre space is also mythic space”, a “pseudo-historical (or pseudo-real) setting … in which the concrete work of contemporary myth-making is done”.38 To brings all of this into play but his evocation of noir in Kowloon is like a stroll through Ground Zero in the aftermath of a metaphysical apocalypse. As To depicts it in PTU, Kowloon is the hell above ground. There is no doubt that To is into contemporary myth-making where the “real” shifts into an abstract mythic space, where time and space are impressionistically distorted. This is jianghu space where once again To emphasises stasis within motion; a lot of the time characters stand still, or strike

130

Director in Action

Still 4.9

Kowloon Noir

frozen postures, or else there is a zombie-like countenance to the movements of the actors, emphasizing the motif of hell above ground. The pace is deliberate and evocative of a subjective interior malaise which eerily reflects the deep crisis felt by Hong Kong people during the SARS health scare that transformed Hong Kong into a ghost city (by an eerie coincidence, the film was released during the height of the crisis, showing once again how To remains profoundly connected to the social milieu of Hong Kong). As an “exercise”, PTU is more a film of atmosphere and mood than of action. In fact, with the exception of the final shootout, there are no other action setpieces. Violence occurs throughout the film under an orderly formalist veneer which has the ring of surrealism. To wanted to concentrate on the subjective senses of his characters when the violence erupts. For example, To himself had this to say on Ponytail’s murder, “Objectively speaking, when someone is stabbed, he won’t be able to move”.39 Thus, upon realising that he has been stabbed, Ponytail not only moves, he runs, in an attempt to save himself. Ponytail’s preternatural strength stems from the same source that sustains Wang Tianlin’s character, the boss of the Super Bowl Restaurant in The Mission who continues to eat his spaghetti even after he’s been shot for his treachery. The counterposing of strength and death is highly surreal, but on the other hand, To shows realistic violence in the form of torture or punishment meted out by the PTU squad to secondary characters: Mike continuously slapping the young underling of Ponytail’s cousin in the video-game parlour in order to force the cousin to call Ponytail, not knowing that he’s already dead; and in a later scene, one of his men beating up an asthmatic informer causing his heart to stop and Mike having to revive him through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Realistic violence can clearly occur within the abstract surrealist frame of Kowloon Noir, and when they do occur, the purpose, as To explains it, is to blur our perception of the police and their association with justice and order. To believes that the police are as prone to the kind of violence that

Directed by Johnnie To

131

criminals perpetrate. It was of PTU that To made his statement about the cop and the robber being two sides of the same coin, “Without the cop, there would be no robber, and without the robber, there would be no cop.”40 Significantly, both the cop and the robber inhabit the night, To’s favourite cinematic time because “it allows me to show things to the audience, not to hide things from the audience”.41 At night, the police turns violent and their real nature is not hidden. The real nature of the police is one of selfpreservation and self-protection (the aim is to get home safely as a female member of the squad is heard to utter at the opening of the film), and in this, the PTU squad is of the same mind as the bodyguards in The Mission. Clearly, To meant the violence as a critique of the police though he does not pass any moral judgement on the actions of the police and in a way, seems to justify it (this sense of self-justification, only made clear at the end of the film, is in fact one of To’s themes; the other theme revolves around the conduct of the police, the way in which rules are bent by the lower ranks for personal reasons while other colleagues insist on following the book). In The Mission and PTU, the real and surreal violence is both a state of mind and a procedure conducted by professionals totally committed towards an objective. Violence becomes abstracted by pure subjectivity. In PTU, depending on who executes the violence, the nature of the violence can shift from realism to comic-book caricature: not only Ponytail running with a knife stuck through his chest, but also the imprint of a boot left on a woman’s Tshirt after she’s been kicked by one of the PTU squad who then demands that she wipes off the imprint (reflecting the police group’s preoccupation with self-protection), and the four punks all curled up inside animal cages, shaved and naked, tortured and punished by Ponytail’s father, the triad boss nicknamed Baldhead (the method of punishment reflecting his deranged sense of justice and vengeance). Even the nicknames of the bad guys take on the comic-book tinge. Baldhead’s rival is nicknamed Eyeball whom the former believes is behind his son’s murder.

Still 4.10

Caged bodies in PTU

132

Director in Action

Such comic-book details are abstract in themselves but the violence reaches its acme of abstraction in the Canton Road shootout. Lo arranges it so that Eyeball and Baldhead meet in a confrontation, but both men soon discover that their confidence in Lo has been betrayed as other parties converge at the scene: the PTU squad, the CID team led by Madam Cheung (Ruby Wong) that is investigating Ponytail’s murder, and purely by coincidence, a gang of four Chinese gunmen who have popped up apparently out of nowhere (continuing the line of coincidences that To had inscribed in The Longest Nite and Expect the Unexpected, and a thread that To would

Still 4.11 The slow-motion final shootout in Canton Road, emphasizing still figures

Directed by Johnnie To

133

pull into Breaking News). A shootout occurs, resulting in the mutual elimination of Baldhead and Eyeball, while the heavily armed Chinese desperados, who return fire as the shooting starts, are shot down by the PTU squad. The whole sequence is shot in slow-motion to emphasize the Kurosawa-esque concept of stasis within motion. As the shootout unfolds, all the protagonists are essentially static. Baldhead and Eyeball are like two gunfighters waiting to shoot each other down, while the Chinese gunmen are mown down as they stand erect, like the human objects in The Mission. The slow motion has the effect of freezing their postures in the midst of movement. The final shootout leads to possibly the most self-satisfying conclusion in To’s action cinema. Lo finds his gun in the same back-alley during a chase, after tripping again on the same banana and landing on the same spot where he had dropped his pistol, hidden among a pile of garbage. He picks up the gun to shoot the gunman chasing him and returns to the Canton Road scene. All the police personnel survive but some have their pride and positions bruised by the unexpected showdown: Madam Cheung, for instance, who for most of the film appears as a belligerent by-the-book figure trying to assert her command on Sergeant Lo and the PTU squad. As the shootout commences, Madam Cheung panics and drops her gun as she is fired upon by one of the Chinese gunmen. She hides herself inside her car during the rest of the shootout and after it’s all over, is advised by Lo to fire two shots from her gun so that “it’ll look better in the report, and you may even be commended”. She takes the advice and fires two shots, thus falling in behind the others, ensuring the survival and perpetuation of the group, and the film reaches its note of self-satisfaction as the lead protagonists dictate their reports, ultimately justifying their actions as self-defence. Hence, the film reiterates the theme of group survival and self-protection from The Mission, but here the theme is applied to the law enforcers, a major shift from the doctrine of fatalism that compelled To to wipe out his police protagonists in Expect the Unexpected. Yet the film does not seem optimistic or is only cautiously optimistic. Triumphalism is tempered by a sense of compromised integrity — the way for example that Madam Cheung has to bend her own code of conduct to ensure her standing serves as the key to the sequence (significantly, as a female, Cheung obviously feels that she falls short of her male colleagues like Lo and Mike Ho in filling the heroic role). The protagonists depart in a dream-like way as if dazed by the night’s proceedings, and PTU fades out enveloped in the same Kowloon Noir ambience as it began, with no sense of the dawn breaking, only the darkness of the night stubbornly persisting.

134

Director in Action

Breaking News: The Lady Is a Hero Breaking News starts off with a sequence that is To’s most audacious formal experiment yet — a single long take staged across a narrow street with multiple set-ups, the kind of virtuosic opening action sequence that hasn’t really been seen since Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958). The film is essentially a reworking of Expect the Unexpected, recycling its premise of a group of mainland Chinese criminals who come to Hong Kong to carry out a robbery but before they can do so are caught up in a no-holds-barred confrontation with the Hong Kong police. The opening sequence shows the Mainlanders trying to launch their operation from their Tai Kok Tsui hideout only to be thwarted by the presence of police patrolling the streets.42 The sequence begins with a low-angle shot of apartment block towers, ostensibly taken from street level, a deceptive touch because the camera is actually on a crane which floats down to street level as it catches a car moving down the street. As the car drives past, the camera holds on a man, one of the robbers, and dollies with him as he enters a building and goes up to an apartment on the first floor. The camera cranes up to the apartment and composes through the window a medium shot of the assembled Mainland gang, led by Yuen (Taiwanese singer-actor Richie Jen), getting ready to go downstairs to their car to carry out a robbery. On cue, the camera follows a scrap of newspaper which floats down and lands on the bonnet of a car in which CID officers are laying in wait to ambush the gang before they can drive away. However, two constables on patrol unwittingly intercede, trying to book the driver for a parking violation. The camera dollies up to the gang members who stand around trying to look incognito, and swivels around while the driver pleads with the constables; the camera then tracks laterally across the street. In a ploy to get the constables out of the way, the CID officer in charge Cheung Chi-hang (played by Nick Cheung) orders his undercover cops, disguised as mechanics (others are disguised as workers who have dug up a trench on the road for public works), to stage a brawl, but the brawl is only partly effective as it pulls only one constable away. The other constable is about to let the driver off but sees a bag inside the car and insists on checking it. This is the cue for the shootout, which breaks out with the robbers shooting down the intransigent cop and his partner, and the undercover CID team is forced to return fire. As the bullets fly, the camera dollies down one side of the street to catch the cops bearing the brunt of the assault and taking cover. The camera then swings around to the other side of the street to show the robbers calmly and brazenly dishing out the attack, all the time dollying down the hidden track (partly camouflaged by the public works) and expansively

Directed by Johnnie To

135

Still 4.12 Action in one long take: scenes from the opening sequence of Breaking News

cranes up again to show a long shot of the action in which one gang member fires an automatic sub-machine gun from the window of the apartment. The camera slowly zooms in on the gunman as he jumps down from the apartment onto the street and fires at a police van that has just driven up in the background of the shot. The robbers hijack the van and before driving away, fire a mortar towards Cheung’s car. The bomb explodes a few metres away from the target, which is the cue for the first cut in the sequence. Hitherto, the sequence has run uninterrupted for seven minutes.

Still 4.13 The first cut in the opening sequence of Breaking News

136

Director in Action

My description above is meant to deliver a rough approximation of the style and the way the camera covers the events. Words alone can’t do full justice to the precision and the impact of the plan-sequence (sequence shot, implying a long take). As it actually unfolds on the cinema screen, the sequence is undoubtedly more complex and multi-faceted since it involves both dialogue scenes and gunplay battle scenes perfectly coordinated and choreographed with complicated camera movements (the camera in this instance seems incredibly mobile and flexible: compare and contrast with the idea of stillness in the “shopping mall” gunfight sequence in The Mission). Because the sequence calls attention to itself for its sheer virtuosity (it was, according to To, accomplished in one first take after a three-day rehearsal43 ), To runs the risk of making the rest of the film seem like an anti-climax, but he had two main aims to achieve. Firstly, he saw the sequence as a challenge because he had never done a long take of its type before; secondly, the motivation of the sequence was to prep up the two lead actors, Richie Jen and Nick Cheung, both of whom had never done a gunplay action movie before. “I wanted them to be really involved in the whole sequence and feel what a gunfight on a Hong Kong street would be like,” To said. “Even when they are not in the scene, they are still acting because the camera hasn’t stopped.”44 From this explanation, the plan-sequence is not merely a bravura exposition of action but a proairetic text announcing the conflicting intentions and actions of the cops and the robbers represented by the two leads Nick Cheung and Richie Jen playing the chief cop and the leader of the robbers respectively; it sets up the narrative for the former’s dogged pursuit of the latter throughout the film (Cheung’s line “I don’t believe I can’t catch those bastards” is uttered more than once and serves as a recurring chase-and-catch theme, previously seen in Running out of Time and Expect the Unexpected). From an aesthetic point of view, the plan-sequence is an objective exposition of To’s theme that both the cops and the robbers are parasitically linked together (which serves as a proairetic code throughout this study informing the narratives of The Big Heat, Loving You, The Longest Nite, Expect the Unexpected and Running out of Time). The sequence then goes on to harmonize with the rest of the film, which is effectively directed and well-paced throughout, calculated, like To’s other classy “exercises” The Mission and PTU, to run just under 90 minutes (thus the idea that a brilliant opening will make the rest of the film an anti-climax doesn’t hold in this case). The film has the feel of a companion piece with PTU, as both films engage the action genre from the perspective of the police department: PTU on a micro level (as it focuses on a squad and its operation) while Breaking

Directed by Johnnie To

137

News takes a macro look at the operations of the whole police force and the inter-departmental rivalry between the CID and the OCTB (Organized Crime and Triad Bureau) in their response to a crisis. The film is much more political than To’s other action thrillers, a point that he himself acknowledged.45 The police as an institution is To’s target, which invests Breaking News with a certain strength of ambition, To clearly being interested in saying something about the way the Hong Kong Police works and where their interests lie. In fact, there was already implied criticism of the police in PTU, where the police were obsessed with self-protection as a group and this makes them no different from the gangsters in To’s view, both being grouporiented and self-possessed with their own rules. Breaking News adopts a cynical view of how the police manipulates the media to protect its own image. The political criticism of the police is introduced through the scene of a uniformed policeman who holds up his hands in a gesture of surrender during an encounter with the robbers in a second shootout following the opening sequence (Cheung and his CID operatives give chase and manage to catch up with the robbers who have abandoned the police van; another shootout ensues as the robbers calmly walk up to an ambulance and hijack it). The image of the surrendering policeman is captured by the TV media and is then broadcast to the disgust of the police force. The TV broadcast engenders much social criticism from the public and from politicians, and the rest of the film is about the police attempts to salvage their image from the negative fallout. The theme of group self-protection seen in PTU is manifested in Breaking News through a wider context that includes the police department, the media, and the public. The question of who the police really serves and protects has social and political implications. Their attempt to mount a robbery thwarted, the Mainland gang hides inside a nearby housing estate (in Yaumatei’s Ferry Street) but they are soon discovered by Cheung’s CID team, who continue to pursue the gang against orders from Kelly Chen’s OCTB officer, Inspector Rebecca Fong. She has been given command of the whole operation to hunt down and capture the Mainlanders and to put on a good show of it by using the media, feeding it with images and news provided by the police themselves. As the Hong Kong Police lays siege on the estate, Fong literally directs a show from behind the scenes with images recorded by wireless cameras pinned to the uniform lapels of policemen and the special forces mobilized to the estate to capture or kill the Mainlanders. However, the robbers themselves prove to be savvy media manipulators. They are able to photograph (through a mobile camera phone) unflattering pictures of the special forces being dealt a severe licking during a chance encounter which they offload onto the

138

Director in Action

Internet in the home computer of a family they have taken hostage. Thus To demonstrates that the robbers have a role to play in the wider social context too, stressing his belief that the cops and the robbers are interrelated in society, and that both groups feed on each other to survive, both able and willing to use and manipulate modern communications technology to put across their points of view. To’s view of the robbers is less cynical or critical insofar as he considers them beyond the law and therefore beyond the purview of political criticism. Despite their murderous and terroristic actions, To casts no moral judgement on the robbers (and later the professional killers who coincidentally are hiding out in the same building and brought together with the robbers by circumstances). They are people with no futures to protect having already given up their lives to fate, therefore To shows them all killed as an inevitable consequence of their actions (fate inevitably delivering the final punishment on the criminals) — the theme of heroic fatalism that is continued here in a matter-of-fact manner, without much need of exposition or underlining since To’s audience would have become familiar with the theme and its variations from the Milkyway films of the last chapter and those following A Hero Never Dies in this chapter. The difference here is that the robbers are not eulogized but are rather shown to be human, a quality that is expressed in the scene where Yuen and Chun (the chief professional killer played by Mainland actor You Yong) cook a meal for themselves and the hostage family. However, the scene also accentuates once again the homosociality of the group in To’s cinema. The scene of the meal-taking, which the robbers feed to the media through the Internet, incidentally illustrates the idea of fate, as a line spoken by Yuen makes clear “Destiny has brought us together to share a meal,” but it also goes to shore up the political point about the interrelatedness and the complementarity of the cops and the robbers as Rebecca Fong counters the robbers’ meal scene with her own images of the cops eating out of their lunch boxes (the TV cameras are directed to display the nutritious contents of the boxes). “I want to show people that the police are also human, that they are also hungry,” Fong declares, and then later makes the statement which summarizes the theme of the film, “The person who knows how to manipulate the media is the hero.” With the delivery of this line, To shifts the accent onto the concept of heroism, moving the narrative towards a post-homosocial understanding of heroism, one that is tuned to technological progress and its manipulation. To implies that Fong is the hero of the piece, and dispenses a twist to this effect as the film nudges to its climax. Up to now, Breaking News has largely unfolded in the mode of a cops and robbers thriller where the action is

Directed by Johnnie To

139

dominated wholly by men, notwithstanding Rebecca Fong’s role as the commander. In many respects, the character of Fong is an unsympathetic part since she personifies the more cynical aspects of the drama as the person who came up with the idea of putting on a good show, and whose relationship with her chief played by Simon Yam (in a cameo) lands her the job of commanding the operation (To hints of an affair between them in a brief but telling scene). Kelly Chen’s deadpan look while seemingly designed to make her look cool also conveys the impression that she may not be up to the job and that she may panic and lose her cool — an implicit prejudice against the female that To suggests through the subtle interplay between Fong and her immediate superior, Superintendent Yeung (played by Cheung Siu-fai). The intransigence and faux-cool image of female officers who play by the book, threatening the unity and integrity of the group was a theme last seen in PTU where the part of the unsympathetic officer was played by Ruby Wong. This part is now extended into Breaking News where it is modulated to reflect political points about the role of the police, the role of the media, and the interrelatedness of the police and the criminal. In a sense, Fong encapsulates the spirit of the picture in both the form and the content. To shows that at no time does she lose her cool, and Chen’s deadpan look confirms this. The film is a studied expression of coolness, a kind of manipulation of cool that is foreshadowed by the opening plan-sequence, a study of cool in its execution. However, To also makes an objective point about heroism: in his nonjudgmental view of the robbers, we see the proposition that the bad guys can be heroes, thus the role of the hero is not bound by moral judgment or determined by the thin line that divides the cops and the robbers. Breaking News proceeds from a sequence that aesthetically speaking is whole, there being no point-of-view or subjective cuts to align scenes with one or two key protagonists from both sides of the line. In To’s view, the robbers could cross the line and become cops and vice versa. The cool exterior of Breaking News refracts the action in the most objective manner possible. Just as there are multiple set-ups in the opening plan-sequence, To allows for multiple perspectives (illustrated by the use of split-screen) as the narrative evolves through the points of view of the three main characters: Yuen, the CID man Cheung, and Rebecca Fong. To is interested in how different characters respond to a given situation — the basis of The Mission and PTU; and as in those films, the resolution of the situation defines the heroism of the characters. Fong’s role is the most substantial of the three characters not only because it carries the weight of To’s political criticism against the police,

140

Director in Action

but because it also carries a political message about To’s genre outlook and his male-centered films. To’s basic innovation in the characterisations of Breaking News lies in our perception of Fong as an armchair hero. The twist that To delivers is to make her rise above this perceived role: Fong does not merely theorize about manipulating the media, she actually manipulates it, and what is more, she herself goes on to become an action hero. In the superb climax, any reservations the audience may have harboured about the character should dissipate as she takes her own initiative to chase after and capture the surviving remnants of the gang. In effect, To redeems and vindicates the part of the female officer who was essentially humiliated at the end of PTU and the conclusion that To reaches at the climax of Breaking News is that the female can be a bona fide hero as much as her male colleague (in this instance, the CID officer Cheung, who represents effectively a stereotype of the genre). The sequence of scenes in which this objective point is made is as follows: Fong leaves her post to inspect the scene of the events that led to the killings of all the robbers save Yuen and Chun. She is able to trace Yuen’s movements from a mobile phone she has retrieved from one of the dead robbers (the line being kept open and connected to Yuen’s phone), and finally finds him at a traffic crossing. Giving chase but unable to catch him, Fong is taken hostage and compelled to go inside a hijacked mini-bus. Yet, Yuen is not interested in a getaway but rather to fulfil his new role as an assassin, having reversed his role with the hired killer Chun. (In fact the dialogue between them in the scene where both men escape from the building by blowing a hole at the bottom of the lift shaft where they are joined by Cheung and they exchange fire, is a good example of To’s objective view about cops and robbers. Yuen says to Chun: “Why don’t you become a robber?”, Chun replies: “Why don’t you become a hired killer?”, followed by Cheung’s riposte: “Have both of you ever thought of becoming a cop?” whereby they

Still 4.14 Face-off inside a mini-bus between the male robber and the female cop in Breaking News

Directed by Johnnie To

141

continue shooting at each other. The scene illustrates the idea of interchangeability of roles but also the way that all the protagonists are supposed to play prescribed roles which by their nature can easily shift and roll over into each other.) As the mini-bus heads towards the target’s destination (Cheong Wah Street in Cheong Sha Wan46 ) where the assassination will be carried out, Fong goes through the usual attempts to persuade Yuen to surrender. Shots are suddenly fired from behind by Cheung, who is giving chase on a motorcycle. This whole scene is covered in one single take, another remarkable achievement of coordination and precision. The exchange of fire between Yuen and Cheung momentarily dislodges Fong’s position as the heroic focus: she becomes a passive participant being inhibited by her hostage role, but the import of her continuing presence, signified by the long take, is the fact that she remains the epitome of cool (Fong also makes the pointed remark that Cheung’s action was “rash” when Yuen compliments him on being a cop who doggedly does his duty).

Still 4.15 Gunfire action as an example of Johnnie To’s achievement of coordination and precision in Breaking News

The visual look of the sequence is also significant — in fact the look of the entire series of scenes beginning with Fong tracking down Yuen, her internment inside the mini-bus, and in the shootout climax, is strikingly shot through a blue filter that has the effect of bathing all the scenes in blue, which progressively becomes murkier and murkier, rendering details in gradations of blue and black. The effect can only be described as noir coolness, as if determined by Fong keeping her cool to the very end even when her life is threatened under fire. Equally it could also be determined by Yuen’s coolness though, from his perspective, the scenes would take on a sense of impending death, in keeping with the notion of fatalism. Both the worldviews, so to speak, of the cop and the robber are intertwined but each have their respective

142

Director in Action

roles to play. Fong is handcuffed to Yuen as he goes through with the assassination. Wounded and surrounded by police, Yuen points his gun at Fong who remains unfazed. “You are not raising your hands?” he asks, “No, I can’t let the show down”, she replies. Expressing his admiration, Yuen declares, “I’d cast you as the female lead, if I could”, before firing two shots in the air which trigger his death, for he is then shot down. The film reaches its logical conclusion with the line “You’ve played the hero too,” spoken by Superintendent Yeung as he removes the cuffs from Fong (the whole motif of handcuffing in To’s films is here repeated, as is the stand-off between fugitive and police: cf. the last scene in Running out of Time). The line may be taken as ironic in the circumstances, and the whole conceit of the police’s manipulation of the media is kept on the side of cynicism rather than resolved in any satisfactory way, which some might see as a failing of the film (perhaps expecting a vindicative statement about state control or the increasing tendency towards authoritarianism in Hong Kong’s governing circles) but they would have missed the point. In the context of To’s cinema, it is a notable line, being a realistic and hardnosed acknowledgement of the female as a hero in To’s action cinema, and in so far as To’s career is a work in progress, it could be the forerunner of a new heroic archetype embodied by the female. This new heroic female archetype would perhaps combine Richie Jen’s male fatalism with Kelly Chen’s deadpan coolness, and a touch of her cynicism into the bargain.

Conclusion In Breaking News, To’s tendency towards male-centeredness and his fundamental celebration of the male as the heroic archetype is consciously knocked back not only by the manifestation of Kelly Chen as the female hero (who however shares the limelight with her indomitable male colleague from the CID) but by the effect of a meta-criticism that To works into the narrative and his own consciousness about his films that extends to PTU, The Mission and at least as far back as Expect the Unexpected. In part, the consciousness of his own films stems from the idea of providing continuity to his themes, primarily a thesis about the nature of heroism and a criticism of it, but the other part is the desire to do himself one better in terms of style, which results in the stunning plan-sequence which opens Breaking News. The experimental streak in achieving a formalist style marks this cycle of To’s works, at least insofar as To is able to mark his films with one or two virtuosic sequences that show To’s indebtedness to the legacies of the masters (Kurosawa, et al).

Directed by Johnnie To

143

The Mission, PTU and Breaking News are graced with outstanding sequences which show To evolving his approach to genre. To is the active agent of genre evolution in which we see “a gradual shift in narrative emphasis from social value to formal aesthetic value”.47 Such a shift also means that in some respects, the three formalist films are flawed works by dint of the fact that they are “exercises”. They seem pat and therefore constrained. The protagonists are self-conscious and too-studied models rather than characters. One could note that Lau Ching-wan, To’s favourite actor, does not appear in all three films and subsequently, they lack the human warmth and charm (or conversely, in bad or tough guy roles, the menace and obstinacy) of Lau’s characters in the string of Milkyway films discussed in Chapter 3 and in A Hero Never Dies, Where a Good Man Goes, and Running out of Time. Running out of Time is possibly To’s best film because it doesn’t strive as much to be self-conscious, and therefore less pretentious. Andy Lau and Lau Ching-wan are at their best entertaining selves befitting the theme of gamesmanship, effectively trying to deflect each other’s egos and personae. The film is well-paced and works equally as a thriller and a comedy. A Hero Never Dies is a very stylish work but falls just short of its ambition to cross tragedy with heroism, and excepting Lau Ching-wan, the rest of the cast are weak. Both films are more typical of To’s mainstream pictures but are also untypical in the sense that they contain dark characterizations of genre archetypes, or in the case of Running out of Time, an intrinsically ambiguous narrative. Nothing in Running out of Time is predictable. Yet somehow, the film seems to have been overtaken by the three auteur “exercises” although in fact it has been more influential in the Hong Kong cinema — witness the doppelgänger play-offs between Andy Lau and Tony Leung in the first edition of Infernal Affairs (2002) and between Leon Lai and Ekin Cheng in Benny Chan’s excellent Heroic Duo (2003). The imprint of the “shopping mall” gunfight sequence in The Mission, the slow-motion gunfight in Canton Road in PTU, and the plan-sequence opening of Breaking News, all leave an indelible impression on the memory. These examples convince us of To’s skill as a craftsman auteur, one able to craft superb sequences and integrate them seamlessly into the narratives. The films, despite their flaws, are worthy of admiration, destined to become classic expressions of the action form, replete as they are with To’s themes of noir fatalism and cynicism, the impermanence of life necessitating the survival of the group and its self-protection. At the same time, they are idiosyncratic enough to lead us to expect more from To the next time. In a way, their flaws don’t really matter, as flaws are the essence of experimentalism that pushes the evolution of the action genre forward and indicates To’s continuing

144

Director in Action

progress as an auteur. In the next chapter, we will examine a selection of To’s works where the flaws qualify his auteur status and make him an uneven auteur, as I have called him.

The Uneven Auteur

145

5 The Uneven Auteur

A Broad Church The career of Johnnie To has tended to move within a wide berth of genre films which can be fairly divided into “commercial” or “personal” projects. For those films in the former category, To keeps his eyes carefully trained on the market, taking few risks, producing mass-entertainments geared towards avoiding the pitfall of box-office failure attached to the more personal “exercises”. Examples are the Chinese New Year comedies Wu Yen (2001), Fat Choi Spirit (2002), Love for All Seasons (2003) as well as special effects-lite farces such as Love on a Diet (2001) and My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (2002). They are the kind of genre works that To did in his Cinema City period before he entered his “personal” period, and all were commercially successful. More recently, To has re-tackled the romance genre in Turn Left Turn Right (2003) and Yesterday Once More (2004) with mixed results. An analysis of all of these films is beyond the scope of this book: although most contain outbursts of violent action (whether swordplay or kung fu or just pure slapstick), they are at best marginal to the genre that is the purview of this study. Another way of looking at To’s career is to see it as a broad church under which can be placed practically everything that To has ever made, including his minor and major works, demonstrating his remarkable diversity as a director, his adept handling of different genres and moods. To’s nimbleness in straddling art house cinema and mass-audience entertainments is an admirable trait although not uncommon in Hong Kong where both strands have a tendency to overlap. But a less charitable view might be that To is indiscriminate in developing projects designed to maintain his company as a going concern and its commercial standing in the industry. Certainly, he has

146

Director in Action

maintained a high output, persistently making three or four films a year, moving from one project to another seemingly without batting an eyelid. His prolific output is symptomatic of Hong Kong cinema’s propensity to resemble a miniature Hollywood of the old studio system, and in this respect, To can be compared to old-time movie directors such as Raoul Walsh, Michael Curtiz, John Ford, or Howard Hawks who were able to churn out minor and major films as a matter of course. Thus, shoulder to shoulder with The Mission, PTU and Breaking News are films such as Wu Yen, Love on a Diet and My Left Eye Sees Ghosts which are essentially hurriedly conceived projects put through the motions of production to meet predetermined release schedules (either as Chinese New Year Movies or Summer Movies). Then, there are the five films making up the focus of this chapter: Needing You (2000), Help! (2000), Fulltime Killer (2001), Running on Karma (2003), and Throw Down (2004), a mixed bag of risk-taking works containing some of the experimental elements of the “exercises”. Since the films seem more strained than usual by To’s idiosyncratic handling, I prefer to identify them as “neo-exercises” — a sort of third space of intractable idiosyncrasy, not as formally elegant as the “exercises” but not outright failures either — making them worthy of critical consideration. My own assessments of these films will be made clear below; at this point, I should state that I like some better than others — but all are personal and even original works, even those I do not particularly like (Fulltime Killer and Running on Karma), which brings us back to the question of To’s unevenness and the difficulty it poses in assessing him as an auteur. Firstly, it seems obvious that the unevenness is an outcome of the pairing between To and Wai Kafai. With the exception of Throw Down, all the films discussed below are directed as conjoined works of the two directors. Wai was instrumental in working out the stories and organizing the hierarchy of themes, and To’s task was as a glorified metteur-en-scène, making sure that whatever Wai wrote would be filmable within the allocated budget, and the stories are told in the most interesting manner possible according to the scheme of thematic movements formulated by Wai, which can be summarized as follows: romantic destiny, meeting, separation, need, and reunion (the paradigm of Needing You that is repeated in the romantic comedies); heroic destiny, failure, revival, fulfillment and acceptance (Help!, Running on Karma, and Throw Down — although this last film was directed only by To, it conforms to the schema). The films work on the symbiotic partnership of the two men and clearly, To feels more comfortable in being credited with Wai on an equal basis than with any other director so far. However, To’s role in the partnership has a strong supervisory component, a legacy of the Milkyway period and of a work

The Uneven Auteur

147

such as Too Many Ways to Be Number One in which Wai was given a free hand to realize his vision of subjective hysteria. In effect, To exercises a restraining hand on the narratives of the To-Wai films, such that Wu Yen and Help! are controlled farces, while Turn Left, Turn Right becomes a very dull romance (prefiguring the even duller Yesterday Once More, which carries To’s solo credit — in this case, one could argue that Yesterday Once More could have benefited from more of Wai’s input). Secondly, the unevenness is a function of generic plurality and diversity of forms. There is no essentialist text, and at the same time, there are many essentialist texts. The comedies can be separated into pastiches (Wu Yen), slapstick (Wu Yen, Love on a Diet, My Left Eye Sees Ghosts), romances (Needing You, Love on a Diet, My Left Eye Sees Ghosts, Turn Left, Turn Right), and phantasy (Wu Yen, My Left Eye Sees Ghosts). A single film can combine one or two generic forms. Unevenness may also be a feature in a single genre — as in the gunplay action form demonstrated by Fulltime Killer. Here the unevenness stems from the vocal quality of disparate languages even while the movie coheres around the actions of the two heroes, hired killers who compete with each other as rivals, then doubles. Running on Karma is the paradigm of amorphous plurality, bouncing in and out of genres: comedy, detective, horror, mystery, romance, and even a “spiritual” (a genre more pronounced in the Indian cinema, some of which elements are borrowed by To and Wai). Throw Down is only an action film by virtue of its association with the sport of judo. Judo in Throw Down replaces gunplay but it also shapes the film into a symbolic or abstract action movie that can’t be placed generically into the action category. Taken together, these films do not really support the theory of To’s auteur credentials being tied to a specific genre typology, but they do suggest some kind of theory about To’s range as a filmmaker, one who tackles subjects that expand his outlook and our opinion of his career. Assessing To’s works in terms of their intensity of the formalism gives us that rational vantage point needed to view To as an inconsistent auteur. In formalist theory, form includes all aspects of the work; form is a set of functions correlating all the elements of the work with respect to its system.1 If we look at To’s career as a system of correlated elements, we can begin to consider inconsistency as one element in his auteurial system. In this chapter, inconsistency in To’s works is seen as a virtue whereas in classical auteur theory, consistency of style or consistency of concentration in a particular genre, as exemplified by Hitchcock, is a virtue. Inconsistency is a structural means of breaking down constraint, a primal artistic urge in directors who wish to expand their horizons and not be limited by the constraints of genre and the industry. However, inconsistency also

148

Director in Action

means that the work is flawed and that the director “transgresses the formal continuity of attitudes” and breaks the rules.2 Inconsistency, seen as both virtue and transgression, is at the core of the five films analyzed below. In these works, the traditional concept of genre devolves into a typically postmodern receptacle for different sectarian modes of thought, and even different nationalities and languages. The idea of different sectarian views may not be too far out if we see a film such as Help! as one that preaches a basically Christian view of charity while Running on Karma is preoccupied with Buddhist notions of death and reincarnation pointing the way to personal redemption; and as for different languages, all we need to do is listen to Fulltime Killer. Genre itself is a broad church or, to refer to Jameson’s arguments on genre, a social institution based on “tacit agreements and contracts” that make up its own series.3 For Neale, the cinema is a social institution in the sense of a cinematic institution based on Metz’s theory that cinema is more than just an industry, it is a “mental machinery” in which genre is a component of the machine.4 The institutional idea of genre, broadly defined as a mental process, points to a method of discovering modes of signification, the structures and the conventions that relate to each other and to each unit within themselves. To’s position in the broad church of genre is one of difficulty and awkwardness, which underlines his development as an uneven auteur. On the one hand, genre is indeed a constraint, since all directors are subjected to the rules of genre. Genre constrains as much by its reputation as by its conventions since there is still a tendency among some critics to view all genre films as inferior works (in this respect, genre theory might have harmed the cause of genre itself). On the other hand, the empirical evidence of To’s genre films suggests an accommodation with auteurism — a reaction against genre theory as an indication of the postmodern condition of Hong Kong cinema which allows filmmakers to overcome structural constraints as part of a movement of postmodern cinema following the adoption of new technology and skills. To’s unevenness is determined by the aesthetics of the postmodern movement and its immersion in the uneven capitalistic market conditions and the history of Hong Kong throughout the 1990s: the ending of the boom of the 1980s, the bursting of the bubble in the property market, the unstable geopolitical environment, and the anxiety of great political changes (from the Tian’anmen Massacre in 1989 to the 1997 handover).5 The Hong Kong film industry has throughout its history of development followed and absorbed outside influences which change the conditions of production. In the postmodern age, this is often reflected within the perimeters of a director’s

The Uneven Auteur

149

career. Postmodernism allows To to concentrate on a particular genre and excel as an auteur at one time-period, and in an alternating time-period, it dislocates To’s concentration to make commercial entertainments in other genres, thus making him an uneven auteur. Postmodernism and formalist theory offer an avenue for analyzing the following cluster of Johnnie To films that do not seem to conform to the gunplay action form that he has excelled in. These films are a function of the auteur in the formalist-structuralist application of his career — as a work of many elements that cannot be seen separately from the system of his cinematic language. Postmodernism posits a theory of To’s career as one fully integrated into the economic and social system of Hong Kong that is uneven in its development. Formalism demands that we look at To’s films in correlated parts that are unequal in development and in their relationships. Following Terry Eagleton, postmodernism is a social theory of culture that celebrates kitsch and camp, the bad along with the good, in a “later, less euphoric stage of technological capitalism”.6 Imperfection, according to Todorov, “is a guarantee of survival”,7 and though it is not the purpose of this book to show that To’s work is imperfect, I do intend to show that it exhibits a pattern of deterministic flaws that illustrate Todorov’s maxim. In the postmodern age, the social order accepts the broad church of inconsistent, imperfect forms as a distinct part of all commodified forms of culture and art — “postmodernist culture will dissolve its own boundaries and become coextensive with ordinary commodified life itself, whose ceaseless exchanges and mutations in any case recognize no formal frontiers which are not constantly transgressed”, so writes Terry Eagleton.8 Finally, befitting the broad church description, To is a highly social filmmaker (as opposed to the idea of the independent artist who works within the field of high culture, free of any constraint), a generalist in his approach to genre, a filmmaker who addresses issues of morality and religion, marriage and commitment, life and death — practically the entire narrative spectrum covered by the films below — strengthening the case of their worthiness for serious criticism.

Needing You: A Moment of Romance Needing You is an office romance,9 featuring Sammi Cheng as the “OL” (office lady), a figure from Japanese soap operas incorporated into Hong Kong cinema and television. According to The Dorama Encyclopedia, the OL is

150

Director in Action

a pretty girl hired to do vague secretarial chores, though more likely to spend her time making coffee, doing the photocopying, and “brightening the office”. In a slumping economy less forgiving toward sinecures, the term has become a byword for bimbo.10

In Needing You, Sammi Cheng’s OL is a sexually unfulfilled female. In this sense, she embodies the ambiguous connotations of the term “working girl”, as explained by Yvonne Tasker, in which “the representation of working women almost inevitably involves an invocation of sexuality/sexual performance”.11 In the film, Sammi seeks a male dream lover, who turns out to be Andy Lau. Lau plays Andy Cheung (his Chinese name, Wah-siu, of more significance, will be discussed later in the piece), the sales manager of a computer software company where Sammi works as the newly-hired secretarial assistant. Her character is named Kinki Kwok — the name Kinki invoking the sexuality or sexual performance expected of a working girl, which in fact is more than Sammi Cheng can deliver: as she plays her, Kinki is more kooky than kinky. Kinki suffers a nervous breakdown on her first day at work because her boyfriend has declined to marry her. She keeps a good luck red packet to help her find Prince Charming, relying on fate to deliver him to her. The red packet is an unlikely Destiny-machine but in Chinese tradition, couples are brought together by yuanfen, a benevolent form of fate. Following her boyfriend’s rejection of marriage, she loses her red packet during a lunch break in a restaurant where by chance she meets her boss Andy who has just ordered a bowl of noodles with “bull’s penis” (a translation taken from the English subtitles, and an expression which befits the purposes of a sight gag I will go on to explain below). In the bull’s penis, we have a case of the vulgar sight gag containing the most sublime of meanings. In his article “Notes on the Sight Gag”, Noël Carroll tells us that the sight gag is “a form of visual humor in which amusement is generated by the play of alternative interpretations projected by the image or image series”.12 Andy Cheung has a reputation as a notorious womanizer and eating bull’s penis is in character: supposedly, it is an aphrodisiac and therefore a mark of his womanizing, but on an extra-cinematic level, it also plays on one’s awareness of persistent rumors in the real-life media of Andy Lau’s homosexuality. Andy’s eating of the bull’s penis becomes office gossip inadvertently passed on by Kinki when she is warned of Andy’s reputation as a womanizer by a sister OL. The gossip passing through the office grapevine distorts the original information and has Andy eating raw bull’s penis; the next day, a gay clerk calls him “Mr. Penis”. The sight of Andy eating the head of the bull’s penis sets Kinki off on

The Uneven Auteur

151

another nervous fumble (from her point of view, Andy is trying to seduce her, while from Andy’s point of view, he is only eating meat): she drops her bag and loses her red packet, which quite by chance sticks on to Andy’s shoe. She never finds it, and the association of penis and packet is at the very least an unexpected, most likely improvised, indicator of romantic destiny (or yuanfen). If nothing else, it should remind us that To is an alumnus of the school of Stephen Chow comedies. Back in his car, Andy notices the red packet stuck on his shoe. He removes it and throws it out of the window, but the wind blows it right back into the car, without him noticing it. The throwing of the red packet and the blow-back recurs later in the film, and it is a sign of the hand of fate, or the Destiny-machine, at work, conspiring to deliver Andy to Kinki. After all, it is she who has actually seen him eating bull’s penis while everyone else has not witnessed it: we, the audience, are of course privy to the scene, and the prescribed convention of the romantic comedy genre is such that we can predict Kinki and Andy will become lovers and end up together after some trials and tribulations. The penis-and-packet episode has therefore a long-term significance, but the bull’s penis sight gag constitutes an interruptive segment in the narrative. It relies for effect on its abruptness, the image of the bull’s penis onanistically inserted into the narrative schema at quick staccato intervals: 1) the sight of the whole bull’s penis, elongated like an intestinal organ, 2) the sight of the cook snipping off the head of the penis into Andy’s bowl of noodles, 3) the sight of Andy picking up the head with his chopsticks and putting it into his mouth — these images inserted into the sequence showing Andy going to lunch and sitting down at the table where Kinki is also seated. Following Carroll who enunciates several types of sight gags, the bull’s penis may be seen as an object analog which can be either literal or metaphorical, or it could be a mimed metaphor where the audience sees “an object metaphorically equated with something that it was not”13 (in this sense, we are led briefly to think that Andy is about to do a blow-job as he hesitates before he swallows the penis head). I am not sure that the bull’s penis falls into any one of the categories that Carroll proposes (his examples are taken mostly from classic Hollywood silent comedies) but the episode is certainly amusing in its own incongruous way, deriving its humor from the object of the bull’s penis which can withstand both literal and metaphorical interpretations (and both the object analog and the mimed metaphor are variations of each other). This sight gag is in another sense disturbing because it is vulgar in the Rabelaisian sense (as a sign of the grotesque body language which is induced by, and itself induces, the behaviour of the characters) and therefore transgressive. Carroll’s examples of sight gags are classical but even so, they

152

Director in Action

are essentially transgressive in nature — comedy as a function of the “transgression of social inhibitions about the proper way in which to treat the human body”.14 In Needing You, the sight gag of the bull’s penis obviously denotes a sexual anxiety (sex transgresses the human body). Kinki has an anxiety about having sex with Andy and Andy has an anxiety of neurotic women or indeed, anxiety of the female sex; but the point I wish to make is that the sight gag transgresses the tone of the narrative. While it allows for all sorts of interpretations, no one interpretation seems satisfactory and we are not sure why it is funny. Hence, a structural unevenness is evident: the episode is funny while the movie itself isn’t all that funny. The ultimate signification of bull’s penis and red packet in the narrative is that Fate has determined that Prince Charming is the womanizing Andy and not the young straitlaced cyber-billionaire Roger (Raymond Wong) who courts Kinki. Roger’s one claim to romantic manhood, as a prerequisite determined by Fate, is that he is a collector of high-performance motorbikes (more on this later). When it becomes clear to Roger that Kinki does not love him, he proposes; in fact, he practically forces her to marry him by improvising a show of wealth and power. He books a wedding cruise on a luxury liner, and drives her to Ocean Harbour with all her family and friends in tow. Kinki ultimately holds off the pressure and temptations, and returns to Andy (here another instance of prescribed convention). Fate delivers happiness rather than tragedy and death (the wont of To’s action heroes), but not before the protagonists have been subjected to bouts of nervous psychosis. Kinki’s pathology breaks out whenever she becomes despairing in love (due to her boyfriend’s infidelity, or Andy’s supposed indifference towards her), she is overcome by an urge to clean-up, or to wipe things clean. Psycho-pathological behavior marks To’s characters in the action narrative, usually manifested as violence foreshadowing a character’s impending downfall, and after the downfall, the character claws his way back to redemption (Loving You and A Hero Never Dies exemplify this trend). The action films are marked by fatalism as the tragedy of the human condition while the comedies present fatalism as the harbinger of happiness (death is clearly no impediment, as in My Left Eye Sees Ghosts, to Fate finding a way to bring lovers together). Fate is also the invisible artistic hand — the unseen auteur, the knot that ties Needing You to To’s first effort as producer, namely A Moment of Romance (1990), a hugely successful gangster-romance picture, the direction of which To claims as part of the metacriticism inscribed in Needing You (A Moment of Romance is credited to Benny Chan, and it was the first film produced by Johnnie To — see Chapter 3). For example, To and Wai inserted the

The Uneven Auteur

153

masculine symbol of the sportbike as a conscious reference to A Moment of Romance. In that film, Andy Lau’s character, named Wah-dee, rides a Suzuki RGV 500, a hard symbol of his macho masculinity which had obviously impressed Kinki since she displays a knowledge of bikes and immediately recognizes the model from the film, dubbed the “Cupid Express”, among Roger’s collection (the significance being that Kinki herself has seen A Moment of Romance and is looking for her own Wah-dee). Wah-dee is a gangster who, during a getaway after a robbery, abducts a rich young girl (Wu Chien-lien) as a hostage; she later falls in love with him. At the climax, Wah-dee, fatally wounded, carries the rich girl away on his Suzuki. They speed up the rampway in Admiralty, rushing headlong to their destiny (this image is repeated in Needing You, though the sportbike used in this instance is a Honda). Wahdee dies in the typical heroic fashion of the 1980s, stabbed to death as he kills his enemy (an ending similar to that of Wong Kar-wai’s As Tears Go By which also starred Andy Lau as a lovestruck gangster). In Needing You, the Chinese name of Andy Lau’s character is Wah-siu (meant to echo Wah-dee). He is totally inept with a motorbike. Because of Wah-siu’s ineptness, Wah-dee himself turns up on his “Cupid Express” (this time on a Honda NSR 250), a god on a Destiny-machine dressed in a white tuxedo, emerging in an eternal return, since everything is foretold, to transport Andy to Ocean Harbour so that he can declare his love for Kinki. Andy does this by holding up a sign on which he scribbled “I need you”, which he didn’t know were the very words that Kinki had written on a piece of paper enclosed inside the red packet (we saw Kinki praying with this red packet held between her hands in the film’s opening scene, probably at the advice of a fortuneteller). In the fantasy world of this movie, we can expect she is predestined to meet her Prince Charming this way. In Needing You, the fortune-teller is Fate itself, or one should say, the Hand of the Auteur (the Auteur takes over in an inexorable, teleological fashion in the To-Wai films so that even if To functions purely as a metteur-en-scène, the films inevitably bear the mark of To’s auteurist credentials). Nothing else can sufficiently explain the chain of associations: the castrated bull’s penis (with Andy eating the head; only those without a sense of humour would take this scene as anything less than a mockery of Andy’s character), the flitting red packet, the urge to clean up, the sportbike hero who doesn’t get his girl. It’s an incongruent chain of associations to be sure, but it indicates the kind of neurotic, psychopathological comedy that is the essence of To’s work with Wai Ka-fai, cf. Help!, Love on a Diet, Fat Choi Spirit, My Left Eye Sees Ghosts. It matters little whether or not the psychosis or the pathology is a rollover symptom of the gunplay violence in To’s other films and that this results in

154

Director in Action

an irruptive beat inside the auteur’s system — the beat persisting in whatever film he does, causing a certain disequilibrium in the characters and the narratives. The pathology is structural, not biological: the moment lovers are reunited in the happy ending which is a demand of genre convention, the pathology disappears (in the action films, it disappears with death). But To’s objective detachment from his characters is quite characteristic of his auteur style: one sees this as a manifestation of coolness in The Mission, PTU and Breaking News, whereas in the comedies, To’s coolness is like a veneer of Styrofoam from which the characters try to break out of. As I have pointed out earlier, To’s is the restraining auteur’s hand (ever conscious of the hysteria that Wai wrought in Too Many Ways to Be Number One) and the characters are pathological objects necessarily tempered by Fate. Finally, the selfconscious allusions to A Moment of Romance are another mark of the auteur’s hand. Needing You demonstrates that To can’t wipe his slate clean even if he wanted to; signification is always found in its relation with another signification. To is himself pathologically attached to the idea of proving that he is the auteur of that earlier film — but at least his pathology is manifested as humour.

Help!: Hong Kong Hospital Help! was made almost back-to-back with Needing You and was released just over a month after the latter opened in the summer of 2000. Both films were To’s first productions for the new company One Hundred Years of Film, which he helped to form for producer Charles Heung. They were made in the wake of The Mission, a critical success for To, winning him the Hong Kong Film Awards’ Best Director Award that year, and they were clearly intended as departures from To’s gunplay action style after a run of films in that mode — examples of To doing something different, with Needing You being noteworthy for having the most pronounced female lead character in To’s films since The Heroic Trio (1993) (though it is debatable whether as an average neurotic female of the “OL” variety, she constitutes any kind of breakthrough in the cinema of Johnnie To in terms of awarding heroic status to the female). However, Help! had seemed to me at the time the more impressive of the two films, and it is arguably the best of the films that To made in collaboration with Wai Ka-fai, in both aesthetic and narrative terms. In retrospect, I found it impressive because it most reminded me of Too Many Ways to Be Number One, though the film also now appears more calculated and therefore much less effective than the earlier film as an exercise in mass

The Uneven Auteur

155

hysteria. This could be attributed, again, to To’s restraining hand as the codirector. Help! is set almost completely in a hospital which acts as a microcosm of society, in the vein of Lindsay Anderson’s 1982 satire Britannia Hospital. The Hong Kong society represented in the hospital is not a cross-section of the real Hong Kong; rather, the film dwells on a class divide between the professional elite of the hospital (the doctors, the nurses, the faceless bureaucrats) and a handful of mostly poor and miserable patients who are at the mercy of the hospital elite. The object of attack is the materialism and uncaring nature of Hong Kong society, a capitalist, free-market economy that rewards its citizens for materialist and selfish attitudes, while the poor and the sick are pushed to the wayside. The film is thus a real satire. The plot concerns a hospital whose benefactor Sir Ho Kau-kei (the name is a pun on the Cantonese expression for willful sloppiness or doing as one pleases) has checked himself in for treatment after being struck by lightning. The staff do not recognize him and he is treated with wanton neglect. He then resolves to reform the hospital and entrusts this task to a young female doctor (Cecilia Cheung), the only person who cares to take a look at him, and the two men she idolizes, Joe (Ekin Cheng), a former doctor cashiered from the same hospital for refusing to toe the line and now working as a car mechanic, and Jim (Jordan Chan), a surgeon who, like the rest of the staff, has put aside the Hippocratic oath to look after his own material interests. The trio pushes the reforms through as best they can but are defeated by the bureaucracy, leading to their resignations and those of colleagues whom they have managed to win to their side. The dysfunctional workings of the hospital are a grotesque fantasy, the target of which is to expose the ills of the capitalist system rather than the more narrow issue of healthcare or hospital reform. The form of the satire is one of inversion, its intent being to subvert: hence the doctors and nurses and the rest of the hospital staff, obsessed with self-interest, are much sicker than the patients. The portrayal of the doctors’ incompetence is designed to break the myth of Hong Kong efficiency while the hidden bureaucracy (who later scamper away when they realize that the game is up and are trapped inside a lift) reflects the post-97 tendency of unrepresentative, bureaucratic governance. As a post-97 treatise, Help! proposes that professional standards in Hong Kong have declined and that disillusionment has set in; but as a satire, there is a huge element of myth-making and wishful thinking in its post-97 political implications: the wish that Hong Kong has declined (while the truth is that it is not as bad as all that the film portrays), and that there are still good people who care about professional standards and are compassionate and

156

Director in Action

supererogatory (while the truth is that most people are as apathetic and selfobsessed as they were in pre-97 Hong Kong). The film mitigates its own absurdity by concluding, Caligari-like, that it was really a series of demented visions in the minds of patients who think they are doctors or nurses while waiting for medical attention in the emergency ward. In the end, the film mocks itself — essentially ridiculing the notion of heroism in the contemporary world, such that the idea of selfless sacrifice and the doing of good deeds is broached in the context of a post-97 satire, and is then put down as a piece of madness. Help! is a full-fledged hospital movie in To’s filmography already studded with hospital scenes (The Heroic Trio, Loving You, Lifeline, Expect the Unexpected, A Hero Never Dies). It also opens and ends with scenes of emergency life-saving situations which are familiar from Lifeline, a film that deals with firefighters, so that with Help! we are brought full circle in that cycle of To’s cinema concerning itself with emergency and life-saving institutions in Hong Kong (To’s police movies of course belong in this cycle which would include films such as Lifeline, Expect the Unexpected, Help!, PTU ). The hospital setting accentuates the pathological element in To’s characters. In effect, with its ending that effaces heroism and self-sacrifice, all the characters in Help! are psychotic cases, and for this reason, there’s no getting around the feeling that the film is probably To’s most pessimistic work. Help! is a vision of total chaos and crisis, of dysfunction and breakdown. The social institution is in virtual collapse — a result of the conflict inherent in capitalist societies between the self-interested individual and the group. But because the film is a satire, To’s doomsday message is essentially a myth, all the more so with an ending that inverts its own vision of madness and anarchy as a chronic state of mind that recycles itself and can’t be wiped out. On this level, the film looks back to the anarchic Too Many Ways to Be Number One, a farce-satire in its own right reflecting the anxieties over 1997 as felt by petty gangsters. Help! is a kind of sequel, or more accurately, a work that continues the earlier film’s psychopathological strand of anxiety. Unlike Too Many Ways to Be Number One, there is no subjective choice of options for the hero to pull out of the madness in following either the China option or the Taiwan option, or to observe the status quo (Hong Kong). Help! gives us a picture of Hong Kong as a madhouse — and that is its vision of the status quo in the post-97 epoch (as a myth, we can rest easy that it is imaginary, and that the status quo is intact, so we hope). As an exercise in myth-making, we should put it alongside To’s action films such as A Hero Never Dies and The Mission which are both concerned with the heroic myth. In Help!, the heroic myth is a social function — there is a need for heroes

The Uneven Auteur

157

who serve society rather than themselves (the narcissistic ego is signified by an obsession with luxury cars, and there is a intriguing scene where Ekin Cheng’s mechanic talks to his cars about whether to return to his medical vocation or to remain a mechanic: he repairs cars with the precision and methodicalness of a surgeon, taking care of his cars like a dedicated surgeon would his patients). Help! can therefore be regarded as one of To’s “neoexercises” in his uneven auteur phase, a work that modulates his formalism in the “exercises” with an element of excessive style and a reworking of the heroic myth. The function of myth-making in Help! is clearly to upset our view of Hong Kong in the hope that Hong Kong people can see it with some objectivity, and prompt them to act charitably towards their fellow citizens. Help! is didactic, moralistic, and in the last analysis, political — as trenchant a piece of political criticism as PTU, Breaking News, Election and Election 2; though the first two films’ depiction of the police department and the last two of the triads as functioning bureaucratic institutions are more to the mark than Help!’s depiction of the hospital as a theatre of the absurd.

Fulltime Killer: Killers in the Diaspora One of the most notable features of Fulltime Killer is the fact that it consciously sets out not to sound Chinese. It can be considered To’s first English-language movie though Japanese, Thai, Mandarin and Cantonese are also spoken. Its use of English and its multi-lingual framework is a feature of the film that stands out. The inconsistency of language adds a jarring tone and rhythm to the narrative; language itself is a sign of the pathology of narrative and in a paradoxical way, it sustains one’s interest in the narrative. This structural unevenness in the film is also supported by a layer of self-consciousness, such that the film is about itself (its own genre) and about To’s achievements in the genre. At one point, a trailer of The Mission is shown in a cinema, watched by the hero played by Andy Lau. It is as if To is either wallowing in his own success or trying to parody himself. Hence, the self-consciousness of Fulltime Killer is intent on displaying its creator, and not just displaying his historical method and form (I am paraphrasing Leo Braudy, who points out that “the selfconsciousness of a genre film is of the existence of a historical method and form” [emphasis his]15 ) but also other facets of the creator, namely his language and identity. The idea behind Fulltime Killer is to manifest a diasporic, pan-Asian consciousness — not the first time that To has done so in his productions, cf. The Big Heat, Beyond Hypothermia and A Hero Never Dies, all of which

158

Director in Action

feature Malaysian, Thai, Cambodian and Korean personalities, though in these films Chinese is the lingua franca spoken by disparate pan-Asian identities. In Fulltime Killer, the lingua franca is English for the most part. Andy Lau plays a Chinese professional killer named Tok who engages in a rivalry with a Japanese hitman named O (played by Takashi Sorimachi), Asia’s number one killer (to whom “Tok” becomes “Toey” in Japanese, just one of those linguistic irregularities that recur throughout the narrative). Tok carries out contracts in Thailand and Singapore at the behest of a Singaporean big boss named Fat Ice (played by Lam Suet). They speak English in their encounters. O carries out hits in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Macau. These hits are contracted through a middleman in Korea. He keeps an apartment in Hong Kong and employs a Taiwanese woman Chin (played by Kelly Lin) to keep it clean. In their meetings, they speak Japanese. Tok, meanwhile, makes contact with Chin in order to get close to O so that the two men may commence a showdown to determine who comes out on top as the “number one killer”. In Tok’s encounters with Chin, they speak Japanese and Mandarin. Meanwhile, a Singaporean Interpol detective named Albert Lee (played by Simon Yam) is investigating the identities of the two killers and trying to track them down, with the help of a Hong Kong counterpart Gigi (played by Cherrie Ying). In their scenes together, they speak English (and Yam speaks it with a Hong Kong Cantonese accent). From this rough scenario, it should be clear to the reader that Chinese (in the form of Mandarin or Cantonese) is not often spoken. There is a determination, particularly on the part of Andy Lau as the star of the picture, not to speak Chinese.

Still 5.1 Killer

A Chinese transnational killer: Andy Lau in Fulltime

The Uneven Auteur

159

The principle of not speaking Chinese (or conversely, that of speaking English) is a sign of the diasporic identity that Fulltime Killer aspires to. Here we have for the first time a Johnnie To film which tries consciously not to be Chinese, by which I mean that To has not until Fulltime Killer made diasporic identity as pronounced a theme by a conscious decision to have its characters avoid speaking Chinese as much as possible. By making Fulltime Killer, To is in his own way contributing to the discourse on diasporic identity, now a fashionable topic in academic circles (though of course, To’s intention to make a pan-Asian film was based purely on commercial considerations16 ). Ien Ang in her book On Not Speaking Chinese addresses the issue of diasporic identity from her standpoint as a Chinese born in Indonesia, arguing that “not speaking Chinese” is a marker of diasporic identity much more so than “Chineseness” as a biological marker. To stress one’s “Chineseness” is selfdefeating in an “interdependent, mobile and volatile postmodern world”.17 She continues: Instead, Chineseness becomes an open signifier, which acquires its peculiar form and content in dialectical junction with the diverse local conditions in which ethnic Chinese people, wherever they are, construct new, hybrid identities and communities. Nowhere is this more vigorously evident than in everyday popular culture.18

Fulltime Killer is one such work of popular culture, based on a best-selling novel by Edmond Pang, a young Hong Kong writer since turned director. In Pang’s novel, also known as Full Time Hitman, published in 1999, O is a Chinese killer and Tok is Eurasian (his name is derived from Thor, the Viking god). In the film, To has not only changed the ethnic identities of both these characters (O becomes a Japanese), but also reversed their roles: Andy Lau who plays Tok, assumes O’s role, and O, now a Japanese, assumes Tok’s role. To therefore fundamentally changes the novel to denote how an ethnic Chinese person constructs a new, hybrid identity for himself in the context of his profession as a professional killer. This character is extremely mobile, traveling throughout the region and dealing with other ethnic Chinese who do not speak Chinese. But diasporic identity is a complex issue and does not fully hinge on not speaking Chinese, since many diasporic Chinese do speak Chinese (or some Chinese dialect). Previously where Hong Kong films feature diasporic Chinese characters — as in To’s The Big Heat — they are usually shown to be adept in speaking Chinese or Cantonese (the convention in the Hong Kong cinema dictates that diasporic Chinese for the most part can speak Cantonese while

160

Director in Action

the reality may be quite different). I have endeavored to show in this book that To’s films are culturally Hong Kong, which makes them also diasporic — Hong Kong remaining the crossroads of East and West and a postmodern global city despite reunification with China. From the Hong Kong perspective, Hong Kong is an integral part of the Diaspora because it is on the periphery of China and a stepping stone towards the nanyang (meaning the southern ocean, indicating the countries all along the rim of the South China Sea). Traditionally, Hong Kong has fed the nanyang with Cantonese speakers and other Chinese migrants, and Hong Kong people naturally assume that the Disapora (which I henceforth take to mean the Chinese Diaspora) is made up of dialect speakers rather than Mandarin speakers. In a way, Ien Ang’s thesis of “not speaking Chinese” may subconsciously be referring to “not speaking dialect”. Hong Kong’s contribution to and its association with the Diaspora is a recurring subject in many Cantonese films of the 1950s and 60s, which basically adopt a naïve-romantic position that Chinese remain Chinese wherever they are — and they can speak Chinese.19 In the current discourse, diasporic identity and its hybrid positions can be both productive and counter-productive, and as Ang demonstrates in her book, it is filled with tension, alienation and ambivalence. “Chineseness” can be a double-edged sword: it can wound one’s identity just as it can help to bolster it. “Chineseness” also takes on different shades of meaning when viewed from inside China and outside China. For Ang, who has no connection with China, Chineseness is a matter of political expediency. “If I am inescapably Chinese by descent, I am only sometimes Chinese by consent.”20 For To and Wai, who do have a connection with China and who also see themselves as part of the diasporic community, the issue of “not speaking Chinese” in Fulltime Killer is a political act that underlines their desire for a diasporic audience, as well as their desire not to be “Chinese” in the post-1997 era. In this way, Fulltime Killer is just as politically conscious as Help!, PTU, and Breaking News. However, aesthetically, the act of “not speaking Chinese” (or the act of speaking English) has a dubious efficacy in the narrative. This reflects the fact that To, who doesn’t speak English well enough, has no ear for the English language and thus the application of “not speaking Chinese” seems forced and unconvincing. Even if the whole movie were spoken in English, it would sound awkward at best, an aesthetic disjunction in the voices of the characters that can’t be reconciled with the deliberate structural dissonance of the narrative. The use of English becomes an overreaching device that changes the nature of the film’s poetics — in effect it forces us to ask whether it would have been better for To to show diasporic identity through a narrative discourse on Chinese (either Mandarin or

The Uneven Auteur

161

Cantonese or some other of the many dialects spoken in the Diaspora) as a diasporic language with equal legitimacy as English. As a result of “not speaking Chinese” (which, as should be evident to readers by now, is a trope to indicate diasporic identity and hybridity rather than a literal tendency in the film), Tok comes across as an even more insecure character on top of the psycho-pathological drives that To invests in the character. Tok is driven by an urge to be Asia’s number one killer but his ambition is hampered by a physical disability: he suffers from epileptic fits. It turns out that he was a former champion shooter who had failed to win a gold medal for China in the Olympic Games because of his illness which breaks out in crucial moments, an illness that also befell Tok’s brother in a previous competition. And thus both Tok and his brother have retreated into the jianghu to take up the business of contract killing; the brothers conspire to topple O from his position as Asia’s number one killer — Tok’s brother being O’s middleman in Korea — so that Tok could occupy the position and thus become the “gold medalist” of killers.

Still 5.2

The “gold medalist” of killers

Naturally, Tok’s pathological condition is on a par with other To characters: particularly relevant is Andy Lau’s character in Running out of Time, who supposedly suffers from a terminal illness and with whom Tok is also meant to share many of the same mythical qualities (such as the magical propensity to disappear), except here Tok does not win in the end. He is not as fully drawn a character as the one in Running out of Time (Andy Lau refers to this previous character as being more “subtle” while Tok is more “affected” or pretentious21 ), and ironically Tok’s ability to speak in many tongues (mainly English, but also Thai, Cantonese and Mandarin) makes him less, not more,

162

Director in Action

recognizable as someone with an identity. In this respect, Tok recalls Wu Chien-lien’s female assassin in Beyond Hypothermia, another character who suffers from an illness and who is a woman without a recognizable identity or nationality. Tok only wants to be recognized as a killer and this drive combined with the structural pathology of “not speaking Chinese” makes him more or less psychotic. O, on the other hand, appears the much cooler character and he wins out in the end because he has certain advantages: he does not suffer from illness (though psychologically speaking, he does exhibit a tinge of guilty conscience over the killing of the woman whom he had previously hired to clean his apartment). Perhaps more importantly, O is monolinguistic. Apart from a smattering of Cantonese swear words learned from Tok just before their showdown, O shows no compulsion to speak any other language.

Still 5.3

O: the monolingual Japanese fulltime killer

Because of its linguistic iconoclasm, Fulltime Killer is like an experimental film which has turned out to be To’s most self-indulgent “neo-exercise”, combining some formal elements (for example, O’s flashback scene of his previous hired cleaner that occurs back to front; and action scenes staged in a residential estate depicting O and Chin’s escape from the police) with linguistic dissonance and self-pastiche. Its mode of linguistic significations to underwrite the actions of the heroes is a different kind of myth-making from other To exercises, and this is underscored towards the end by Simon Yam’s Singaporean detective who, driven to psychological despair when he fails to capture O and Tok, turns to writing a book about the two killers and is given an ending by Chin, which “prints the legend” of Tok finally triumphing over O thus realizing his ambition to become Asia’s number one killer. However, the real ending in the film reveals that this is a myth.22

The Uneven Auteur

Still 5.4 Killer

163

A glimpse of madness: Simon Yam in Fulltime

Myth is a type of speech, as Barthes tells us, and Fulltime Killer virtually sets out to prove that axiom, being so infused with languages and other textual signs — its self-referential system to a plethora of action movies: To’s own The Mission, Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break, Luc Besson’s Leon, the Professional, Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado, and a mythical Alain Delon gangster movie where the hero pins down a villain by sticking a knife into his hand (this being the action that Tok deals out to one of Fat Ice’s henchmen who compares Tok’s competence unfavorably with O’s, and Tok tells him that “there is a scene just like this” in an Alain Delon movie; later, this henchman tries to get his revenge and tells Tok that he had tried to find the movie but “no one has heard of it”23 ). There are also unstated references to Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels (1995) and Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967), showing that To’s debt to postmodern Hong Kong and Japanese cinemas is as deep as his dues to postmodern Hollywood and French cinemas. The form and the concept of Fulltime Killer is two-fold: firstly, it is a diasporic and pan-Asian movie and secondly, it is a “pan-Action movie” with the focus on professional killers. Its multiple languages evince the hybridity of its texts, but almost on the same level, the dissonance and the ambivalence might just drive the viewer to despair, and we could end up just as depressive and neurotic as Simon Yam’s Singaporean detective. In the final analysis, the trope of “not speaking Chinese” is an unsatisfactory structural conceit that To is unlikely to repeat (unless he makes a move to Hollywood and makes films entirely in English — and Fulltime Killer was indeed meant as an exercise to connote To’s readiness to take on English-language projects24 ). In his discourse on diasporic identity, To, and for that matter Ien Ang, have over-emphasized not speaking Chinese as a marker of diasporic identity, as if speaking English in itself is an adequate sign

164

Director in Action

to show hybridity or non-“Chineseness”. Paradoxically, the film, and Ang’s book, may have raised a counter-response which is that the position of Chinese as a language has its own right to exist in the diasporic whirlpool, given that the Diaspora is an expanding and developing entity with many Mainland Chinese increasingly shoring up the pool (the idea that the Diaspora is made up of Chinese many generations removed from China may soon become a myth). As a language, Chinese possesses its own integrity and beauty, and it can be a marker of both cultural identity and global identity. If the Diaspora and the notion of hybridity have to make any sense in the postmodern world, it has to absorb Chinese as a language that belongs to the world, not just to the Chinese. “Not speaking Chinese” therefore can be a loss as profound as any perceived gain that one could obtain from the reality of diasporic hybridity (all languages not spoken in any hybrid state would constitute a loss, and if in fact a whole language can be wiped out, the nature of hybridity should be called into question for what it leaves out and disposes). Tok’s ability to speak several languages shows that language is a skill that can be learned, and while identity can be arbitrary and shifting, language is a system of its own.

Running on Karma: Body and Soul The plot of Running on Karma concerns an ex-monk from the Mainland (played by Andy Lau and known only as “Big” because of his swollen bodybuilder physique) who helps a female cop Lee Fung-yee (played by Cecilia Cheung) in Hong Kong to solve a murder and capture the killer, an Indian mystic with martial arts powers and the yogic ability to wriggle in and out of a tin can (and other tight spots). He also helps Lee capture another supervillain, a wall-crawling cat burglar straight out of the Marvel comic books. Big himself possesses preternatural powers, being trained in the martial arts and qigong; he also has the ability of foresight or Karma-vision, i.e. the vision of people’s previous incarnations whose acts in their previous lives can affect their destinies in the present life. Thus every time he sees Lee Fung-yee, Big sees a vision of a Japanese soldier in World War Two murderously beheading innocent civilians, and from this vision, Big concludes that she is destined for a gruesome death. In helping her solve her cases, Big actually tries to save Fung-yee from her fate but as we know from many To films ( The Longest Nite, Expect the Unexpected, A Hero Never Dies, Running out of Time) the wheel of Fate cannot be stopped. Fung-yee, on her part, knowing that she can never turn back the wheel of fate decides to find the crazed killer of Big’s girlfriend.

The Uneven Auteur

165

It was this incident that led Big to leave monkhood after failing to find the killer who hides himself in the mountains: out of frustration and anger, he strikes out with his stick, killing a bird, which triggers off his ability to see Karma-visions. As penitence, Big becomes an illegal migrant in Hong Kong, finding work in male strip tease joints (it is during a raid in such a joint that Big first meets Fung-yee and their relationship develops through the shared adversity of tracking down and capturing dangerous criminals). In fact, the film opens with Big presented as the object of the female gaze as he performs the strip tease with Fung-yee disguised as a spectator, egging him on to take off his G-string (which Big does, and this is the cue for the raid). The opening serves to introduce Big’s body, which is a latex body suit, a construct of American special effects makeup experts who had previously provided the fat body suits of Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng in Love on a Diet. From the first to the last impression, Big’s body strikes one as looking oddly inorganic and artificial, producing a striking discrepancy. The body suit thus gives the impression of a denaturalized body which To turned into a narrative advantage. The swollen, denaturalized body removes Big from his inner natural body such that we see the body suit as a transcendental cover enclosing the proverbial garden of the soul, thus emphasizing a discrepancy between body and soul. The muscular body as an iconic symbol of action cinema is the subject of Yvonne Tasker’s book Spectacular Bodies. Tasker poses the question of whether the muscular hero, with his “over-developed and over-determined body”, represents “the triumphal assertion of a traditional masculinity” or is the body “an hysterical image, a symptom of the male body (and masculine identity) in crisis”?25 The question is ironic in the context of Running on Karma when we consider that Big’s body is so patently false to begin with. Andy Lau is certainly no Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone or Jean-Claude Van Damme who typify the muscular hero that Tasker has in mind, all these actors being real body-builders; and Lau is also no Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan whose muscular bodies exude biological masochism from tough regimes of martial arts training. For Tasker, Hong Kong action films are instances of “an enthusiasm for scenes that imagine the transgression of physical limits”, but another question that is well worth asking here is: does Andy Lau’s body represent anything more than a “generic heritage” of the Hong Kong cinema’s enthusiasm for spectacular bodies, or could it be seen as posing “more complex questions about social identity”?26 The key to the answer lies in Lau’s patently manufactured, artificial body. This body is an apparatus of a kind and it therefore seems to me that To is invoking another type of body — conceivably that of the “phantasmatic body” designated by Mary Ann Doane as a body

166

Director in Action

“reconstituted by the technology and practices of the cinema”.27 Doane’s view of the phantasmatic body is more a psychoanalytical concept, and her analysis deals with the technology of sound as a natural component of cinema: the absence of sound yields a phantasmatic body that renders a unity between the body and its represented image on screen; the introduction of sound brings about an organic totality of sound and image with the result that even when the body is absent (as for example in voice-off or voiceover situations where it is heard but not seen), the sense of unity is not lost: “the body in the film becomes the body of the film”, as Doane puts it.28

Still 5.5 Karma

Andy Lau’s phantasmatic body in Running on

The technology in To’s film on the other hand has to do with makebelieve, positing artificiality as a natural component of film. The notion of the “phantasmatic body” seems to me a more apposite description of Andy Lau’s artificial body. To has effectively inscribed the phantasmatic body in the narrative through the presence of an artificial body, making the idea of absence more self-evident. The phantasmatic body signifies an obvious dichotomy between body and soul, such a body being symbolic of the spiritual crisis that virtually enwraps the soul of Big (enwrapment is a visual motif: Big subdues the two super-villains by literally wrapping them up with improvised enclosures, the Indian enclosed inside a twisted and knotted ceiling ventilator tube, and the wall-crawling cat burglar enclosed inside a twisted satellite dish). The phantasmatic body therefore is a body in structural crisis (“the body in the film becomes the body of the film”): the body is a material flaw that causes a friction between it and the character of the protagonist, and I would submit, between it and the narrative. The friction-murmur between body and soul — the gap constituted by the phantasmatic body — is the unevenness of the structure and the narrative.

The Uneven Auteur

167

This body-soul anomaly also structures the narrative through a number of odd instances of dialectical oppositions. Firstly, Big is matched against the small and slender Lee Fung-yee. The star persona of Cecilia Cheung would seem to indicate an obvious opposition between femininity and masculinity but the size and the artificial dimensions of Big’s body re-valorize the opposition to one of big and small which is a fundamental unbalancing of the narrative. Besides, Cheung’s performance stresses her femininity in a conventionally subordinate, whining manner, and she is probably miscast in the role which calls for an action heroine much tougher than Cheung can convey29 — which also explains why her previous incarnation, a brutal Japanese soldier, appears fundamentally unmatched with her character (the Buddhist idea of incarnation may or may not entail a “matching” of character; I suspect not, but my point is that, aesthetically speaking, this unmatching quality is a structural sign of unevenness). Secondly, Big is matched against lithe, flexible villains, the Indian mystic whose Yogic powers enable him to contort and distort his body; in the same way, the cat burglar writhes and coils. In contrast, Big is a prisoner of his overly muscular body. But although he is encumbered by his body, as in those scenes where he clumsily tries to follow Lee Fung-yee on a motorbike (To making a point about Lau’s bike-riding heroic image gained in A Moment of Romance), his powers appear to be superior to the villains’. On this score, the film is right on the generic mark of good versus evil, a standard opposition of the mythic romance. Big is the film’s moral hero, an ex-monk who exiles himself from his order because he has killed a living thing and because he has murder in his heart (his thought of revenge on his girlfriend’s killer — the film, however, skirts over the moral question of how Big came to have a girlfriend in the first place). The religious, or semi-religious, theme becomes more prominent towards the end when Lee Fung-yee goes into the mountains to find the crazed killer, and, as Big had foreseen, is killed and beheaded (this is recorded by Fungyee’s digital camera which is accidentally, but conveniently, left running at the scene of the crime). The murder prompts Big into another rage and he resolves to find the killer. This turns into a journey of self-redemption in which Big is confronted with his “biggest opponents”, in the words of Wai Ka-fai, which are “fate, samsa¯ra (transmigration), or some gigantic force”.30 Big has a vision of himself, dressed in rags and with long hair and beard, meeting the killer and then killing him; but he also fights with this double self, confused over his identity but finally realizing that he is the “Buddha in my heart”. Big spends five years searching for the killer, finally meeting him, just as he had foreseen, forgives him and takes him back to civilization, handing

168

Director in Action

him over to the police. After shaving himself and putting on the robes of a monk, one of the police officers notices with astonishment that Big has lost his oversized body. He has returned to normal, in fact he looks almost feminine with his shaved head and slender body. He is now soul and no body. Thus the phantasmatic body of Big, now lost as a result of his ordeal and his karma, was truly an apparatus, one which finally “unified” body and soul. Running on Karma is about spiritual attainment, and the structure of the film is such that it expresses the struggle of this effort. “In religion the spiritual world is a reality distinct from the physical world,” Northrop Frye tells us.31 Big’s physical struggles in Hong Kong with the Indian killer and the wallcrawler manifest his spiritual struggle — as both enemies are embodiments of evil in different degrees. Big’s Karma-vision brings to reality the evil deep in our selves. In its utter immersion into a reality distinct from the physical world, Running on Karma is quite remarkable, though it remains a flawed achievement insofar as it can be considered a spiritual work. It is fundamentally unable to integrate the theme and the style of spiritual attainment with the action principles of the detective-mystery thriller — here, the artificial apparatus that is Big’s body suffices to symbolize the film’s failure. Perhaps one could see what To and Wai had sought to do and to some extent realized was to make an action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger directed by Robert Bresson (just on this equation alone, Running on Karma qualifies as a “neo-exercise”). The improbability of such an exercise seals its fate. It is little wonder then that Running on Karma threatens to run away from itself — we might call this the crisis of the transmigrating soul.

Throw Down: Blind Man’s Bluff Throw Down is To’s favourite of all his films and the one I deem to be the most fascinating of the “neo-exercises”. Because it is To’s favourite, and because he himself had tended to be more critical about The Mission and Breaking News, the upshot is that Throw Down is close to his best work. There is a strong case to make for Throw Down as one of To’s greatest films. It is the work that best expresses To’s philosophy, which can be summarized in his own words “jiji rensheng” (life as a positive force), meaning that no matter how ephemeral and abnormal life may be, one should struggle through it — life as a process that must be passed through — and one would then “look at things differently”.32 It is no accident that Throw Down in both subject and theme ( judo and the philosophy of life) is dedicated to Akira Kurosawa. To admires Kurosawa principally for his philosophy expressed through his films.

The Uneven Auteur

169

As To sees it, Kurosawa’s touted cinematic techniques are secondary to his philosophy. Throw Down is mistakenly assumed to be a remake of Kurosawa’s Sugata Sanshiro (1943, aka Judo Saga), whereas in fact it is a film that tries to capture the essence of Kurosawa’s humanist philosophy propounded as a poetics of cinema. What makes Throw Down distinctive is that it is probably the most idiosyncratic tribute to Kurosawa that has ever been made in the genre of films either inspired by the Japanese master or purporting to pay a tribute to him.33 Throw Down is the most determinedly positive of To’s films without To departing completely from his fatalistic noir mood and usual obsessions, and this paradox of the light that comes from the dark grove is really the heart of the matter of To’s idiosyncratic handling. Throw Down is a comedy like Needing You in that both films show people faced with making right choices. In Needing You a woman must choose the right man; in Throw Down a man must choose the right way forward. Throw Down was in fact conceived as a comedy before To changed the tone of the film and made it what it is34 — a dramatic film about redemption which remains remorseless in its total eschewal of sentimentality. “It is a moving film without ever trying too hard to be a moving film”, as the critic-screenwriter Jimmy Ngai puts it.35 However, the comic touches are signs of the original inspiration of the film. It is peopled with oddballs who give the film a suitable lightness but who at the same time provide heart tugging moments. The plot concerns an ex-judo fighter Szeto Bo (Louis Koo), who is down on his luck and being prodded to regain his former glory by Tony (Aaron Kwok), a young judo devotee and admirer of Szeto. The rejuvenation of Szeto is a slow process, and we gradually learn that he is hampered by an illness which will eventually make him blind (this fact is kept from the other characters until the very end).When he finally recovers his prowess, he arranges to fight the champion Kong (Tony Leung Ka-fai) whose expectation of engaging him in a championship match two years ago had been dashed by Szeto’s failure to turn up (thus hinting that Szeto’s predicament had begun by then). Szeto is already blind, and Kong fights him by wearing a blindfold; their contest is fought in a dark grove of wild reeds on the edge of the city (which is a scene that pays a direct tribute to Kurosawa’s Sugata Sanshiro by evoking its climactic scene of the judo battle fought in the wind-swept wilderness). The film shows Szeto’s redemption being motivated by others and not by himself, and much of the interest in the narrative stems from the active interventions of outside characters on the life of Szeto. These characters include, on the outset, Tony who constantly turns up at Szeto’s bar (named

170

Director in Action

After Hours: a side reference to another of To’s favourite directors, Martin Scorsese) to badger him for a fight, and a young Taiwanese woman Mona (Cherrie Ying), a fledgling entertainer constantly hustling for opportunities to become a star and who drifts into Szeto’s bar to apply for a job as a singer. Szeto recruits the eager Tony and Mona into service as musicians but they become casual witnesses of Szeto’s decline, following him into a video game parlour where they become his accomplices in a plan to steal money from a petty racketeer nicknamed “Brother Savage” (played by Cheung Siu-fai as a mildly insane wonder of the underworld, probably the most offbeat gangster ever seen in the Hong Kong cinema).36 Brother Savage effectively lets Szeto steal his money because he too is an admirer of the ex-judo champion; Szeto then gambles away the money and is drawn deeper into a moral quagmire of his own making. More characters in Szeto’s past come into play, offering ways to pull him out of the morass. There is Szeto’s old judo master (Lo Hoi-pang) who now runs a waning judo school together with his mentally retarded son Jing (Choi Yat-chi) and who hopes that Szeto could revive the school’s fortunes by becoming one of its teachers; and an underworld boss to whom Szeto owes money. Szeto’s interactions with all these characters form the centerpiece “Four Tables” sequence in Throw Down, designed to showcase To’s effortless mastery of mise-en-scène on yet another level of formalism. All parties turn up in the bar at the same time but each has matters to discuss separately with Szeto, Mona or Tony (Mona’s manager, played by Jordan Chan, is one of the parties not directly involved with Szeto; this character, also an underworld type, hopes to persuade Mona to return to his fold, she having run away because he wanted her to appear in pornographic movies). The parties are all seated in four tables placed adjacent to each other so that Szeto, Mona and Tony talk concurrently but separately, with Mona’s refrain to her manager, “You are forcing me into prostitution,” providing a caesura to the proceedings (all parties stop and turn their heads towards Mona whenever the line is uttered). To shoots the scene on multiple points of two imaginary axes or 180degree lines, providing a sense of continuity by matching cuts of the lead actors and their respective interlocutors (Tony versus Brother Savage, Mona versus her manager, and Szeto, alternating on a north-south axis between the old judo master and the underworld boss, juggling and trying to satisfy their conflicting demands). “The difficulty was the timing,” To says.37 The scene was rehearsed many times until all the actors got the timing right because when To shifted from one zone of an axis to another zone in the next imaginary axis to shoot a different party in conversation (thus crossing the 180-degree

The Uneven Auteur

171

lines, which is a taboo in Hollywood practice), the other party in the other zone (who also appears in the shot) had to repeat the same lines. The different lines of representational axes, with To jumping from one point to the opposite point to shoot reaction shots, constitute an “exercise” of a quite different magnitude, with an increased if not equal difficulty quotient as the opening plan-sequence of Breaking News. To cuts to provide an apparent continuity but on closer scrutiny, he cuts in such a way that the discontinuity (and the tension of the scene) is structured into the scene (in fact, he hides a central discontinuity in the movement of Szeto between the judo master and the boss which is at the root of the tension of the scene).

Still 5.6 Johnnie To’s direction of 360-degree space in the “Four Tables” sequence in Throw Down

The sequence is audacious, more likely to engender a sense of bewilderment in the spectator on first viewing, but it is just as impressive a

172

Director in Action

sequence as any of the formal setpiece “exercises” that To had attempted up to now. What the sequence demonstrates is To’s willingness to extend his aesthetic experimentation from one film to the next, but seeking to do so this time with the most optimal, minimal means which nevertheless ends up as virtuosic and as meticulously crafted, entailing a high level of coordination among virtually the entire cast and precise editing skill. The sequence ends with the negotiations finally breaking down and the parties fighting each other in a judo brawl, played essentially silent: we hear only Jing breaking out in song on the soundtrack, singing the sad ballad of Sanshiro (taken from the 1970 TV series — this song is associated with Jing who sings it at the opening and at the climactic bout between Szeto and Kong, both scenes set in the wild grove).

Still 5.7

A judo brawl in the street

Szeto’s interactions with this group of eccentric loyalists all seeking to redeem him make up about two-thirds of the narrative before it becomes clear that Szeto is going blind and that his recovery as a judo fighter will mark his redemption. Hence, the narrative for much of the time is in effect a kind of bluff that deliberately keeps the audience in the dark about Szeto’s ailment. This “bluff” tactic, which I will call the structure of the blind man’s bluff, is a decisive element in the aesthetic of unevenness that we sense in Throw Down. We can see the outward sign of Szeto’s decline clearly enough (his alcoholism and addiction to gambling), but the inward sign of the decline (the blindness and the spiritual malaise) is something we have to induct. The structure of the bluff is manifest in some of the early scenes showing Szeto leading Tony and Mona in a sort of metaphysical game of blind man’s bluff, testing the endurance of Tony and Mona as players. These scenes are those set in the video game parlour where Szeto brings Tony and Mona to steal money from Brother Savage, and those of Szeto leading Mona into the gamblers’ den where he later loses all his money. The tone and structure of these scenes are that of the characters walking, running and catching up with

The Uneven Auteur

173

Szeto. There is no narrative logic that explains the action — in fact, the reverse is true, the action explains the narrative. This incessant movement, which so exasperates Tony at one point that he holds down Szeto in a judo arm lock on the street, almost choking him to death, is the key to the metaphysical game of bluff — this metaphysical structure being embedded into the other scenes involving all the other supporting characters who assemble in the “Four Tables” sequence. The “Four Tables” sequence is characterized by whimsical, irregular behaviour, a lot of changing sides (or transgressive line-crossing, from a technical point of view), different angles, attempts to pin down, elusiveness, and finally, Szeto’s disappearance into the toilet (and some funny scenes involving Szeto and Mona sharing the same stall as a strategy to elude their interlocutors). As Szeto goes blind, the narrative takes its cue from this decline and it too takes on the scattershot, quirky nature of the character. As Szeto regains his dignity and his recovery begins, we sense the nature of the bluff receding and the true nature of the man coming to the fore. One sign of his recovery (both physically and spiritually) is that he fights Tony, Brother Savage and the Boss, naturally defeating all of them, signifying that all these characters have in their own way tried to help Szeto because of their love for the sport and their belief in its philosophy, of which Barthes’s observation is apposite, “In judo, a man who is down is hardly down at all, he rolls over, he draws back, he eludes defeat, or, if the latter is obvious, he immediately disappears.”38 Szeto’s redemption is therefore not miraculous but a quality inherent in the judoka. Blindness is only an excuse not to fight, it clearly does not impede one’s prowess, though the process of the illness that will eventually make Szeto blind is a hard slog impairing the body and the spirit (in Szeto’s case, more the spirit). The spiritual redemption at the end does not mean that the hero can be cured of his blindness, and in this regard, To stays true to his theme of fatalism (as indeed, he stays true to characters with pathological defects, heroes with mortality factors and who are given to struggle against their fates).

Still 5.8 Redemption of the champion: Tony Leung Kafai acknowledges defeat in Throw Down

174

Director in Action

It is the will to fight that redeems the hero but the wheel of fate (or the Destiny-machine) cannot be turned back (in fact the ending is as bleak as some of To’s films such as Expect the Unexpected, A Hero Never Dies, though the hero survives and goes on struggling with his impairment). To shows also that redemption is an interactive process, a dialogue between human beings, predicated on a love for the sport (judo could be substituted for any other form of art, and in the sense that To has dedicated his film to Kurosawa, it is an obvious substitute for cinema). The film is a loving tribute to film in an auteurial-specific way: to chiaroscuro lighting, long takes, audacious mise-en-scène (the “Four Tables” sequence, which seems to approximately capture the accuracy of the game of judo itself, as per Barthes’s description, “It is said that judo contains a hidden symbolic aspect; even in the midst of efficiency, its gestures are measured, precise but restricted, drawn accurately but by a stroke without volume”39 ), and to cultural idiosyncrasy (explicit in the characterizations of Brother Savage, Jing, the old master, Mona, Tony, and above all Szeto; implicit in To’s handling of narrative, his sense of timing, rhythm, and tone). Recognition of Throw Down as To’s greatest film may only come in time, as To himself is probably aware. Throw Down is very much a retrospective movie, not so much because it looks back to Kurosawa but because it looks back on itself. One can appreciate its individual greatness only after multiple viewings whereas a first viewing might very well leave the viewer dumbfounded, whereby the conclusion would be that the film is a failure. It is not that by any means. To has made an inductive masterpiece with a lot of heart but without much sentimentality so that the viewer is forced to search for cause and effect — the connections between action and emotion. In short, To has expressed an intellectual response to crisis and action — the prevalent tone of his exercises. “I wanted to leave a lot of space for the viewer to fill in, to think about”, To says of Throw Down,40 but the same could also be said of The Mission, PTU and Breaking News, all films which show characters responding coolly to crises and coming out of them drained of emotion. Throw Down is set apart from these films in that there are no villains, and the crisis here is one of humanist rather than existentialist dimensions. The outcome of the struggle is not without emotion; rather it curbs emotion at very opportunity and becomes a study of human archetypes which rebounds to engage the viewer in a deeper type of emotion. To has attempted to re-capture Kurosawa’s humanism but in fact, he is much less sentimental than Kurosawa. The adjective here may well be “Bressonian”, a word that better describes To’s handling of actors to achieve inner stasis and so to encapsulate the spiritual dimensions of their characters — a state of grace that is the highest form of

The Uneven Auteur

175

cinema (as Kurosawa, Bresson and others typify). However, Throw Down is the Johnnie To form of mannerist grace, accomplished and perhaps only to be comprehended within the generic heritage of the Hong Kong cinema — until such time when it breaks through to universal fulfillment.

Conclusion I have attempted to demonstrate how all the films above extend To’s artistry into quite unexpected paths of meaning — the retrospective metacriticism of Needing You, the satire of wish-fulfillment in Help!, the expression of diasporic identity in Fulltime Killer, the attainment of spirituality through pragmatic action requiring suffering and forgiveness in Running on Karma, and the attainment of redemption through the will to fight in Throw Down. All these films contain unequal measures of excellence and flaws which result from the effort to integrate different qualities. One might say that To is trying to experiment with commercial films to make them more meaningful; the refrain that one hears in To’s interviews is that it isn’t enough just to make entertainments, one should also attempt to make films with something to say. The form of the narrative depends on the ideal or the conceptual plot that is undeclared until it becomes evident in itself, usually towards the end of the narrative (but not always, as in the case of Needing You where the combination of the bull’s penis and the red packet states the film’s message very clearly quite early in the film). However, To’s hand of the auteur is an assurance that the uneven narratives will always be interesting and never dull. The theme of unevenness is a structural conceit which may conceivably be regarded in different shapes depending on the films. In Throw Down, the quality of quirkiness and the characters’ idiosyncratic behaviour may be said to define the unevenness of the film and therefore the unevenness is really abstract; it may not even exist because as we get to know the film on a second or third viewing, it will disappear. Throw Down is undoubtedly the quirkiest of To’s masterpieces but it happens also to be To’s clearest testament of a life philosophy where the humanity of the characters is emphasized and the society they come from is not a mythical one. The violence in his action masterpieces, I have argued, create a sensation of abstracted reality whereby it could be said that Running on Karma, which ends as a testament of spiritual attainment, is a wish fulfillment. Both Needing You and Help! are also wish-fulfillments while Fulltime Killer reverts to the abstracted reality of violence (it is also unfortunately, the most pretentious of To’s gunplay-action films). Throw Down

176

Director in Action

doesn’t entirely eschew violence but even its violence is tinged with humanism. The principle of judo is a symbolic prevention of violence formalized as a sport, and what To has done is to create a symbolic action film that is quite unlike anything he has done. There is no action except in the character, the action defines the character, and “action” in the sense of violence and adventure is muted (it is therefore not by accident that the sound of the action scenes following the “Four Tables” standoff is eerily muted). Throw Down is an achievement that To is deservedly proud of, and one can sense a kind of final statement, but the film does not mark a closure in To’s career, not yet by a long shot. Its sense of unevenness is a reflection of To’s creative impulses as it is also a reflection of the unpredictable nature of the industrial system of the Hong Kong cinema. To’s career is ongoing at the time of writing, and the critical process is a synchronic process of discovery. A film like Throw Down symbolizes the adventure of discovery one embarks on in looking at To’s career, and quite effectively so in the sense that the film and other To films may need to be rediscovered in the march of time; and so long as To continues to work in his indomitable manner, the process of discovery in To’s cinema may be what counts most of all.

Postscript

177

6 Postscript

This postscript updates the monograph to include Johnnie To’s three most recent films, Election (2005), its sequel Election 2 (2006), and Exiled (2006). All three films show the director engaging in a dialectical discourse with his own work in the action genre discussed in the previous chapters. The two Election films were made as I was in the process of finishing the monograph, and by the time the first film was released in 2005, I had completed the manuscript and submitted it to the publisher. Exiled was released in October 2006, after I had already submitted the final draft. This postscript is therefore an effort to keep abreast of To’s prolific output and to be as up to date as possible in assessing his career. It also serves to demonstrate the futility of limiting To’s work within definite boundaries. Election and Election 2 constitute a diptych that pushes To’s work into new frontiers and, like Throw Down, they do not fit neatly within the director’s previous denominator of gunfire action films. The duo’s hard-boiled and cynical view of power and politics is supported by a brand of violence that appears to break new ground in To’s enunciation of the action genre. Exiled is ostensibly a sequel to The Mission but it is a work in its own right and can stand alone if one chooses not to refer to The Mission. All three films, however, must be placed against the action backdrop of To’s previous achievements and be considered as belonging to the “neo-exercises” (see Chapter 5) which challenge the director’s own work, on the principle of undertaking continuous personal development of his own career. All three films offer a homily on violence, with Election and Election 2 being the more startling expressions on the subject — and I will undertake to analyze the films by focusing on To’s treatment of this very subject, in order to demonstrate their quality and the director’s constant drive to be different and original but yet stay within the generic range of his works so far.

178

Director in Action

Election and Election 2: To’s New Aesthetics of Violence As a sign of To’s experimentation with the genre, no guns are used by the protagonists in the two films. There is almost a taboo against guns, and this may at first seem highly unnatural given the general availability of guns — if not for a ritualistic element that infuses the two films. To explains that traditionally “triads do not use guns to settle their problems, they always use swords”. 1 The fact that swords are used instead of guns accentuate the symbolism of violence — swords are symbols of ritual in the Chinese tradition — and swords play a part in the investiture ceremony of Simon Yam’s Lok as the new triad leader in Election. The violence of Election and Election 2 is, in the first instance, a symbolic violence — by which I mean a violence containing symbols, perpetrated according to the ritual and the law of the triads. For instance, rivals fight over the phallic symbol of the baton, an action McGuffin.2 The other concept of symbolic violence, derived from Pierre Bourdieu, is the symbolic violence of male domination: the invisible, repressive violence exercised by the structures of androcentric power to subjugate women into acceptance of its power as a natural law.3 The notion of symbolic violence is eminently applicable to the institution of the triads as an androcentric and patriarchal power which subjugates all its members, men and women. It is also epitomic of the all-male, patriarchal structure of the triads depicted in the diptych. In his study of masculine domination, Bourdieu defines symbolic violence as “a system of structures durably embedded in things and in bodies”, creating “dispositions attuned to the structure of domination” which subsume those who are being dominated.4 In Election,

Still 6.1

Gunless violence in Election

Postscript

179

the irony of the symbolic violence evoked is that Big D seeks to destroy the structure of the triads and his “disposition” of being dominated by such a structure.

Still 6.2 Simon Yam holding the symbol of the triads, the catalyst of real and symbolic violence in Election

Violence in these two films is certainly disturbing because it is not brought about by guns, which are normally thought of as delivering a clean and straightforward kind of violence — this is the violence of the classical Western genre, until Sam Peckinpah changed the style of violence by making it bloody and prolonging it through slow-motion (and Peckinpah, like To, was influenced by Kurosawa5 ). The violence in Election is even more of a primal urge — but there is another side to the violence: a mythical side that entails the conceits of lawmaking, of submission to the law of the triads. The fact that violence is driven by the law is shown by To in scenes depicting triad rituals, and the final aim of the violence is to restore peace and stability between the different triads grouped together under the Wo Sing Society when warfare threatened to break out over the election of a new leader. This context well illustrates Walter Benjamin’s concept of lawmaking violence, discussed in his essay “Critique of Violence”, as a form of violence perpetrated in order to obtain peace and stability in a system of law. Lawmaking violence is sanctioned violence that seeks to preserve the law of the state (examples being capital punishment, war and militarism). Benjamin makes the point that lawmaking violence does not deliver justice to man. It seeks only to preserve itself. “All violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving,” Benjamin writes.6 The “highest” violence, therefore, according to Benjamin, occurs in the legal system. In the exercise of such violence, “law reaffirms itself”, but “in this very violence, something rotten in law is revealed”.7 The lawmaking violence that is portrayed in Election and Election 2 presents the triads as self-governing institutions within a state. The Chinese triads, like the Italian mafia can be seen as mini-states: they have their own

180

Director in Action

Still 6.3

Paying allegiance to the laws of the triads

codes and rules of behaviour (their own law); they govern their own “territory” and zealously guard their “boundaries”; and they collect “taxes” in the form of protection fees. Conscious that viewers would naturally draw cinematic allusions to Coppola’s Godfather trilogy and Scorsese’s GoodFellas while watching his films, To stresses in his public interviews that his main motive was to show “a very local gangster culture” which was different from The Godfather or GoodFellas. To presents an uncompromisingly local vision of gangster culture and a strong part of the localism is the politics of the triads.8 While To had previously dealt with triads in A Hero Never Dies, The Longest Nite and The Mission, Election and Election 2 mark the first time that he wholly deals with the inner political mechanism of the triads. Then there is the political fable that the triads also represent — as To himself explained, “1997 was a big event in Hong Kong history and this was the motivating drive to make a movie like Election.”9 Clearly, To meant to portray the Wo Sing Society as a microcosm of Hong Kong and its particular status as a self-governing city within the Chinese state. He utilizes the triad practice of electing a chairman10 to make an ironic comment on the city’s failure to democratically elect a leader despite the promises made by China that Hong Kong would become fully democratic after reunification. The Wo Sing Society’s election of a leader every two years is cause for a caustic remark by the anti-triad chief of police in the film (played by veteran David Chiang): “The triads have a longer history of electing leaders than we do in Hong Kong.” However, the depiction of elections in the triads, though factually based, is more of a fictional conceit, as the Hong Kong critic Sek Kei points out: “The triads have always been autocratic … and though the films portray elections in the triads … the candidates resort to murder and killing and are ruthless beyond words, so one can’t call it election”.11 One can’t call it democracy either. Sek Kei reminds viewers that the so-called election in the films is held within a closed cabal of senior triad “uncles” and is totally undemocratic.12

Postscript

181

The idea of electing a leader in the triads was previously treated in the Young and Dangerous series — in the fourth edition entitled 97 Young and Dangerous, released in 1997, a symbolic year for the film’s treatment of youthful triad gangsters in a context of change and adjustment. The triads are portrayed as seeping into every level of society, including politics. Elections are adopted by the triads as a means to update and modernize themselves (the hero, played by Ekin Cheng, even goes to a school and gives a speech to errant students exhorting them to be good kids). In the film, a democratic-style election is held for a supreme leader between two candidates belonging to rival gangs. The candidates face each other off in a debate, with the leader of high virtue (in Chinese, degao wangzhong) claiming the mandate to rule. Although it ends in violent retribution (the winner getting rid of traitors and enemies, Godfatherstyle), the film works as a representation of Hong Kong people’s subconscious desire for good and competent triads because of their power and influence in society. In essence, the triads constitute a mini-government. In Election, the police appear to acknowledge this fact by arresting all the principals of the Wo Sing in order to ensure that the election does not result in war which would endanger peace in the wider society. In Election 2, it is the Mainland law enforcement agency, the Public Security Bureau (PSB), which has an interest in seeing that peace is maintained between the triads. Election 2 is by far the more political of the two films. Its conclusion reveals China’s hand in the lawmaking agency of violence perpetrated in that film. Louis Koo’s character, Jimmy Lee, the victor of the election, has a meeting with the provincial PSB deputy chief Shi (played by You Yong) who instructs him to go for total power and ensure stability by hereafter passing the power on to his family rather than have the triads go through elections — thus a cycle of violence — every two years. “Your leadership will make Hong Kong a safer place”, Jimmy is told. The character of Shi recalls Tao Siju, the disgraced ex-Minister of Public Security who gained notoriety in 1993 for making the remark that “even triad gangsters are patriots”. Tao was well known for his links with triads and had personally welcomed members of the Sun Yee On Society to Beijing.13 The figure of Shi therefore reflects the collusion between the Chinese Government and the Hong Kong triads in protecting their respective vested interests in Hong Kong — on the pretext of ensuring stability and peace. To makes the political point that China is against democracy in Hong Kong, believing it to be injurious to stability and the growing economic cooperation between China and Hong Kong. However, this political point lacks conviction, as Sek Kei has suggested, since the triads are hardly democratic. In addition, the election of a leader by a closed cabal is precisely the way that Hong Kong’s chief executive is chosen, “so why would China

182

Director in Action

oppose this?”14 Sek Kei acknowledges that the film nevertheless generates the strongest “political fireworks” in the Hong Kong–China relationship since reunification. In other words, Election 2 is the most directly political film made in Hong Kong in the post-97 era. Election 2 also contains one of the most violent scenes that To has ever conceived — the scene of Jimmy butchering a victim, hacking off his arms and legs with a butcher’s knife and feeding them to hungry dogs. In the diptych, violence — whether symbolic or lawmaking violence — is itself a political statement of sorts. The most violent character, Big D, is also the most rebellious. An example of this rebelliousness is his threat to start his own “New Wo Sing Society” if he does not have his way. He remains an irredeemable iconoclast even when appearing to accept his rival’s authority as the new leader of the Wo Sing. In his own way, he is a permanent revolutionary. Rather than abide by the law of the triads, he follows his own primal desires and is killed in the end because he attempts to bend the rules, to change the law. Of significance is the fact that he is the one character who is constantly seen with a female by his side, his wife (Maggie Siu). This kind of masculinefeminine (or yin-yang) doubling (the man marked by feminine values of deceit, cunning, whereas the woman adopts masculine values of authority and command) is followed through in Election 2 where Jimmy Lee is also the only character seen with a female, his young Chinese wife — and Jimmy is marked by “feminine” values of a desire for domesticity and an initial reluctance to stand for election (he only does so in order to secure his business interests in China); his wife displays “masculine” virtues of coolness and calm in the abduction scene where she hits Jet with a bottle to stop him from killing Jimmy. The violence of Jimmy and Big D belies their “femininity” on the surface but in fact is highly revealing of subversive feminine characteristics. The whole aesthetics of violence in the diptych is based on finding ways and means of accommodating violence to the archaic if not obsolete laws of the triads. I have earlier discussed symbolic violence in relation to the triads’ use of violence as a means to perpetuate its power and dominance. An associated form of symbolic violence is Benjamin’s concept of mythical violence, which I discussed in relation to The Heroic Trio in Chapter 2. Mythical violence reemphasizes violence in myth as a meta-critique of violence in society. With his concept of mythical violence, Benjamin was grappling with the idea of a form of violence that could be justified both as a means and as an end. Mythical violence is a different kind of violence: not a means but a manifestation, more aligned with violence as a natural law which Benjamin calls fate; it is violence that lies outside the law, uncomplicated by legal ends. Benjamin then stated that mythical violence is not really destructive

Postscript

183

but constructive in that it brings a new law to men. Mythical violence itself is a lawmaking form of violence: it is violence doubly mediated — by law and fate. Violence in its mythical manifestations throws a problematic light on lawmaking violence: it “illuminates fate”.15 I noted that To’s eschewal of guns makes the violence in these two films surreal, and it is the lack of guns that signifies the idea of mythical violence and its associated concept, symbolic violence (both in the sense that it is not real but surreal, and in the sense that Bourdieu uses it, as a mainstay of masculine domination). These kinds of violence have a deliberate tone, meaning that they are there to say something — they “illuminate fate”. Here, fate is the law and the rituals of the triads and inasmuch as the triads are an institution (a mini-state, a mini-government, or a patriarchy), it manifests as the Destiny-machine. Mythical violence establishes the law of the Destiny-machine, thus we can see the absurdity of violence and the archaic laws under which the triads still subject themselves to (nowhere more so than in the scene of Lam Suet repeatedly intoning the triad oath of loyalty as he is beaten up by Lam Ka-tung for refusing to hand over the baton — and if the point is lost in the heat of the violence depicted, To insists that he was really ridiculing the whole notion of triad justice and righteousness16 ). Pang Laikwan asserts that violence in Asian cinemas expresses “the local cultural resistance to modernization”.17 She may have a point insofar as the characters of these two films, inhabitants of modern cities, seek simple solutions to their problems through primitive violence. Such violence involves physical acts of hacking, kicking, smashing, etc. These are the sorts of physical actions that primitive men would have used to kill, especially when executed with primitive tools like shovels and rocks. To seems to be saying that even without the relatively modern technology of guns, men can use whatever is at their disposal to kill. One might also say that the archaic rituals of the triads represent the local resistance to modernization. However, To’s new aesthetics of violence in Election and Election 2 displays the many facets of violence and I would suggest that it shows not so much resistance to modernization as a postmodern accommodation to the contemporary urban environment in which violence is a common feature of modern life. Criminals adapt to modernization as much as normal citizens. The violence of the two films is substantial even though To does not show his characters using guns, which is the iconic way of John Woo and the hero movies in Hong Kong cinema including To’s own. To in this instance is deliberately working against convention and the root aim of his aesthetics of violence is to show the many ways of violence in order to push the art of the action film to the cutting edge, to illustrate the idea of adaptation or alteration as society changes.

184

Director in Action

Violence is particularly disturbing in these two films because of this basic trait of aestheticizing, involving the skills of adapting and altering. But I would go further and say that it is disturbing in a distinctively genderized way — that the violence, rendered and conducted without the phallic instrument of guns, is feminized. I have alluded above to some extent to the idea of feminized violence by referring to the “masculine-feminine (or yin-yang) doubling” of Big D and his wife in Election, Jimmy Lee and his wife in Election 2. This quality of doubling in itself is quite different from the doubles of A Hero Never Dies and Running out of Time where sameness or a certain homoeroticism is at work. Meaghan Morris shrewdly observes that action cinema generally “is fascinated with both ‘like’ and ‘unlike’ doubles”, and it is “also fascinated by ‘sameness’, and by the difference of sameness from ‘similarity’”.18 Here, the unlikeness of the doubles stems from gender but their likeness too also stems from gender — and this is a crucial point in perceiving the nature of the violence, which is feminized by virtue of the symbolic abstention of gunfire and the symbolic tools of violence that are used (a motif of victims being trussed up and put in cages or sacks, for example; or the use of short swords or knives, traditionally associated with female knights-errant). Morris also points out that in traditional portrayals of heroic cinema, “the one who yearns to become identical with or be the master is usually a villain”.19 Election and Election 2 can hardly be called heroic cinema but they do have heroes who yearn to be the master — and they are clearly villains who all share a certain similarity of identity. In this sense, sameness is also a function of gender. They are all male, slim and pretty (as represented by the three principals, Tony Leung, Simon Yam, Louis Koo — with Louis Koo’s tanned and impeccably groomed Jimmy Lee being the “prettiest” of them all: a well-educated, metrosexualized criminalbutcher 20 ), and the violence they perpetrate is all of a feminized kind, which we can call yin violence.

Still 6.4 Louis Koo as Jimmy Lee, a tanned and pretty criminal-butcher, in Election 2

Postscript

185

The idea of doubling can be extended to the structure of violence in To’s action cinema as a whole, which heretofore have largely concentrated on gunfire or yang violence (the sight of “action babe heroines” wielding guns in The Heroic Trio points to an offsetting yin factor in the depiction of violence which remained nascent in his subsequent male-dominated films21 ). That is now counterbalanced by the yin violence of Election and Election 2. In her study of Milkyway films, Pang Laikwan rightly points out that they “reveal a certain contradictory handling of masculinity”.22 The films “no longer carry the male confidence and aggressiveness so often seen in earlier Hong Kong gangster and action movies, and the man’s world portrayed … is full of anxiety and disturbance”.23 I have tried to show in the previous chapters To’s paradoxical handling of masculine action in films such as The Mission, Breaking News, and Running on Karma. Pang emphasizes that the Hong Kong action film exhibits a “problematic gender ideology” in its aesthetics of cinematic masculinity which is “culturally characterized as clean and sober, as opposed to devious, clumsy, and confused femininity”.24 To’s films of course challenge the aesthetics of masculinity in a subliminal fashion, and Pang’s remarks exert a lot of weight particularly on Election and Election 2 in that the diptych presents violence in a manner that can be said to challenge the stereotypical masculinity of the protagonists. The idea that triad gangsters do not use guns in a modern environment where guns are

Still 6.5 The feminine yin “look” of modern triad gangsters: Election 2

186

Director in Action

readily available is a highly tendentious move on the part of To. Firstly, it is of course another fictional conceit that triad gangsters do not use guns, since To himself has shown triad gangsters using guns in A Hero Never Dies, The Longest Nite, and The Mission. Secondly, gunless violence makes the violence even more abstract: in a sense, since the violence is not denoted by the phallic symbolism of guns, it is not as exposed and therefore the violence appears devious, clumsy and confused — all adjectives denoting yin nature. To builds upon a motif of hidden or enclosed violence. For example, though guns are not invoked as phallic symbols, there is a phallic symbol in the form of the triad baton and violence takes place around this action McGuffin. Significantly, the baton is always hidden or wrapped up (in Election 2, it is literally buried). This motif of violence that is hidden or enclosed is played out in the various scenes where victims are encaged or put inside crates (Election) or pens (Election 2) — all instructive of yin violence. Traditionally, in Guangdong province, women who are caught in the act of adultery are put inside pig baskets and thrown into the river to drown. This is a punishment meted out by the feudal patriarchal structure to the female sex, and the punishment is suitably yin — to enclose as in a womb — befitting the female physiology. To had introduced this unique form of violence in PTU where the triad boss Baldhead captures the male underlings of his murdered son Ponytail and puts them naked inside small wooden cages, such that the victims are forced to assume foetal positions, more importantly, feminine positions: their squatting inside the cages implies that they are bodily and structurally subordinated and subjugated like the female sex inside the symbolic order of male domination.

Still 6.6

Encagement, in Election

In Election, Big D kidnaps a couple of senior uncles in order to persuade them to change their votes; he imprisons them inside wooden cages which he then rolls down a slope, at the same time conducting negotiations with Simon Yam’s Lok (the victor of the election) and other uncles on his mobile. The point is clear: Big D is not just vicious and violent; he is that in a highly

Postscript

187

negative, feminized way. He is devious, manipulative, hysterical, and shrill — a shrew of a criminal if ever there was one (Tony Leung Ka-fai flawlessly embodies these “feminine” characteristics with his nagging speech and facial gestures — that whining nasal voice and those glaring eyes; Leung deservedly won the Best Male Actor award in the Hong Kong Film Awards for his performance). In Election 2, Jimmy Lee captures Lok’s loyal underlings and submits them to torture by encaging them in dog pens with hungry Alsatians. The motif of yin violence is recapitulated with a variation: in order to convince the others that they should switch their loyalties to him, Jimmy himself chops up the most hardcore Lok loyalist among them and feeds his limbs to the dogs. Jimmy goes about his butchering methodically and unflinchingly like a housewife, as if he were chopping up a chicken. Of course, Jimmy is man enough to do his own butchering but there is a hint of yin qualities to the images of violence, suggested by the clinical, gray lighting, and the elimination of sound that brings out the enclosed womb-like surreality of the butchery. The absence of sound (no cries of the victim or sounds of chopping — the only sound heard is that of a wailing flute) produces a phantasmatic effect or a hell-like aura which in Chinese is called yin jian (the domain of yin).25 But the point about Jimmy’s butchery is that it is both yin and yang — qualities which overlap without necessarily neutralizing each other. In a maledominated structural system of violence, yin qualities are hidden and difficult to make out — such qualities being glimpsed within the structure of masculine symbolic violence. In these two sequences, To shows the dark side of masculinity structurally and formally — by depicting the violence of the men as a feminized form and a yin-infused ambiance of violence. I have already stated that the “masculinity” of the lead characters (Big D, Jimmy, Lok) can be seen ambivalently in terms of their femininely slim and slender body sizes which offer a stark contrast with the muscular bodies of the action-blockbuster type hero that Tasker analyzes in Spectacular Bodies. In fact, the whole cast of characters in the diptych can hardly be said to be heroically masculine in the fashion of triad movie heroes, with perhaps the exception of Nick Cheung’s Jet and Lam Katung’s Kun who come across in Election as stereotypical triad heroes of the Young and Dangerous disposition but who are then given their comeuppances in Election 2. Other characters such as the oath-muttering loyalist played by portly Lam Suet and the stammering junior uncle played by Cheung Siu-fai are more like caricatures of heroes, while a new character like Mark Cheng’s professional hitman Bo in Election 2 is shown to be completely moneyminded. Thus Bo is without the ideals that traditionally bind triad members: his line in the scene where he and Jimmy wash up after the butchery scene

188

Director in Action

— where he had carried out the devilish task of putting the chopped limbs through a meat mincer — reveals his character’s shortcoming, “This will give me nightmares! I want more money!”26 Thus Election 2 accomplishes the critique of swaggering, brutish, masculinity as represented by the likes of Bo, Jet, and Kun, as it also gives a certain finish to the political critique of the Hong Kong–China relationship, imbricating Jimmy’s “crisis of masculinity” with the crisis of politics — his sense of helplessness and powerlessness intermingling with his fear and loathing on the discovery of the state superstructure bearing down on him, and thus the Wo Sing — at the end.27 The question that is raised at the end of Election 2 is whether or not the violence will end for the sake of stability and the greater peace of society and the state: the political message understood in the Chinese title, Yihe weigui. Shi, the PSB officer who imparts this message to Jimmy is described by Sek Kei as “sinister” (yinxian),28 another feminine vice demonstrating the complete cynicism and utter loss of faith that is revealed at the end of the film. The film’s political critique is all too transparent and far from subtle. Shi gives the message to Jimmy who then retaliates by hitting him several times, which under ordinary circumstances would be a serious crime in the People’s Republic (perhaps punishable by death). However, Shi does nothing and even instructs his men not to intervene as Jimmy continues to hit him (Shi’s nonaction smacks of a certain coded practice of honor implicit between criminal and cop; he is of course conversant with the moral code of the triads since it was established in Election that he had infiltrated the triads as an undercover PSB officer dispatched to Hong Kong before the handover). There is a more subtle critique that lies underneath the political layer of the scene. Shi is really a variation of Curtis, the leader of the bodyguards in The Mission played by Anthony Wong, who is similarly manipulative and sinister. Earlier in the film, Curtis is beaten up by one of his men but for the sake of the group and its professionalism, he does not meet violence with violence. Curtis takes the violence, like a woman who takes the symbolic violence of masculine domination on her body by displaying “the opacity and inertia that stem from the embedding of social structures in bodies”.29 Ironically, it is Curtis who, at the end of The Mission, secures a conclusion that reinforces the peace and stability of the structure of masculine domination (see Chapter 4 for my analysis). In both the endings of The Mission and Election 2, To inscribes ambivalence about the existence of the masculine group while apparently maintaining the ongoing survival of the super-structure (the triad in the case of The Mission, the state in the case of Election 2). All the forms of masculine violence finally bring on a crisis of masculinity but the structure of violence — symbolic violence ultimately — remains intact.

Postscript

189

Exiled: Symbolic Violence and the End of Masculinity The intactness of symbolic violence in To’s work is aptly demonstrated by the continuity he provides from The Mission to Exiled. The fact that the four main characters of Exiled (the hitmen played by Anthony Wong, Francis Ng, Roy Cheung and Lam Suet) are transparently the characters who appear in The Mission — though they look much older — may have underscored the sense of continuity between the two films, but it is the film’s structure and topography of violence which suggest more forcefully that Exiled is a sequel to The Mission. Paradoxically, it can also underline the film’s independence as a work in its own right — and the inclusion of a new star, Nick Cheung, who plays effectively a new character, is an indicator of To’s urge to create difference and variation in the midst of continuity. The structure and topography of violence are both marked by variation and a further strand of experimentation which show once again To’s susceptibility to meta-criticism and his compulsion to extend himself cinematically within his own oeuvre. Though there is no centerpiece sequence of gunfire action in Exiled on the same scale as the “shopping mall” sequence in The Mission, the violence in Exiled has an abstract art quality with a kind of Jackson Pollock luster and gloss to it. In the gunfight sequences, one can’t quite see who is shooting who, everybody is firing at the same time and trying to take shelter from the crossfire, the gunsmoke seems to be the primary element at first, and then, as the smoke subsides, the targets become clearer but yet the abstractness remains, one sees blotches of red. I am reminded here of Pollock’s 1952 painting Convergence. The several shootout sequences in the film, mostly shot in slow motion (which tends to exacerbate the idea of a chaotic convergence),

Still 6.7

The four gunmen-protagonists of Exiled

190

Director in Action

are not far different from each other, which show how To seeks to present a consistently abstract look of violence rather than display one specific bravura setpiece sequence as he did in The Mission (the shootout in the shopping mall), PTU (the final shootout in Canton Road) or Breaking News (the opening shootout sequence done in one long take). Similarly, the topography of violence in Exiled is marked by the same kind of uniform abstractness that I remarked upon in my analysis of The Mission in Chapter 4 which portrays violence taking place in (Kowloon noir) settings that represent a subjective world apparently cut off from the objective outside world. Once the violence erupts, we see only the protagonists involved in the violence and no one else. I wrote in Chapter 4 that all the protagonists are “automatically enclosed within an inner world that no one from outside (apparently not even the police) can enter or has any recourse to intervene in the action or to stop the violence”. In Exiled, which is set in Macau on the eve of the Portuguese handing over the colony to China in December 1999,30 To makes the inner world abstractness more obvious by qualifying and “explaining” it with the satirical motif of a senior Macau policeman (played by Hui Shiu-hung) who, while driving around the streets of the colony on patrol to make sure that there are no incidents to mar the handover, is kept out of the action by two gunmen (Roy Cheung and Lam Suet) and thereafter receives instructions from the triad boss Fay (Simon Yam) not to interfere. This officer of the law constantly strays around the edges of the inner world of violence, keeping his head low all the time and deliberately staying out of the action; it also happens that he is retiring from the force on the final day of Portuguese rule when the clock strikes midnight for the handover. The character represents To’s running commentary on the collusion between the triads and the police — a favorite theme evident in the two Election films but which stretches back to The Longest Nite (1998), also set in Macau.31 Unlike the policemen characters in The Longest Nite and the two Election films who actively intervene in the affairs of the triads and the hitmen, Hui’s bumbling inspector of police is plainly an outsider — or the only symbol of an outsider — who exists outside of the subjective world of hitmen and triad gangsters. He symbolizes the absence of the police and innocent bystanders. The absence of innocent bystanders in Exiled is somewhat more pronounced, given that the size of the colony is even smaller than Hong Kong (a population of 450,000 people living in an area of 15.5 square kilometers), and that the action takes place in residential neighborhoods. This fact is pertinent to our understanding of the abstraction of the topography of violence in Exiled. The abstraction is grounded in a very small space and there is a rational explanation for the absence of innocent bystanders in that gang wars

Postscript

191

were particularly virulent in Macau in the three years before the handover (The Longest Nite, of course, takes place in that period) and it is only sensible for people, on hearing the sound of gunfire, to vacate the streets and stay indoors. It would be deadly, not to say foolish, to expose oneself. This rationality certainly adds a realistic, plausible dimension to the action sequences in Exiled, giving tangibility to the “inner world” of violence. It is relevant that one considers the variations of this “inner world” of violence which To inscribes in Exiled. In The Mission, the subjectivity of the inner world of the bodyguards is paramount once violence erupts: all the protagonists are united in the “mission” of protecting their boss. In Exiled, there is no one overriding mission and the protagonists are not as solidly united within one inner world of violence. The violence in Exiled is abstract because the group is divided, and there is more than one mission (Anthony Wong’s character is less decisive here than in The Mission, and he is reduced to tossing a coin to make decisions, for instance) — but ultimately because it is driven by To’s need to experiment and express new facets of violence, the phase that To went through immediately before Exiled, with the Election diptych. In those two films, To eschews the use of guns, rationalizing this decision by saying that it is the tradition of the triads not to use guns. Consequently, and ironically, the violence, as I have stated in my analysis of the two films above, is more abstract and surreal. In Exiled, To returns to the inner world of professional gunmen who were last shown bonding together as a group in The Mission. Anyone expecting the same kind of stylistics of gunfire violence might have been disappointed. The Mission has clearer, cleaner, lines of violence. Exiled is messier — and, as I have noted above, the slow motion technique, blurs the action and creates a messy convergence. It is as if having decided not to use guns in the two Election films, To had lost his bearings in taking up guns again in Exiled.

Still 6.8

Shootout in a Macau restaurant: Exiled

192

Director in Action

The mess of the violence in Exiled certainly accounts for the Jackson Pollock-like abstraction but there is a deeper spectacle behind the managed chaos and pandemonium. The spectacle is that of masculine violence and the crisis of masculinity that I have considered in my discussion of The Mission. Exiled continues the discourse and gives it a summation, in fact, brings it to an end, as signified by the mass mutual slaughter of the hitmen and the triad gangsters at the end of the film. The sequence is reminiscent of the final slaughter in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (and, incidentally, also the final slaughter in Expect the Unexpected ): men meeting their ends without any ambivalence about their survival. Thus the end of masculinity is determined by the exact nature of their end as a group and as individuals, but also the nature of their crisis before the end. As in The Wild Bunch, all previous action scenes in Exiled already hint at the archaic nature of the group and prefigure its end. It is how the men die that counts. The abstract “mess” of the violence in this final sequence and in the other sequences (notably the one where both parties converge in the makeshift operating room of an underground doctor, and shoot it out), is a psychological mirror of the vicissitudes of the masculine group that is now divided unto itself and can therefore no longer survive. The sequence shows male bodies “stylized and fragmented” by To’s abstract depiction of violence, deformed and made distinctive by slow motion into a moving spectacle of death.32 Anthony Wong and Francis Ng represent the two different drives of the group — one to kill and the other to protect Nick Cheung’s character, named Wo (Chinese for peace). In Exiled, a female (Wo’s wife, played by Josie Ho) acts as the catalyst of the masculine group’s disintegration and demise. As in The Mission, the presence of the female constitutes a threat to the group, and she then brings about its downfall. Hence, my claim that Exiled has inherited the structure of violence as embedded in The Mission can be tested and proven through the female role in both films. Exiled opens with a knock on the door and Wo’s wife opening the door. Not for the first time, To sets up the figure of the wife as a domesticating influence (cf. Where a Good Man Goes, which, in retrospect, now looks like a key film in To’s evolution and appraisal of masculinity). The ensuing scenes inside the house show how far a violent character like Wo has been domesticated, chiefly through the scenes revealing the presence of a baby, and most importantly, the wife breast-feeding the baby. The image is consistent with To’s utilization of babies and mothers, seen for example in The Heroic Trio, and the pre-Oedipal threat they pose to the stability of the patriarchal order as represented by the hitmen and the triad mobsters. The visual symbolization of breast feeding is therefore an instance of a threat more

Postscript

193

so than the appearances of the two hitmen and their associates which ostensibly pose a threat to the home. The hitmen, as it happens, turn out to be softies of a kind, with a desire for home and domestication (the scenes of them cheerfully moving furniture into the house and then cooking dinner are instructive of this desire). In short, the female and her corresponding maternal body represent a crucial difference, one that matters to the masculine group as a desire for home, on the one hand, and as a symbol of a castration threat, on the other. The breast feeding is a classical Freudian instance invoking castration anxiety in the spectator, but To may simply have wanted to emphasize Ho’s maternal character (marking her out as a different kind of femme fatale from that in The Mission). That the castration threat remains largely symbolic may be due to the masculine group’s psychological perception of the female maternal role. In Exiled, To demonstrates that there are only two female roles of consequence in his action worldview thus far: the mother and the whore, and it is clearly the mother who poses the greater threat of castration while the figure of the whore (who appears in crucial moments throughout the film as an opportunist money-and-gold-grabber) simply feeds the men’s sexual fantasies and their sexist attitudes. For example, To inscribes vulgar jokes about female breasts in the repartee between Anthony Wong and Lam Suet later in the narrative, which suggest the mother-whore matrix that is firmly fixed in the minds of the group: the vulgarity indicates that the men treat women largely as playthings but the reference to breasts is an unconscious reminder of the mother, and the whole episode might be seen as essentially offsetting and highlighting the nature of Josie Ho’s significance as a symbol of the castration threat to the masculine group. The strength of this symbol is such that it plays on the minds of the group, reminding them of their vulnerability, or their sense of crisis about their masculinity since it invites identification with the mother. It is noteworthy, for example, that Boss Fay (Simon Yam) is shot in the testicles (the closest to an actual castration that has been depicted in To’s action cinema) during the restaurant shootout where the group are supposed to eliminate the Macau triad boss Keung (Lam Ka-tung). The crisis of masculinity is therefore manifested as a motif in the scenes of Boss Fay wincing in pain from the wound in his crotch — and it is played out as a joke later in the makeshift hospital scene where Fay seeks medical help from the underground doctor. Fay’s wounded masculinity necessitates a spontaneous alliance with his erstwhile enemy Keung (in a scene, cut from the Hong Kong release version, where they shake hands to seal their alliance33 ), thus pitting the triads against the hitmen — and effectively ensures the end of masculinity. The interplay between the different groups of macho gangsters and hitmen

194

Director in Action

represents a convergence of forces of which the end result is a foregone conclusion. To has provided precedents of this in several films where fatalistic ends mark the final scenes (Expect the Unexpected, The Longest Nite, A Hero Never Dies) — and the trajectory of these films to The Mission and Exiled represent a constant reappraisal of masculinity in which the end of masculinity is manifest. The other meaning of the end — that of objective or final point — is that masculinity is in perennial crisis, a crisis usually triggered by the presence of the female which tests the resilience of masculinity, but crisis may just be the end in itself, as a kind of sado-masochistic ritual. The crisis of masculinity in Exiled is most patently demonstrated throughout the film by Anthony Wong’s performance. Instead of exuding self-assurance, Wong’s face registers doubt and hesitation. His whole body is literally made to suffer — in those several scenes where he is shot in the chest but survives because he is wearing a bullet-proof vest and in the scene where he is repeatedly slapped in the face by Boss Fay for failing to carry out his orders to execute Wo. The scene mirrors the one in The Mission where Wong’s character, Curtis, is beaten up by Francis Ng that I referred to above. Wong takes the violence meted out to him like a woman who takes the symbolic violence of male domination, which is perfectly represented by Boss Fay, and, of course, he gets shot in the balls. This is To’s way of closing the circle of male domination and the crisis of masculinity. Such self-conscious parody of male violence makes the film memorable, not so much To’s stylization of violence and the allusions to the Western (particularly Peckinpah and Leone) though they are certainly entertaining (the hitmen dressed in winter coats that look like the dusters worn by the male protagonists of Once upon a Time in the West, or the trek through the Macau backwoods reminiscent

Still 6.9 Taking in a beating: Anthony Wong and Simon Yam in Exiled

Postscript

195

of a Western desert). The end of masculinity is the outcome of the self-parody. Only the mother and the whore survive — the former with her baby, and the latter with all the gold she can carry.34 The female in Exiled is the Destinymachine that drives men to their final encounters with death, and through the emblematic figures of the mother and the whore, she ensures that the cycle of crisis and violence will continue in the masculine cinematic world of Johnnie To.

Conclusion As a self-conscious parody of male violence, Exiled works on multiple levels of genre tribute, commentary and stylistic displays of action, primarily that of the male body, which To has obsessed over in his films discussed throughout this monograph. Though far from being a negligible film, Exiled, however, must be considered a minor work compared with its immediate predecessors — the diptych of Election and Election 2 which present both political commentary and violence as substantively new facets of To’s work in the action genre. The new aesthetics of violence presented in Election and Election 2 provoke the question of whether or not the aim of the two films, following Rene Girard, is “to achieve a radically new type of violence, truly decisive and self-contained … that will put an end once and for all to violence itself”.35 There can be no doubt that To has made two socially conscious films that have political significance, particularly in the post-97 context of Hong Kong, but the question of violence that they raise may not be understood as social implication but rather as genre convention. Violence begets more violence in genre film, as one sees in the continuity of violence from The Mission to Exiled — and the aesthetics of violence from one film to the other leads the audience to demand more and newer visions of violence. Cinematic violence is selfperpetuating, exciting to watch and often heroic. It can also be nasty and demeaning in its realistic power to shock. Violence in To’s action cinema has a didactic function inasmuch as one’s cognitive senses are provoked through the viscera of violence. Tom Gunning, when describing the nature of the violence that Glenn Ford’s detective Dave Bannion uses against his enemies in Lang’s The Big Heat, wrote that Bannion “employs violence not as emotional expression but as a tool of instrumental reason”.36 In Election and Election 2, violence is a tool of instrumental reason, being employed for larger purposes. Jimmy Lee is one of the most rational of violent characters: he employs violence to further his own ends methodically, to ensure his election as well as his own survival. Similarly, Big

196

Director in Action

D in Election uses violence as a means to ensure his ends, but his volatility causes his exertion of violence to come across as “emotional expression” and it ultimately seals his doom. Big D is an example of how not to use violence, and his reprehensibility stems from his irrational violence, while Jimmy’s reprehensibility lies in his rational employment of violence (in this respect, Jimmy is a close cousin to Michael Corleone in the Godfather trilogy). Lok in Election is seemingly reasonable and non-violent until the very end of the film when he makes a sudden but rational move to kill Big D (Election 2 of course exposes Lok’s true colors as a murderous criminal who cannot get over the system of violence which in the end also destroys him). All three men are reprehensible for using violence as a means to an end. “In the great criminal,” Benjamin writes, “this violence confronts the law with the threat of declaring a new law, a threat that even today … horrifies the public as it did in primeval times.”37 Thus Benjamin concludes that all violence contains a lawmaking character. The aim of lawmaking violence is the use of “violence as a means of legal ends”.38 Far from getting rid of violence once and for all, it structures violence into the body politic. The critique of violence in general, as Benjamin points out, is that “violence is no longer exercised and tolerated naïvely”.39 Lawmaking violence is highly political and sophisticated, tied to a system of rituals and oaths, designed to keep the peace and to ensure the stability of society. The ending in Election 2 may signify the peace but it does not suggest the end of violence — and in this sense, it is an ambivalent ending, which is the kind of ending that To has always favored. The irony of the film is that it shows that peace embedded in the structure of symbolic and lawmaking violence can never bring real peace of mind to its perpetrators. In other words, the structure and body of symbolic and lawmaking violence falls down like a rock on the victim and peace is the peace of the dead, rather than of the living. Such an irony is arguably more pronounced in Election where Lok kills Big D with a rock, smashing his head over and over. “It is no longer combat but something else altogether”, the French critic Florence Colombani comments.40 Lok is not driven by hatred nor by any innate desire to kill — the violence is something that descends logically on him as the leader of the Wo Sing. It is as if the violence is dictated by the structure of the Wo Sing and it falls down like a rock with Lok functioning as the human instrument mechanizing the fall (the imagery of Lok using the rock to strike Big D is therefore highly symbolic: Lok is an impersonal Destiny-machine, as dead as the dead weight of the rock). Colombani describes this final scene as “the only moment in the film of sound and fury which lets one perceive the vibration of a human tragedy”.41

Postscript

Still 6.10

197

The gravity of violence at the end of Election

In genre cinema, violence is rooted generically in the cinema and so there can be no end to violence. Exiled presents the end of masculinity, not the end of violence, and Election shows that the human tragedy revealed by its climactic scene is that violence as a disposition deeply embedded in the body will be passed on from one generation to the next, as Lok’s act of violence on Big D is witnessed by his son. It suggests that violence is biologically rooted in Lok’s son who therefore cannot escape from the Destiny-machine of violence, even by running away from it as he does in Election 2 (Lok chases after his son as if to illustrate the hereditary linkage). By probing new forms of cinematic violence in the gangster movie, To exposes the hypocrisy, the cynicism, the absurdity and the implacability of violence, as practiced by men and by institutions. In the process, To gives us a bleak political vision of power and the corruption of money. It is a deeply fatalistic vision. I hesitate to call it pessimistic because To films his scenes of violence with an objectivity that is as startling as the violence itself. He shows us that we live in an objectified state of violence (cf. the scene in Election 2 where Jet, wearing a mask, nonchalantly approaches his victim on the street and cuts his throat), so much so that our senses may be immune to violence — and that is perhaps the greatest violence of all.

Still 6.11 The trauma of violence impacting on the next generation

198

Director in Action

To’s objectivity — his sense of distance — captures the wisdom of Benjamin’s truism: “Man cannot at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, no more than with any other of his conditions and qualities, not even with the uniqueness of his bodily person.”42 While Benjamin speaks of the “not-yet-attained condition of the just man”, To speaks of being “more careful in your next life” (Jimmy’s last words to one of his victims before he is tied up, put in a sack and thrown into the ocean). It is a fatalistic axiom which offers a glimmer of hope in a hopeless situation — perhaps a fitting epitaph for all the victims of triad violence in To’s diptych and certainly a testament of his highly personal take on the question of universal, and eclectic, violence.

Epilogue

199

Epilogue

The Subject Was Johnnie This monograph has set out to demonstrate To’s auteur function in the genre cinema. I have tried to avoid taking a naïve romantic view of To as auteur. His films are vital expressions of the Hong Kong film industry in which To himself has a stake in maintaining and preserving. Only in this way has To been able to produce a corpus of major works which he deems to be “exercises” and what I call his “neo-exercises” in the last chapter — films with high formalistic segments that distinguish the narratives as a whole. Though uneven, To’s films are marked by his own hand as auteur. When we recognize all his films as Johnnie To pictures, genre takes on the specificities of the auteur-function. Genre resides in the works of the auteur whose complicity in the texts or an exchange of texts (his alteration and transformation of texts) becomes a process of defining genre and its patterns. In the introduction, I said To encompassed several egos in his auteurfunction, implying that his positions can shift as he executes his authorship of the film text. To is the auteur of his films by virtue of occupying the subject position of the auteur — sometimes in the role of a producer in apparent contradistinction to his role as director. However, To effectively is the auteur of those films that do not carry his name as director (specifically A Moment of Romance, The Odd One Dies, The Longest Nite, Expect the Unexpected ). To’s auteur-function in general privileges the position of the director, and it is as the director of his films that this monograph celebrates Johnnie To. As auteur, Johnnie To is his own subject — by which I do not mean that he makes biographical films but that he makes films shaped by his personality and thought, and that he makes films which inevitably revolve around his own

200

Director in Action

films. To is the speaking subject of his films, the producer-director-artist who has something to say about Hong Kong (and about China) and about the state of its cinema. Looking beyond the films, To’s auteur status is observable by anyone watching him at work on the set (he is one of the most accessible of Hong Kong directors), as I had the opportunity to do on several occasions when he was shooting Election at the end of 2004. On set, To’s authority was total, like that of an absolute monarch, with everyone silently deferring to him. To’s dominance and control over his crew, and actors, is possibly due to the fact that he works with a stock company of technicians and actors — old colleagues from his TV days or regulars from the early days of his filmmaking career. His faithful technicians include the associate director (and sometimes editor) Law Wing-cheung, action choreographer Yuen Bun, director of photography Cheng Siu-keung, and his team of writers Yau Nai-hoi, Wai Ka-fai, Au Kin-yee, not to mention grips, gaffers, and assistants who also appear in his films in bit parts. Filmmaking may be a collective enterprise, but on To’s sets, To is the subject-focus of the collective. In the cinema of Johnnie To, To himself is the subject extraordinaire. Yet, while To’s auteur ego may be paramount, this monograph also analyzes his function as a director working within the generic parameters of the action genre in a commercial Hong Kong film industry which has continued to decline over the past decade or so that has seen To’s own career advance (in 2006, he was once again named Best Director by the Hong Kong Film Awards for Election, which was named Best Picture). The industry’s decline has worsened over the last three years (2003–05). Production plummeted to its lowest point ever in 2005 and the state of the Hong Kong film industry seems even more precarious than ever before.1 If To was ever regarded or even saw himself as the savior of the Hong Kong cinema in the post-97 era, he has clearly failed up to now to pull it out of the profound depths of depression it has fallen; and while To might have established a new tendency in the action film genre, he did not make the most commercially successful films in the genre, namely the Infernal Affairs trilogy (of which more will be discussed later). Hence it could be said that To’s contribution has been eclipsed by the success of others. Yet the success of Infernal Affairs could not in itself rescue the Hong Kong cinema from depression. The malaise in the industry is deep-rooted and structural — and To’s film have probed deeper than most into the roots of the depression; his films, with their dark fatalistic edges, in fact constitute the cinema of the depression. If instead of a depression, the good times had returned to Hong Kong, To’s career might have taken a different path; he could very well have turned

Epilogue

201

from the action genre to concentrate on some other genre. To’s contributions in the action genre are hard to deny, however, displaying a formidable style of filmmaking that defies and transmutes the spectator’s expectations of the genre, as I have argued in the book and will argue in the course of this chapter. His career may already have entered a new stage of transmutation as Hong Kong’s economy now looks set to become more integrated with the Mainland’s as a result of the free trade agreement known as CEPA (Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement), put into effect in 2004. With the implementation of CEPA, the Hong Kong film industry is virtually seen as a domestic industry within the Mainland, its products no longer subjected to the import quota imposed on foreign films. Breaking News, Throw Down and Yesterday Once More were produced with the joint imprint of mainland Chinese companies, with subject matter mostly related only to Hong Kong (prior to CEPA, joint productions were required to be set in the Mainland with appropriate subject matter related to China). Though censorship remains a real threat to Hong Kong filmmakers, the CEPA regime of breaking down quotas and other restrictions may be the medicine that the Hong Kong film industry urgently needs to revive itself. CEPA renders a milestone to Hong Kong films since they can now be recognized as cultural entities integral to the national framework of China. Pre-CEPA (roughly from 1997 to 2003), the Hong Kong cinema was, following Ackbar Abbas, a cinema of the déjà disparu, a concept which I would extend not only to the disappeared historical spaces of Hong Kong during the pre-reunification period “where ‘imperialism’ and ‘globalism’ are imbricated with each other”,2 but also to the period since reunification, whence Hong Kong filmmakers, confronted with the decline of their industry, scramble to record existing spaces of the city as a desperate means of re-focusing the city in the collective memory of Hong Kong citizens before its cinema disappears. To’s films (exemplified by but not limited to Expect the Unexpected, Running out of Time, The Mission, PTU, Breaking News, Throw Down, Election, Exiled) are testimonials of this obsession with city spaces as if to denote their impending loss but certainly to depict them as spaces of internal conflict animated by feelings of social insecurity. Election 2 is a post-CEPA cinematic work of violence and intrigue starring the Hong Kong triads supported by mainland Chinese players (Public Security cops, businessmen, party and government officials) who are all conscious of integrating Hong Kong more and more into the system. For Hong Kong citizens, the film underscores an obsession of another kind, which is a growing cynicism of power and politics. In retrospect, we can see this obsession as a symptom of the post-97, preCEPA malaise brought about by the economic depression, the outbreak of

202

Director in Action

bird flu and SARS, as well as the government’s political heavy-handedness (in the enactment of an anti-subversion law, the so-called “Article 23” of the Basic Law, which resulted in half a million people demonstrating on the streets on 1 July 2003). To’s films ultimately relate to Hong Kong physiologically and psychologically. Even when a film such as Fulltime Killer is mostly set in Southeast Asia, it is never far removed from Hong Kong (and indeed, the film reverts back to Hong Kong for its denouement). Films such as Too Many Ways to Be Number One, The Longest Nite, Election 2, and Exiled, are implicitly and explicitly concerned with the question of “Greater China” and Hong Kong’s place in this greater entity. How does Hong Kong relate to the Mainland, Taiwan and Macao at the same time as it relates to itself ? To’s films in general also relate to the Hong Kong cinema in its generic context (it is a cinema about genre cinema) and in its industrial context — To himself playing a key role within the industrial structure as an artist-entrepreneur seeking to revivify a declining industry and balancing this role with that of a citizen-artist. Here I will summarize To’s enunciating role as an auteur of genre film through the convention of the happy ending, as a method of drawing certain conclusions about To’s achievements to date. The happy ending is an ironic way of ending this epilogue, as will be made clear, but since To’s career is ongoing and likely to contain more revelations and surprises, this chapter cannot make conclusions about his career as such but about the way his films have ended — as a means to indicate To’s contributions to genre and the art of cinema.

The Happy Ending In recognizing To as the subject-auteur, it is necessary to underline certain elements of genre that one might loosely call the clichés or conventions which would allow the audience to partake of its pleasures. To creates a cinema of diverse generic pleasures by following through on the auteur-function of alteration and change, and by applying an idiosyncratic touch to the narrative thrust of these genre clichés or conventions. Rick Altman states that genre films offer the pleasure of a counter-cultural experience and that generic pleasure is built on the audience’s desire to restore order and an eventual return to cultural values.3 The strong desire for resolution dictates the convention of the happy ending. To’s cinema, however, is often defined by the denial or the reversal of the happy ending, and in some cases, I would suggest there is only a begrudging return to social order and cultural values. Putting aside

Epilogue

203

the action films for a moment, even the endings of some of his films in the more optimistic genres such as comedy are at best ambiguous. In Needing You, the convention of the happy ending is played down by a mockery of Andy Lau’s heroic and macho image. In Help!, the idea of generic pleasure as a subversive process allowing the audience to suspend their reliance on the norms of civilization in the course of the film, is itself subverted. Altman says that “genre viewers can be satisfied only by an increasing opposition between (generic) pleasure and the (cultural) interdictions that restrict it”.4 Such an opposition sustains the narrative of Help!, but the ending provides no resolution which is part of the generic pleasure that Altman says must come for the generic process to work. “Who can resist all generic temptation?” he asks, in the belief that the end of all genre films will restore our sense of culture and civilization and elicit pleasure in the audience as a result of this restoration.5 The question is an interesting one to apply to the films of Johnnie To inasmuch as To tempts us with his “careful manipulation of opportunities for generic pleasure”6 but then either denies us or gives us a far from smooth return to cultural values through his theme of fatalism or the Destiny-machine (often ending in death in many To films).

Still E.1 Death in the city: the final massacre in Expect the Unexpected

The finality of fatalism, such as we see in the ending of Expect the Unexpected and Exiled, means that To doesn’t give us any option to resist generic temptation. Fatalism gives his films a dialectical ending rather than a happy one: as To says of the nihilistic ending of Expect the Unexpected, it was meant to convey the message that “life is important”. Thus, through the finality of fatalism, To asks us to consider our state of existence and the purpose of living. The restoration of civilizational or cultural values is not as relevant to To simply because such values are not the end of meaning or the end of history. Values in themselves are finite and are subject to change as civilizations rise and fall. They can no more be restored than one can recover something

204

Director in Action

that is lost in time. This is perhaps the most controversial aspect of To’s auteursubjectivism — his bias towards fatalism, which imposes on us a state of finality. There is no democratic means to resist generic temptation; in fact, To resists it for us in the most authoritarian fashion so as to engender alternative modes of meaning at the endings of his films, which generally resist a restored faith in cultural and civilizational values. If To is his own genre subject, he is naturally the centre of his films, echoing another of Altman’s observation that genres “are autocratic monarchs dictating a single standard of allegiance for all subjects”7 (I had previously said of course that To “is like an absolute monarch” on his sets). Genres are not “neutral categories” but are “ideological constructs”.8 In his own cinema, To’s authoritarianism is inscribed in the character of Curtis, the Anthony Wong character in The Mission, an arch manipulator whose cool pragmatism conjoins a team to work professionally with one mind. Curtis’s persona is perhaps the closest to To’s in all of his films to date. Thus, from the predisposed viewpoint of his ideology of fatalism, To imposes on us a fait accompli of resistance to generic temptation so that we are denied the pleasure of resolution or closure. Curtis pulls off what is the most accomplished of accomplished facts at the end of The Mission (his “killing” of Shin that “fulfills” his obligation to the triad godfather because of Shin’s infraction of a jianghu code of practice), though in this particular instance, To induces generic pleasure through a happy ending of sorts, in the appearance of a return to social order and the normalization of triad values. At this stage in his career, To was conscious of delivering the audience happier endings after giving the audience a series of fatalistic endings in The Longest Nite, Expect the Unexpected and A Hero Never Dies.9 However, it is debatable whether the ending in The Mission resolves anything and the ending seems to me to be suspended in time, affecting what David Bordwell calls a “closure effect” or a “pseudo-closure”.10 With Exiled, To gives us the closure and reverts to the fatalistic ending as if to suggest that he is happier with the unhappy ending. In this sense, To is

Still E.2

The “killing” of Shin in The Mission

Epilogue

205

closer to the view of genre proposed by Thomas Schatz who states that a “sense of loss accompanies the resolution of all genre films because of the contradictory, irreconcilable nature of their conflicts”.11 For Schatz, genre is inherently contradictory because it unfolds a narrative rupture that results from a cultural conflict between individualism and the common good.12 The happy ending glosses over the sense of loss, but genre has a capacity to evolve and to challenge “tidy and seemingly naïve resolutions”.13 Genre’s capacity to evolve and to challenge is actively negotiated by To as the auteur. To’s resistance and denial of generic pleasure underlines my proposition that without the auteur, genre cannot derive any momentum to change or transform. The director actively seeks to undercut the tyranny of genre by twisting the conventions, notably through the operations of the fatalism theme — the Hand of the Auteur as the Hand of Fate. One sees the theme explicitly at work in A Hero Never Dies, The Longest Nite, Expect the Unexpected, Running out of Time, Running on Karma, Election, Election 2, and Exiled, all containing endings that do not restore the equilibrium of optimistic closure or the “happy ending”. Expect the Unexpected has possibly the most pessimistic ending of any major genre work in the Hong Kong cinema and really the only logical reaction to such an ending is to ask, “Is this a genre film?”

Still E.3 The Hand of Fate: does it bring closure? A scene from The Big Heat

The endings of The Mission, PTU, Breaking News, Throw Down and Election provide us with sober returns to reality, characters facing the future which is as uncertain as they found it in the beginning (only The Odd One Dies in this series has what may be called a conventional “happy ending”) — and none of these films in retrospect are genre films generating classical generic pleasure. Western critics would more likely describe them as “art films” for their

206

Director in Action

rigorous adherence to form and complex characterizations above the usual norms of genre films. The “art film”, Bordwell tells us, is a distinctive mode of film practice, and the one practice that applies to this study is the foregrounding of the author “as a structure in the film’s system”.14 In this sense, the art film is the auteur film — the kind of film which fulfills the function of the auteur. To himself is the “formal component” functioning as a sieve through which generic pleasure is filtered: in short, To does not offer unadulterated pleasure but rather another kind of pleasure designed from his perspective and purpose for our comprehension. Generic pleasure in the hands of To becomes an abstract concept of form that sometimes verges on the metaphysical, as in the conclusion of Running on Karma which emphasizes a spiritual closure of forgiveness and asceticism: the hero in a state of nunc dimittis, executing a departure from his own bodily shape and from the generic world of heroes and villains who had earlier displayed incredible prowess of fluctuating bodily shapes and martial functions. In Running out of Time and its sequel, the generic pleasure transforms cultural restoration into a theurgical force which I have characterized as “magical fatalism” in Chapter 4 (quite apart from the fatalism that invests To’s other films), a force which apparently determines the apparitions of its heroes and their disappearances at the conclusions. Yet none of these films can be said to fulfill audience expectations in the conventional sense of genre theory, and this is because To applies his own auteur-function as formal constraint to his genre films even while he is indulging in the populist conventions of genre. At best, films like Running on Karma and Running out of Time have ambivalent endings that might be construed as partly fulfilling the precept of generic pleasure since they do restore some semblance of a return to cultural values, while also remaining consistent to To’s customary fatalism (in these films, death reaffirms the civil society, and may even precipitate revolutionary change, as Running out of Time 2 hints ironically at, with the singing of the socialist anthem, “The Red Flag”). Yet, ambivalence shows To’s constraint. To’s paradox is a sign of the essence of his unevenness as an unabashed maker of genre films on the one hand, always seeking to accommodate the tastes or tendencies of his audience, and as an auteur on the other hand, thereby demonstrating the truth of Schatz’s observation that the success of any genre depends on its flexibility in adjusting to the audience’s and filmmakers’ changing attitudes.15 In To’s case it is the attitude towards the theme of fatalism and the conflicts that it arouses in and between the characters. This unevenness must inevitably be regarded as a manner of To’s productiveness and artistry in revalorizing genre and its conventions in the Hong Kong cinema, while at the same time reinvigorating

Epilogue

207

the film industry in its period of decline. The concept of generic pleasure is re-modulated to the state of an industry in decline as if there can be no full expression of generic pleasure when genre itself is in danger of being snuffed out. If there is no cinema, there is no genre film. It is in the realm of genre that To seeks to revive the industry, and the premise of the salvation of the Hong Kong cinema is built upon To’s formalist rededication of genre. Indeed, the most sustained pleasure of To’s genre films lies in our appreciation of his application of formalistic “exercises” in rendering his works experimental and abstract forms of action. Nicole Brenez informs us, without irony, that the French avant-garde is entirely fascinated with Johnnie To.16 One shouldn’t be surprised. His best films are the materialistic forms of an artistic temperament exuding a certain enigmatic and contradictory presence that belies the notion of the Hong Kong cinema as a shallow cinema of genre entertainments. In A Hero Never Dies, Running out of Time, The Mission, PTU, Breaking News, Throw Down, and Exiled, To shows that he is a stylistic auteur par excellence, one as much concerned with the form of heroism as with its content. One shouldn’t forget The Odd One Dies, The Longest Nite and Expect the Unexpected which don’t carry To’s name as director but are in fact stamped with his authority. All these films contain sequences of high formalism, revealing a premeditated nature of difference and experimentation. I will only refer to the examples in three films that attest to the evolutionary and experimental aspect of To’s handling of formal structure: the “shopping mall” sequence in The Mission, the opening plan-sequence in Breaking News, and the “Four Tables” sequence in Throw Down — all sequences designed to showcase a cinematic sensibility of decoupage (in putting together a stunning formal sequence). In all these sequences, To experiments rather than creates,17

Still E.4

Exiled : the stylistics of violence

208

Director in Action

a rule of thumb that might seem odd at first in the context of a cinema that is traditionally antipathetic to experimentalism because it is so heavily bound by commercial considerations, but which on second thoughts is only natural in a genre cinema that follows predetermined patterns and rules. Since the genre artist cannot create, he can only experiment. The quality of To’s experimentation may be open to criticism (for example, the “Four Tables” sequence in Throw Down is seemingly inelegant marked by confusing crossings of imaginary 180-degree lines, simply too audacious an experiment for it to really work in the eyes of some critics; or that the editing in The Mission, according to Patrick Tam, is “inaccurate”; or that the long take in Breaking News needs in fact to be edited for its coverage of multiple aspects of action18 ), yet such formal experimentations represents genuine attempts to break moulds and to differentiate themselves from the norm. These experimentations may also contribute to the perception of unevenness in To’s work but they do not necessarily constitute failures. Unevenness in this respect is a feature of experimentation of the predictable forms of narrative due to the fact that genre movies stress repetition and cumulation. An expectation of predictability is built around the recycling of the same stars, plots and endings, and it is exactly such an expectation that seems to me one of those characteristics of genre that detractors of genre cinema bemoan, whence such an expectation leads the curious viewer to see how the filmmaker gets around predictability. The function of the auteur is to be unpredictable, a reversed form of expectation, as the title of Expect the Unexpected advocates. To has proven that he can certainly be unpredictable insofar as he experiments with forms. The three segments that I have taken as examples are all different from each other in terms of their formal attributes: the “shopping-mall” sequence of The Mission stresses stasis in space and the idea of “static violence”, the opening plan-sequence of Breaking News stresses movement and time, and the “Four Tables” sequence of Throw Down stresses multiple-axial montage. Throw Down itself is an unexpected kind of movie following such achievements as PTU and Breaking News. It exhibits an even more drastic formal structure in its deliberately elliptical and disjointed narrative, and it is the one work that materializes the experimentation of form in its entirety — a masterpiece of unevenness, so to speak. It is a film composed of detached, anomalous, and disjunctive sequences. If cinema is a series of false movements, which Deleuze explains as illusions of movements that result from the ongoing projection of still images,19 there are unforgettable false movements in To’s films which appear to break down into immobility. Images seem to slow down even as movement erupts around them — one thinks of the bodyguards in the shopping mall

Epilogue

209

standing still as if to control their urges of violence in The Mission, the various protagonists who appear like statues in the process of being smashed up in the Canton Road gunfight filmed in slow-motion in PTU, and those moments in Throw Down where the protagonist’s impending blindness motivates a series of aberrant movements, stumbling from one scene to the next, thus imposing a nature of unevenness on the whole film. We might recognize this as an interstitial gap in Johnnie To’s cinema, occurring naturally in the series of images that flow from To’s mind as he brings them into form, approximating the apparatus of cinema from its origins as still images and its movement through projection. In summary, the nature of To’s formal “exercises” (all those virtuosic sequences that I have already referred to in The Mission, Breaking News and Throw Down but also including sequences such as the battle of the coins and wine glasses in A Hero Never Dies, the jail confrontation sequence between Tony Leung and Lau Ching-wan in The Longest Nite), are somewhat detached and aloof from the rest of the narratives, becoming the substance of To’s idiosyncratic manner and thus contributing to the perception of unevenness. However, unevenness itself is an outcome of false movement — the contradiction between movement and immobility — which To turns into a philosophical reflection on the nature of action itself (or to be more specific, the choreography of action, since the principal motivator of action as far as this book is concerned is To himself). The philosophical proposition of the false movement applied to Johnnie To is that his cinema is an idiosyncratic, irrational cinema: irrational by virtue of culture and locality (Hong Kong as the intersection of East and West is by this very fact an irrational culture and place) but also irrational by dint of a formal structure where the “images and sequences are no longer linked by rational cuts … but are relinked on top of irrational cuts”, as Deleuze defines the “regime of the new image”.20 While Deleuze is referring mainly to the post-war cinema of the West, he might as well be talking of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, a cinema of irrationality that is inherently postmodern, exemplified in this book by To’s work. To’s idiosyncrasy arises from a constant urge to renew himself not only to produce work that is different from the classical norms of the Hong Kong cinema (and its inter-textual references to Hollywood and Japanese cinemas) but from his own norms: such a desire not to repeat himself further institutionalizes the perception of unevenness, thus the violence of his gunplay films are alternated with farce (Help!), comedy (Wu Yen, Love on a Diet, etc), romance (Turn Left, Turn Right, Yesterday Once More), and something as unpredictable as Running on Karma or Throw Down, which in turn leads to Election and Election 2, both violent films without gunplay.

210

Director in Action

At the very least, To’s impulse is to make films that are entertaining, but it is perhaps sufficient to think of him as a filmmaker who has made films as idiosyncratic expressions of his creativity, and his ideal is to make “quality films” which give the Hong Kong audience (his prime audience) a reason to believe in the power of the cinema to regenerate itself. In this sense, films such as Yesterday Once More, Turn Left, Turn Right, Fulltime Killer, Wu Yen are requisite to the system, and films such as The Mission, PTU, Breaking News, Throw Down, Election and Election 2, are made almost as dispensable works. Commercially, in fact, most were dispensable, not being blockbuster successes, and one reason why To called them “exercises” was that they constituted the dues that To would pay to discharge his own worthiness as a director with the objective of making his own personal films within the system. To’s cinema, as represented by this group of “dispensable” films is intensely personal and while they might be flawed, they come closest to being the kind of great films that an auteur aspires to make, demonstrating not only a consistent style but consistent ideas and themes that more than compensate for the director’s otherwise discordant, disjunctive nature displayed in the generic range of his films. To’s experimentalism, finally, must be put in perspective: he is experimental as a result of working within the system of genre cinema and the industry which produces it. He does not work outside of the system and probably would not be able to function if he did. He is thus very much a creature of the Hong Kong film industry, effectively cultivated into the system through long years of apprenticeship in television before his transition into films (as someone who had missed out on the New Wave and the Second Wave, To is perhaps the last of his generation of directors to have come up through television). He has a stake in the industry through his own Milkyway production company and his involvement in several other companies overseen by China Star, one of the major production houses in Hong Kong at the present time. One can sense a paradox in that what we call To’s “experimentalism” is an essence embedded within the commercial genre cinema and the director’s interests within the industry. However, the paradox is an outcome of To’s auteur-function, his mastery of the system for his own ends, feeding his desire to make more personal films by pandering to the system’s desire for more commercial product: “to give one in order to get one”, an old Hollywood maxim. To is not the only director in the Hong Kong cinema to do this, but he is perhaps the only director in the post-97 era to have made the strongest impact consistently through his concentration on the gunplay action film genre or its correlates, the gangster film and the film noir.

Epilogue

211

The success of the Infernal Affairs trilogy over 2002–03 has probably eroded some of this impact. To’s influence is however evident in the trilogy. In fact, the first film of the Infernal Affairs trilogy is the best Johnnie To action film that Johnnie To did not make (the trilogy was directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak). To’s influence can be discerned in several ways, but chiefly through the employment of Andy Lau and Tony Leung as the two lead protagonists in the plot of the police and the triads, each penetrating the other’s forces with undercover operatives of their own.21 The film therefore engages with To’s theme of the double, and plays through the idea of the moral interchangeability of the cops and the robbers — the line propounded by To in Running out of Time and The Longest Nite. Above all, the trilogy is infused with a deep streak of fatalism, directly sourced from the Buddhist concept of the deepest inferno, Avici: the Chinese title Wujian Dao signifies “The Road to Avici”.

Still E.5 PTU

Walking down the road to Avici: a scene from

The fatalism of Infernal Affairs with its Buddhist overtones is prefigured by such magnum opuses of death in To’s canon: The Longest Nite, Expect the Unexpected, A Hero Never Dies, all films which paved the road to Avici and a distinctive style of Hong Kong noir that the makers of the Infernal Affairs trilogy sought to recapitulate. To might have relished directing Infernal Affairs himself (at least the first film) if only to prove that he could make a huge commercial success in the genre that he has made his own in the post-97 Hong Kong cinema. His own work in the genre have yet to achieve the blockbustertype commercial success that was attained by Infernal Affairs, a fact that must rankle To’s mind as he moves into his next regimen of “exercises” initiated by Throw Down. That To did not direct Infernal Affairs and what he did direct in the wake of the commercial competition thrown up by the trilogy says something about To’s predisposition — films like PTU, Breaking News, Throw Down, Election, and Election 2 are To’s own responses to the Infernal Affairs

212

Director in Action

phenomenon, a resolutely personal quintet that are much bleaker works by contrast and much less commercial (though the two Election films have been successful at the box-office).22 However, it is enough that Infernal Affairs stands as a classy monument to To’s influence. The influence is felt not only in the references to To’s work but in its response to the millennial crisis of post-97 Hong Kong, formalizing such a response in terms of a new aesthetics of gloom. To’s special role in the cinema of action lies in his formulation of this new action aesthetic that mirrors the feel and the face of Hong Kong in its run of bad luck and ill fortune in the post-97 era. He has effectively spearheaded a movement of action films infused with noir suspense and despair. Apart from the Infernal Affairs trilogy, one could name Ringo Lam’s Full Alert (1997) and Victim (1998), Wilson Yip’s Bullets over Summer (1999), Teddy Chen’s Purple Storm (1999), Gordon Chan’s 2000 AD (2000), Tsui Hark’s Time and Tide (2000), Wong Jing’s and Marco Mak’s Colour of the Truth (2003), Wong Ching-po’s Jianghu (2004), Derek Yee’s One Nite in Mongkok (2004) and Protégé (2007), Benny Chan’s Heroic Duo (2003) and New Police Story (2004), Wong Jing’s and Billy Chung’s Colour of the Loyalty (2005), and Marco Mak’s Wohu (or Operation Undercover) (2006). To’s own films in this movement seem more urgent, more avant garde, less exploitative than some of the above titles, and, perhaps surprisingly, much more humorous without losing their capacity to disturb (only Colour of the Truth exceeds the humor of To’s films23 ). To’s ability to unsettle our perception of genre as a world of pleasure and closure is therefore all of a piece with his vision of Hong Kong on the road to Avici, but his action cinema carries a dialectical weight — fatalism carries meaning and redemption, thus the destiny of his films is something else entirely. It is to question the values by which we live. The return to stability in the endings of films such as The Mission, Running on Karma, PTU, Breaking News, Throw Down and Election 2 does not mean closure or resolution; rather it is a means to precipitate questions and set our mind to thinking about survival and existence. The dialectics and the paradox make To one of the most interesting directors in the contemporary Hong Kong cinema. He is a director for the times, one who shows us that existence is survival riddled with fear — his message seems to be that doggedness of spirit and acceptance of insecurity can be uplifting. But if his work is irrational in a structural sense, as represented by Throw Down, there are moments open to us to seize the sensation of hope, recovery, and rediscovery in the human struggle of life and death. Opportunities for epiphanies lie in the interstices of his work. For all its dissonance marked by false movements, there is a distinctive symmetry in To’s work which returns us to a formal resolution if not a generic

Epilogue

213

one, as demonstrated in the opening and ending of Throw Down which are tail-ends of each other (a formal symmetry of form that is also evident in PTU, and with much the same import of showing a determination to carry on). Jean-François Lyotard tells us that by virtue of being endings, all endings are happy endings.24 No matter the persisting fatalism in To’s works, the “happy ending” of To’s films is that it shows us sober images of people accepting outcomes on reflection. Here we may think of the endings of The Mission, Running on Karma, PTU, Breaking News, Throw Down and Election 2 where thought comes into being as a sensation of definite ending. The final action in the action films of Johnnie To is the act of inducing thought.

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

215

Appendix 1: Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

I conducted this interview with Johnnie To in Hong Kong on 8, 10, and 13 December 2004. The interview was carried out in Cantonese, and I have translated it into English. I have abridged and edited the interview due to repetitions and redundancies, but taking care to retain its comprehensive range and length. To was very kind to find the time for the interview (he was then making Election), but in the end, we could not cover everything in as much detail as we both would like. Any lapses and omissions are entirely my fault.

Beginnings ST (Stephen Teo): Could you tell us how you became interested in film when you were growing up and what led you to want to become a director? JT ( Johnnie To): I didn’t think of becoming a director from the beginning. I started working in TVB at age 17, as a messenger. I didn’t think at the time I would become a director. Then I was assigned to the drama unit and came into contact with everything related to the production of drama series: actors, scripts, production, and music. Basically, before I entered the television industry, I had no thoughts of becoming a director. However, the movies were an important medium of entertainment when I was growing up and I loved to watch them. As a kid, I loved to watch the morning shows which were usually Cantonese movies, and the afternoon matinees which showed mostly western films. The tickets for these shows then were ten to twenty cents for the front row seats. There was a period when my father worked as a janitor at the Prince’s (Tung Lok) Cinema in Mongkok, and I would follow him into the cinema but I couldn’t sit in the front row so I had to watch the film from backstage, behind the screen. So this went on until my father left the company, and we moved house. I began to frequent cinemas in Kowloon City. I preferred to watch Western movies rather than Chinese

216

Appendix 1

movies at the time, but later, I got to like watching Chinese movies, and then European and Japanese movies. It was all a matter of interest and entertainment, nothing more than that. All this took place when I was eight to ten years old. Well, this period passed, and then I discovered I was no good in school. I told my father I wanted to leave school and go out to work. My father of course was not pleased. The telephone company, the police department, and TVB were all seeking employees. I decided to apply for the TVB position and that’s how I ended up in the television industry. In TVB, I came under the influence of Chung King-fai who recommended that I enrol in the acting class to become an actor. There I started to learn about drama theory from the perspective of acting, not directing. I wasn’t trained to become a director. I was in training school for one year, learning how to act and I had to undergo the usual lessons in dancing, singing, and so on. This was my education. The year was 1974. On Saturdays, I would sit in on the lectures on drama given by Chung King-fai at the Baptist College. Later, I was lucky enough to be promoted to assistant director, and I was assigned to follow several directors. The one director whom I followed the longest was Wong Tin-lum (Wang Tianlin). He was my teacher in film. He taught me about shots and about how to direct actors. ST: Did you see any of the films he directed for the Cathay studio, such as Wild, Wild Rose? JT:

No, I didn’t. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have remembered them. He belonged to a group of directors working in television at the time who had a film sense. Ordinarily, those directors who had come out of television didn’t have a film sense. He was different, and I was fortunate to have worked with him for two years, mostly shooting martial arts series. In 1977, I was promoted to director. In 1979, I made my first film for the cinema, The Enigmatic Case.

ST: Perhaps we could talk about this film now. It was made for a left-wing company, wasn’t it? JT:

Yes. This was the Fenghuang studio. There were several left-wing companies at the time, as you know, and as an assistant director under Wong Tin-lum (Wang Tianlin), I had the opportunity to work for one of these left-wing companies named Sun-luen. Wong directed two films for this company and I worked on those two films as Wong’s assistant. Then I was given the chance to direct The Enigmatic Case. Based on that experience, I didn’t think I was qualified really to become a film director and so I returned to television. I wanted to learn more about how to create in terms of direction.

ST: Watching The Enigmatic Case today, the film shows you employing many cinematic effects, such as flashbacks, slow-motion, etc. JT:

That was just style. I couldn’t grasp the dramatic motivation, or perhaps I

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

217

thought of the effect first and then its dramatic motivation later, which I didn’t think was the right way. The most important thing in creativity is that you have to achieve the most primal motivation in a character, and I couldn’t achieve that. I had to rely on others to help me, such as the cameraman, and so I wasn’t up to it myself. ST: Why did you choose to make a martial arts film, or the martial arts genre? JT:

Well, the genre was popular then. But it was a choice the company made.

ST: Was it because of the fact that Tsui Hark at the time had made The Butterfly Murders, also a martial arts film? JT:

No. I remember seeing the midnight preview of The Butterfly Murders and the next day, I was on my way to China to start shooting The Enigmatic Case. Everything was already set to make The Enigmatic Case, so it wasn’t a case of the film being done as a result of Tsui’s film. It was more the market that determined that we make a martial arts film because the genre was so popular on TV and the society at large, which afforded us that space to make a martial arts movie. The other thing is that when I was working as Wong Tin-lum’s assistant, the majority of the drama series that he made were martial arts series. It was felt that I could therefore handle a martial arts film.

ST: You have subsequently made rather few martial arts films in your career. The Barefooted Kid is one, and perhaps The Heroic Trio, or even Justice My Foot. JT:

Well, that’s more a comedy …

ST: But relatively few, in comparison with your contemporary action films, the gangster or the triad movies. JT:

That’s right. I never had the opportunity to make these types of movies in television. It was practically forbidden because television is a family-oriented medium. A triad or gangster movie was much too sensitive for television. Very often, viewers would complain. In my time, television didn’t give us that opportunity. Thus when I entered films, I wanted to make films of this genre because it was the one that I had not done before. Also, I feel personally that I am more attuned to the world of the gangster than the world of the knight-errant (wuxia). I felt that if I stuck to the martial arts genre in the cinema, I would one day be eliminated as a filmmaker. If I were always to make comedies, I would also be eliminated. I wanted to search for a genre that Johnnie To should make, and let me tell you, I am still searching. I still haven’t found it. Perhaps when I’ve found it, it may turn out to be the melodrama genre (laughs). From 1996 to the present, I haven’t failed to experiment in many genres. Many people ask me what kind of a director I am since I make different genres of films. I can only answer that I am a filmmaker who is looking for his own world of film.

218

Appendix 1

Back to the Movies ST: Your career in films can be divided into several stages. After making The Enigmatic Case, you returned to television and you stayed there for seven years. JT:

That’s right.

ST: Then you re-entered films to make The Happy Ghost 3. JT:

Yes, in 1986. I thought I was well-prepared then to re-enter films and to face that hurdle which I had considered I could not pass through years ago. Then I discovered when I was making The Happy Ghost 3 that it was much too easy. I didn’t have to do the script, and I couldn’t change the script. That was the Cinema City company, under Raymond Wong. He told me not to change anything in the script. All I had to do was shoot it. I didn’t mind all that because I wanted to re-acquaint myself with the film industry. It wasn’t important to me if I were to function only as an operator; I just wanted the chance to return to films. So I went on to make The Seven Year Itch (1987) and after that The Eighth Happiness (1988). On that film, I had Chow Yunfat to thank. We were friends from the younger days and he helped me a lot on that film. He said, “Why don’t we change the script to make it funnier?” And the two of us were always changing the script. The boss saw what we did but left us alone. I guess he thought that since we had Chow Yun-fat, it was all right because Chow was guaranteed box-office; and indeed, the film established a new box-office record at the time — it even surpassed the takings for A Better Tomorrow. After that success, the boss then said to me, “Why don’t you come up with your own story?” That’s how I came up with All about Ah-Long.

ST: That’s a very interesting film. It’s neither an action film nor even a melodrama … JT:

Well, it’s more of a melodrama …

ST: Well yes. It is a film about a father and son, and is also a love story between the characters played by Chow Yun-fat and Sylvia Chang. And at the end, it has an action scene of a car race … then the film becomes more like an adventure film. Can you tell us what you think about the film today? JT:

I remember it as the first film in which I could line up everything in one go; as the film that was made really from my own thoughts. I am grateful to Chow Yun-fat, who gave me many of his own insights, and also to Sylvia Chang, who actually wrote the treatment and was involved in the production. She disagreed with my ending but I told her that I was making the film because of the ending. It may be flawed but I insisted on it.

ST: I would like to ask you about genre. Do you have a fixed idea of genre?

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

JT:

219

First of all, what do you mean by genre?

ST: Types of movies, for example wuxia, or cops and robbers, or the ghost story … JT:

What genre do you think All about Ah Long is?

ST: Well it’s difficult to say. That’s why I’m curious to know what your concept of genre is. JT:

I myself don’t like to demarcate my films into whatever genre. Genre is something that people like to categorize. Genre is a likeness of a thing, whatever you think it is, more or less. That’s not important to me. As a filmmaker, what’s important is to describe life. There are things that are worth remembering. In the 1950s, there were directors who made gangster movies and now, in the new millennium, there are directors also making gangster films, but the elements are different. The outcome of the product is the memory of whatever is relevant or sensitive to the period. It’s not because the film is a gangster film or a ghost story or whatever, it’s because people have become different. We all exist in something called life and film gives us the means to explore life. Whatever genre it is isn’t important to me. My films deal with human beings whether it’s a gangster movie or a comedy. I speak only of man, and of man’s philosophy, and the value of man’s existence.

ST: Be that as it may, my book deals with your action films and I would like to focus on that. Firstly, I define action in terms of gunplay and the confrontation between cops and robbers. JT:

What about the swordplay films?

ST: Well that’s action too … JT:

Gunplay is action, but so is fighting with fists and legs, and car chases … isn’t that about the size of it?

ST: Yes, that’s about it. What I’m saying is that we know you best through your gunplay action gangster movies, which are films in the modern, contemporary period. In the book, I have organized your action films into various groups in chronological periods: films like The Big Heat, The Heroic Trio, Executioners and Loving You fall in the first period; the Milkyway films such as Beyond Hypothermia, Too Many Ways to Be Number One, The Odd One Dies, The Longest Nite, Expect the Unexpected fall in the second period; and in the third period, there’s A Hero Never Dies, Running out of Time, The Mission, PTU and Breaking News. Do you agree with such a division? JT:

It’s much like my progress, yes … as far as it goes up to Loving You and after that with the appearance of Too Many Ways to Be Number One and then A Hero Never Dies. The films after A Hero Never Dies fall into another cycle.

220

Appendix 1

Why I agree largely with your division is that I had early on made many socalled commercial films, for example The Eighth Happiness or Justice My Foot, or A Moment of Romance, and I discovered that comedy wasn’t what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was action — at least I had always thought so. So I embarked on making The Heroic Trio and Executioners and then Loving You. Loving You marked another stage in my career because it was a work that was more like my own style. It came after I had made The Mad Monk [a Stephen Chow comedy] which caused me to re-examine my career. Up to then, all the films I had made featured huge stars who controlled my method of work. I had to please the stars, not them me. So I thought, “Why should I make films to please others?” I wasn’t making a film so much as I was making a product, and I was making it because it could sell in the market. Since my return to films in 1986, that had been how my career developed — so I called a halt. I didn’t make any films in 1994. I spent a whole year reflecting on this. Then in 1995, I started work on Loving You, which I consider a film with my own Johnnie To thought. Then came the Milkyway films, but we found with these films that nobody went to see them, so we decided to make films that the audience could follow and Running out of Time was the result. So this was the start of the third stage. So I would largely accept your periodization because it conforms to my own thinking about the progress of my career.

On The Big Heat and The Heroic Trio ST: I’d like you to begin by discussing The Big Heat, produced by Tsui Hark. JT:

That was a very difficult project. There was another director before I was called in. He couldn’t satisfy Tsui Hark’s demands and so I was called in. That director had a difficult time communicating with Tsui Hark and in fact that happened in my case as well. Tsui’s problem was … well, he was a very good producer with a huge capacity, and that was the problem. You shoot something according to his wishes but then you find out that it isn’t what he wanted. You can never grasp his line of thought. It turned out that when I was doing stuff according to his wishes, he would turn around and say, why don’t you have more of your own stuff. So the film is very uneven to say the least. In the end, I didn’t even complete the film. He finished it and Ching Siu-tung also shot some scenes, but there are many of my own stuff in it. I don’t consider it a Johnnie To film, but re-viewing it, I think it’s very good in spots but flawed as a whole.

ST: But looking at the film today, we can see many typical Johnnie To touches. For example, the hero has an illness which affects his gun hand — the defective hero is one that we see appearing in many of your films such as Loving You

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

221

and Running out of Time. Then, the style of action is also familiar from what we’ve seen from your latter films, for example, staging the action in housing estates or apartments and inside lifts. JT:

I think at the time our thoughts were controlled by the environment. Making films at that time was quite different from nowadays because the government was not as supportive as it is now. The government did not permit us to close a street or to use guns. Because of these restrictions, we were forced to imagine action scenes in settings that we could control. We couldn’t shoot on the street because the police would come and stop us. What would happen if we had shot a scene only half-way through and we were stopped by the police and couldn’t continue anymore? There were many problems of this kind.

ST: So it was a matter of being forced by … JT:

… by circumstances and the environment to think of alternative settings that we could control. If a shopping mall allowed us to shoot inside, then we could come up with all kinds of action. The government would not stop us. The lift is a very small unit, it goes up and down, and nobody would care if we used it to stage action. So long as we don’t go out to the street, the government would not care. The possibilities of these settings caused us to be even more imaginative.

ST: The Big Heat also has an obsession with the group, or team work. This has some relevance to your latter films such as Expect the Unexpected, PTU, and Breaking News. JT:

Firstly, if I choose a subject with action in it, I would have several groups or many people involved. For example, if I were to make a film about the fire department, as in Lifeline, I would have a mass of people, or if I were to make a film about the police, there would be a team. This is so that it could bring out the theme of action. If I choose a subject with a single individual, it becomes a “killer” movie. Perhaps because my tendency is towards gangster, or cops and robbers movies, the group is more prominent. I like it because I can describe relationships between people, the group as a microcosm of humanity. This was my own choice really only after I had made Lifeline so I wouldn’t say it came from The Big Heat. With Lifeline, I felt that the idea of a group was a good method of describing characters’ relationships, and I wanted to extend this into other films more as a challenge. What team would I choose next? Thus I made Expect the Unexpected, and after that I made The Mission, then PTU, and the next film I would make would involve another different group. This is all very deliberate on my part. I want to experiment and find out just how many kinds of groups I can make films about.

ST: The Big Heat is also very violent, almost abnormally so. Was that your idea?

222

JT:

Appendix 1

It was Tsui Hark’s idea.

ST: It becomes more like a horror movie, a slasher movie. JT:

I didn’t want it to be. He (Tsui Hark) added all these elements and made it so. The most I would go for is to have a hand blown off or something like that. At the time I didn’t want the gore. I may make violent movies, but if you were to look at my subsequent films, there’s not much gore. So in The Big Heat, it’s not me, it’s Tsui Hark. That’s why we couldn’t get along. We had different views of action. For me, I start off by looking at the romance and aesthetics of action before I come to the violence. I would make violence but I would maintain the beauty and romance of action. Whatever action it is, be it gunplay, swordplay, fist and leg, car chase, I deliberately make it romantic.

ST: Your next film was The Heroic Trio and then the sequel Executioners. Both films were co-directed with Ching Siu-tung. JT:

The idea was to make a wuxia movie because the genre was in fashion at the time due to the Swordsman series, and many Jet Li movies. But if we were to make it in the same way as the other wuxia movies, there wouldn’t be much of a difference. So we thought of making a movie about female heroes, because female stars were not so expensive and we couldn’t at any rate get male stars since they were all contracted to other companies. We brought together three female stars, the most popular at the time: Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung and Michelle Yeoh — a very good combination. We wanted to make it different, so we didn’t want to make it in period costume. I had worked with Ching Siu-tung on television from the late 1970s onwards to the early 1990s, and we had made many martial arts series. So the idea was to make it different, post-modern, very comic book. I very much like Siutung’s action choreography. He was responsible for all the action scenes and he had a lot of input in the set design — we discussed this together with the art director. My work was in the screenplay and the non-action scenes. We respected each other and that’s how we divided up the work.

ST: Did you choose all the actors? JT:

Yes. The film didn’t do well at the box-office but we consider it a rather successful movie.

ST: But in the West, it’s a cult movie. JT:

Yes, they really like the film over there.

ST: Why was it a failure in Hong Kong? JT:

Probably because it resonates with a postmodern world. We don’t have this sort of comic-book resonance. In the West, they have Spider-Man, Batman

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

223

— that kind of world. With the Chinese, the most we could come up with was a world of female knights. But the locals couldn’t throw themselves into that world, firstly. Secondly, a film with females in the leads couldn’t sell at the time. This has been the case historically. ST: But don’t the Chinese have their own tradition of comic books? JT:

Yes, but the film is much more Western, don’t you think so? — in terms of art direction. Naturally, the kung fu is very Chinese. But the feel of the movie, in its design and so on, is very like Western comic books.

ST: Did you have a fondness for comic books when you were younger? JT:

No, I can’t say I did. I’ve always preferred movies. Even now, I seldom read manga or comic books.

On Loving You and Lifeline ST: Now we come to Loving You, which you have said is the first movie with a Johnnie To thinking behind it. Do you consider it a breakthrough? JT:

Yes, my own breakthrough. I can say that with Loving You, I didn’t think about the box-office or whether I had a famous star. Lau Ching-wan wasn’t too well known at the time. I used him as an actor, not as a star. He had to play the role the way I wrote it and the way I wanted it. There were no considerations of the audience reaction or anything like that, but rather what was good for the film. It might not have been too successful, but the film had a standpoint. I was determined while making it that the film would follow a creative path and that there would be no other factors that would lead me to compromise its direction. And so this is the first film that was made with my own thinking.

ST: The Lau Ching-wan character is a flawed hero. How did you conceive the role? JT:

He was based on a real person who was shot and injured while chasing a criminal suspect. The bullet entered his skull from the back and came out through the front of his face, through the eyes and nose, but incredibly, he survived and returned to the force. The newspapers printed his story. The film was a dramatization. The character therefore became a dramatic fictional character and the film is really about his personal reflection — how a person who undergoes a moment of inactivity thinks back about his life and realizes that he has made a lot of mistakes.

ST: The film has a lot of scenes taking place inside the hospital. The hero is of course injured and is therefore hospitalized. You have many hospital scenes in your latter movies. You seem to have an obsession with hospitals.

224

JT:

Appendix 1

This is something made necessary by the drama. Firstly, I was conscious of the budget; we had a very small budget so we had to build our own sets which would make it easier and cheaper for us to shoot, and hospitals are always good settings for drama. Secondly, hospitals are full of emotion and humanity. In such a place, you would feel that a person needs care, to make himself well again. The events that happen in his life take place in settings that are similar to such places. In the writing of the screenplay, we thought that hospitals would be the quietest places, the most ideal places for cool reflection, and also the places where you can see a lot of emotion. Apart from the environmental factor, I was also mindful of the dramatic factor.

ST: The last action sequence actually takes place in the old TVB studios. Did you deliberately want to shoot there? JT:

Indeed. I’ve an affection for TVB as I worked there on and off for some twenty years. The studio was to be demolished for renovation at the time and so we could use it to stage action with explosives. This was possible because Loving You was made by a subsidiary company of Shaw Brothers, and as you know, Run Run Shaw is also the boss of TVB. The scene shows the nostalgic affection I have for TVB since I started my career there, and I wanted to have a shot of the old studio building before it was demolished.

ST: Could it be that at this stage of your career, you were also saying goodbye to TVB? JT:

Some of that feeling is there, yes. I started in TVB as a messenger, and the studio gave me the opportunity to finally become a director. I can’t fully explain it but in my mind, I know I have this scene in my movies that I will always remember.

ST: Your next action movie, Lifeline, can also be called a breakthrough. It’s a different kind of action movie; there’s no gunplay, but it deals with the group. However, instead of the police, you now focus on the fire department. Why did you choose the fire department? JT:

In the beginning of the 1990s, there were so many so-called “hero movies”, triad movies, or cops and robbers movies. Action is invested in gunplay but I myself wanted something different. For myself, I have always wanted to be contrarian. When everybody is making triad movies, I will avoid making triad movies; if everybody is making gambling movies, I won’t be making gambling movies — this is the way I am. In a city like ours, there are many kinds of heroes. I don’t consider that killers or assassins are the only types of heroes in cinema. I was thinking at the time about what type of heroes there are in the city and to my mind, those who save people with no regard for their own lives are heroes. People in the medical services, and in the fire brigade are the heroes of the city. I chose to make a film about the fire brigade.

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

225

However, I knew practically nothing about them and I had no experience of a fire-saving situation. We made the film for about half a year and we had seventy units working on the film. Each day, we could shoot only about two scenes because each time we set up a fire for a scene, it took hours to clear the smoke before we could shoot the second take. ST: You didn’t use any special effects? JT:

All the fire scenes in the movie are real. There were no special effects. We did use wire for some scenes and the only special effects involved the erasing of the wire, but the fire is real. It gave us the most challenge and I must admit there were times when I had to question whether we could go on shooting like we did, using real fire. The first thing I had to consider was how to control the fire …

ST: In fact, the fire is like the lead actor of the film … JT:

Exactly. Fire is the most important thing in the film. It occupies at least half the movie, from the second half to the ending, and each shot, I had to face the fire … if not the fire, then the smoke. It was very difficult for the crew because not everyone of us could wear oxygen masks. The smoke was probably the most difficult because in a day’s work, say we work for nine hours, at least three hours were taken up in clearing the thick smoke. That certainly affected our health. It was very difficult for the actors too. We weren’t too sure how to shoot the scenes and it was a huge test for the actors. All of us were learning. I was always mindful of the dangers and the risks to health. We shot the film on and off for six months under adverse working conditions, but I was determined. At least, I was determined to make a film that could rival the best of anything shot in foreign countries, though we didn’t have the money. I had a very dedicated crew, and we were eventually, some twothirds of the way into the shoot, on top of things as a result of our experience. We found we could work faster even with the fire. The main reason why I made the film is that Hong Kong needs heroes, but not the kind of heroes from triad societies. We want real heroes.

ST: I remember the film came out a month after the Garley Building fire disaster in November 1996. Did the real-life disaster inspire the shooting of the last fire sequence, which took up nearly half the film? JT:

That was a coincidence. We had already shot our last sequence well before the Garley Building fire. In fact, on the day of the disaster, we had already finished the film. Some people asked us why we didn’t shoot more scenes so as to evoke the real-life disaster to put into our film. I felt this isn’t in the creative spirit. I don’t need real life to support our film, to make it more commercial or to make it richer. But I know that the Garley Building fire is the most horrible disaster in Hong Kong’s history. Even with our fake fire,

226

Appendix 1

it was extremely dangerous, and the real life disaster shows that in fact, it is very difficult to control fire. ST: How long did it take to shoot that last sequence? JT:

About forty days. It was a huge challenge. The conditions were adverse because there was a lot of water — we had to use a lot of water to put out the fire and it wasn’t completely drained — so that was a health risk as well, as much as the smoke. It was like working inside a big rubbish dump. We had to stop after every two or three days so that we could go somewhere and breathe in some fresh air for our health. Then after some rest, we continued shooting. My own health was affected and it took some six months before I fully recovered from the effects.

ST: Actually, Lifeline began with scenes taking place in a hospital. All the members of the brigade suffer from food poisoning and check themselves into the emergency ward. Did you plan it that way? JT:

Not really. However, I feel that the fire department is similar to the medical services, so there is a relationship there.

ST: What about staging action scenes inside lifts? JT:

It’s all circumstantial, determined by the environment. It’s not something that I deliberately put in. We look at the building and see what we can use for dramatic purposes — there’s the lift, the staircase, the basement, the storerooms, etc — all of which we go on to use.

ST: In my book, I call this the “infrastructure of action” in your films. JT:

Yes, because in a city, you can’t be far removed from these things. There’s also roofs …

ST: Exactly … JT:

They give the audience a feeling that it’s all possible because people always use them.

ST: The Lau Ching-wan character should have died at the end but you let him live. Why? JT:

We had to have the cooperation of the Fire Department to make the film, and it was their wish that they didn’t want to see people sacrifice their lives. Their reasoning was that they didn’t want families or colleagues who have lost loved ones to feel sad after watching the film, and also they didn’t want the idea of death or danger to affect the morale of the department. We promised them this. Then, we also felt that we didn’t need to go to the extreme at the ending. We had achieved our dramatic purposes without making a character die and we felt this was justification enough.

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

227

On Milkyway ST: After Lifeline, you established the Milkyway Company. Can you tell us your reasons why you wanted to form your own company? JT:

Well, I wanted to have my own production company, one whose creative objectives I could direct and which would allow me to express my own creative tendencies in film. I decided to establish the company on two principles, firstly, to be creative, to make films with our own Milkyway style, and secondly, to make quality movies, whether they were entertainments or otherwise. These remain our objectives to the present, although from time to time, we do make commercial movies.

ST: What was the first production of the Milkyway Company? JT:

Too Many Ways to Be Number One.

ST: So it’s not Beyond Hypothermia? JT:

No. That was shot before the company was set up. It was released after the company was established. The official first production of Milkyway was Too Many Ways to Be Number One.

ST: The early films were directed by younger directors. Why did you decide not to direct these projects? JT:

Well, we wanted to establish a production company. It wouldn’t do if I were the only director. Even now, my aim is to maintain a production company that can give opportunities to good directors.

ST: How do you work with the younger directors? Wai Ka-fai directed Too Many Ways to Be Number One, Patrick Leung directed Beyond Hypothermia, and Patrick Yau directed The Longest Nite and so on. We now know that in fact it was you who directed the films that Patrick Yau was credited for. JT:

There are various ways of dividing the work. Wai Ka-fai, for example, came out of scriptwriting. He is a very skilled screenwriter, but in terms of production, he wasn’t mature enough as a director. The director must know what he wants. He must know the content of the shot even if he can’t tell you where to put the camera. In this sense, he wasn’t mature, at the time. Now of course, he has become a mature director. With someone like Wai Ka-fai, I would give my opinions, or if I like his screenplays, I would help him find a producer. I don’t interfere too much. With other directors, I would give them a subject and let them develop it. I insist that they incorporate my views and ideas. Another kind of cooperation is when I have set up the whole project, done the casting, and the director just carries out the execution. This is the kind of director that Patrick Yau is. I feel that my cooperation with Patrick Leung and with Patrick Yau were not too successful because

228

Appendix 1

I would give them too much of my own opinions which they could not accept — but I had to be mindful of the investors and so I insisted they did it my way. Patrick Yau has since departed, and that’s only fair if his desire is to make his own films. Yau directed The Longest Nite and Expect the Unexpected. On The Longest Nite, I had taken him on as an experiment but he couldn’t fulfil my wishes. Half-way through, I took over. ST: Why was he still credited as the director? JT:

Well, I had wanted him to succeed and be recognized as a director. I didn’t want to pull him down half-way through the film, so I helped him finish it. I went onto the set and told him what to do, and he then went on to tell others what to do. After that experience, I felt that it was a good practice for him and I let him work on Expect the Unexpected. But then the same thing happened, and I had to take over the direction. After these two films, I said to him, why don’t you see what you can do outside of the company? He was feeling fed-up himself. Both he and Patrick Leung were my former assistant directors, and perhaps they both felt that I was supervising them. Therefore, if they left the company, it might be better for them. That’s how I feel. If there were opportunities to work together again, we would, but there haven’t been.

ST: Actually, what was the first film you ever produced? JT:

A Moment of Romance. I produced it, and in fact directed most of it. Ringo Lam and Wong Jing didn’t have much to do with it — they only lent their names to the production. Benny Chan directed about half the film. He too was my ex-assistant director. I had to take over the direction but he was on the set. At the time, I felt he was still too green for the job, and so after the film, we went our separate ways. I thought that he should go and work for another company, because in my eyes, I was always unsatisfied with his work. It was very difficult for him. He later became a very good director.

ST: From where does such a system of a producer who can take over the direction of a film originate? Did it come from your experience in television? JT:

No, the television producer wouldn’t take over the direction. In television, if someone was promoted to producer, the system wouldn’t want him to direct; the job of direction is left to the director. So television didn’t give form to my thinking on this question. In the film industry, there is Tsui Hark who served as producer. Let’s put it this way, it’s rule by force, because I have to be responsible for my investors’ interest. It’s a case of someone having to make the big decisions. It’s not important whether I am criticised or praised; I will still give other directors a chance to make movies. As to whether they’ll continue to work with me, I’m not bothered. What I do care about is that when I find a new director, he should finish the job, like with Vincent Kok

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

229

on Only Fools Fall in Love. He wanted to quit after only a few days but I dissuaded him. I know I gave him a lot of pressure, but I told him “You must finish the film,” and he did. Every one of them did, actually, but it’s another matter whether they will work with me again. ST: You have worked with Law Wing-cheung on many films. His credit is “executive director”. Can you explain that? JT:

Basically I tell him about the scene and about the shot and he then arranges everything. Sometimes, he directs some scenes which don’t require me to be present on the set. I appear on the set whenever there are important actors in the scene. If there are minor actors involved, I wouldn’t appear, and he is then responsible for directing the scenes. In future, when cooperating with other directors, what I would like to see is for us to communicate better before we do anything and I will try my best to let them have their own space to work in. I don’t wish to supervise them; they should tell me what to do. That’s what I want. Next year, I hope to start a project, together with Patrick Tam, to cultivate more writers. They’ll write several scripts a year, and perhaps two or three years down the line, they may become directors.

ST: The early Milkyway films are very experimental, even radical. Too Many Ways to Be Number One is shot entirely with a wide-angle lens. JT:

I felt he was forcing it — this tactic of using a single wide-angle lens for a whole scene.

ST: Was this Wai Ka-fai’s idea? JT:

Yes. Since it was his idea, I didn’t want to say anything against it. But by shooting the whole film that way, I felt he neglected other aspects. He couldn’t oversee all aspects of the shoot. He was directing his own screenplay of course. As a director and producer, I felt he missed out on a lot of things. But he wanted that style, and so I felt I should support him to create this special style of his. Perhaps on reflection, he might feel differently.

ST: You didn’t interfere at all with the style? JT:

Not at all. Because I was confident that he believed in his own film. Of course, the boss wasn’t happy — Golden Harvest’s boss. But I told him that the director had tried his utmost to make a good film. At least, it was a film that was quite rare in the history of the Hong Kong cinema. It fulfilled one of the objectives of the Milkyway Company — to be creative. Like in Breaking News, I wanted to have a single long take — and that’s in keeping with the Milkyway principle to be always creative and experimental.

ST: I’d like now to discuss The Odd One Dies. It’s a very interesting work. Patrick Yau is credited as the director, and the screenplay was written by Wai Ka-fai.

230

JT:

Appendix 1

It’s a wonderful script.

ST: Looking back at the film today, it seems to be influenced by Wong Kar-wai or by his style. Takeshi Kaneshiro’s presence as the lead strengthens that feeling, and then, the narrative is non-linear, discontinuous … JT:

Perhaps everybody feel that it’s like Wong Kar-wai, but we didn’t make it because of Wong Kar-wai. Basically, the screenplay is about the vicissitudes of life …

ST: I’d like you to confirm first that you directed this film. JT:

Yes. Patrick Yau is the nominal director. As I was saying, we didn’t deliberately set out to copy Wong Kar-wai. I don’t copy other people’s stuff. The film is about loneliness and it’s possible that it shows a tendency to Wong Karwai. It’s not a linear plot because it tells of the ups and downs of human fortune. You have to pay a price equally for what you want and what you don’t want. The impact of human life stems from the process of change. People often say, your fate can’t be changed and luck can’t be turned around — this is the theme in Too Many Ways to Be Number One. Once you have decided to travel down a road, the road has already determined certain things for you, and these things will change the next stage of your journey. Each road you choose to travel on will give you obstacles or advantages. It’s up to you to decide on how you want to travel. The philosophy of The Odd One Dies is how we face life.

ST: This theme of fate is something that Wai Ka-fai has brought out? JT:

Yes, and it’s a theme that I’ve stuck by. After reading the script, I insisted on following the theme of life as a series of turning points and the decisions one makes that affect us, our success or failure.

ST: The ending of the film, however, seems ambiguous. We don’t really know whether he has survived or not … JT:

He’s all right. I think this is clear in the end. Perhaps not strictly obvious, but it’s accounted for.

ST: What do you think of Wong Kar-wai’s films? JT:

I like his style, but I am not hugely influenced by his films. His films are all about photography and production design. I don’t think even direction occupies a major part of his films. Each shot and scene is a classic. But I don’t think he’s a top hand in telling stories or in direction.

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

231

Doubles ST: Let’s talk about The Longest Nite. It has two major stars. Tony Leung is the cop and Lau Ching-wan is the killer. One character seems to mirror the other. They are doubles of each other. Each person seems to have some of the other’s qualities and characteristics. Do you agree with this interpretation? JT:

I do. The whole film was built on this confusion of identities, I am like you and you are like me. Which one is the real me? Of all the characters, which one is the most powerful? No one knows. The people in the film don’t know. They have all entered a puzzling situation. The old man at the end of the film is the one who controls everything. This old man, when he wants to change something, resorts to the means that we see in the film. He is the unseen lord and master. The film says that everyone of us is inside a labyrinth.

ST: This idea of the double, “I am like you and you are like me”, can also be seen in Running out of Time and A Hero Never Dies. JT:

I think that’s because they are all about two people, two opponents who challenge each other. However, the characters are different in all three films. The Longest Nite is a puzzle, while Running out of Time is a game, and A Hero Never Dies is about two fatalistic heroes who admire each other. The handling of each film is different.

ST: Why did you set The Longest Nite in Macao? Was it shot in Macao? JT:

A large part of it was shot in Macao. At the time, Macao was a hotbed of chaos. What motivated the chaos? Nothing but power — some people wanted more power. We wrote the screenplay based on this idea.

ST: Expect the Unexpected is another interesting work. It reverts back to the group … JT:

The idea for this film is that of life being impermanent, being changeable. Everything is not what you expect.

ST: And such a theme brings us back to that of Fate, or perhaps fatalism (suming lun) … JT:

That wasn’t deliberate. It’s more the idea of impermanence (wuchang). Things are not what you think they are or what you are used to.

ST: Is it all vain hope and wishful thinking? JT:

Everything is a misunderstanding. But the main theme is impermanence. The most important thing is that when you think someone likes somebody, that’s not the case. Among the characters, what everybody thinks is so is just not the case — it’s not what you expect. In the end, what they think is easy to resolve turns out to be the hardest. Finally, they all die. Life is impermanent.

232

Appendix 1

ST: That’s very negative. JT:

I want to tell people not to be complacent, not to think that life is good. You don’t know when disaster will strike. You have to prepare for such an eventuality. This is life. We see many accidents in daily life, and we read about people having cancer, and so on. This is impermanence. It’s not something you can construct. Neither is it something you can separate yourself from. When it appears, it appears, and you cannot avoid it.

ST: Expect the Unexpected seems to link up with Breaking News … JT:

I didn’t plan it that way …

ST: For example, you have the robbers from the Mainland and the coincidences of meeting up with another group of Mainlanders. There’s the gunplay and the violence and so on. We can see the linkages although you may say you didn’t deliberately plan it that way. JT:

I don’t do it deliberately. Once we have worked out the main theme of a film, I follow the main theme …

ST: Actually, I’d like you to expand on a line spoken by Nick Cheung in Breaking News, and the line is “Without coincidences, there would be no stories”. This seems very apparent in your work. JT:

If you put it that way, I believe that in many instances, my films do show coincidences, or perhaps the repetition of things that are similar to each other. This is how I see life. It’s an inevitable part of life, and this determines how I deal with things. Very often, when something happens, it’s like a trial. You might have family problems, or you could be in an accident and there’s a quarrel which could end in a loss of life. Life is full of such chances which could lead to great disaster. If disaster doesn’t happen, then it’s merely an encounter. How often do we reflect on such encounters, on what could have happened? This is what I would like to focus on in my films. What you have said about coincidences, that’s how it often is. Without coincidences, there wouldn’t be situations. I do agree. This is my Johnnie To philosophy.

ST: The endings of PTU and Breaking News are not as negative as that of Expect the Unexpected. Although the robbers die, the cops survive … JT:

And problems are resolved …

ST: Is this something that you planned? JT:

Around 1998–1999, the films we made, including The Longest Nite, Expect the Unexpected, A Hero Never Dies, were relatively bleak works. You will feel that in the journey of life, many things are determined and you have to travel down to the end point, which is death. This viewpoint unsettled a lot of

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

233

audiences, because in the final analysis, film is fantasy. Audiences want perfect endings — that’s what they would accept more. With this in mind, after 1999, I wanted to make my films lighter, with more hope in them. Therefore, when I was making The Mission, I decided that my characters would not die. And in Running out of Time, everybody survives. ST: We are not sure that the Andy Lau character in Running out of Time doesn’t die in the end. JT:

(shaking his head) It’s a game. He got away. I showed him at the end coming back to life and he wipes away the blood. He gives something precious to the girl, and Lau Ching-wan tells her that he may turn up again suddenly. He believes he’s still alive. It’s a game. That’s the whole idea of the film.

ST: Andy Lau’s performance is very subtle, and he makes us believe that he will die. JT:

I am tricking the audience. I wanted to show that in the end, he will disappear, whether he really dies or he is faking his death, he will make an exit. But my own wish was to give the audience a happier ending, and not to see him die.

ST: The sequel continues this idea. JT:

Yes. It continues the theme of the game.

ST: There seems to be some kind of political allegory in the sequel — the use of “The Internationale” and “The Red Flag” … JT:

“The Internationale” signifies an ideal world, a Utopia. I chose to end the film on a Christmas Eve night. If people can work towards making the world more harmonious and equal, then we would all be better off. “The Internationale” signifies this aspiration, since we all live under the grip of capitalism and power. Lam Suet is a policeman addicted to gambling, and his opponent leads him to understand that it is an illness. Hong Kong people love to gamble, and so do the Chinese as a whole. Why is this so among the Chinese particularly? Because in most instances, the Chinese believe in fate. If the character could turn away from this, then he would feel more at ease. I show this enlightenment in the ending. If you don’t pursue materialism and power, you would be happier. That’s my view. That’s why I chose to end the film on Christmas Eve and that’s why I chose the song.

ST: The screenplay of Running out of Time was written by two French writers. Why did you choose them to write the script? JT:

I wanted to experiment. They wrote the first draft which was then changed because I didn’t think it was ideal. Yau Nai-hoi then rewrote the script. I also put in a lot of my own ideas.

234

Appendix 1

Classic Moments ST: The Mission is a classic Johnnie To movie. I remember reading an article which you published in City Entertainment. It was entitled “How to use static shots to capture the sense of motion in gunfights” — this was in relation to the classic gunfight sequence in the Tsuen Wan Shopping Mall. Could you explain this idea of “static shots”? It’s quite a contradictory notion because when we think of action movies, we think of movement. Where did you get this idea of “static shots”? JT:

I was under the influence of Akira Kurosawa when I was shooting The Mission. In static shots, I believe I could build a sense of movement. This sense of movement is in the audience, not in my shot. In that moment of stillness, you can feel that there are many things moving. You don’t need to see it, you can imagine it. This is the basic concept which led me to film that sequence. Originally, I had hoped that it would be very theatrical. The whole plot would be driven by the physical movements and gestures of the actors. I wanted a film with movement but to shoot it with static shots. The idea is for the audience to imagine where the movement comes from. I believe that the audience has this space.

ST: Did you shoot the sequence very quickly? JT:

Very quickly. We didn’t have a screenplay. There wasn’t a single page of script for each sequence, and I told the actors what to do. The whole film was done in 18 days.

ST: How long did it take you to shoot that sequence? JT:

Two days. This is a movie that’s all Johnnie To — nothing else. What I said was what was done. There was no screenplay. All the actors turned up and I told them what to do. They gave me a lot of face, of course, because they all did what I told them to. They believed in me. They didn’t know what would happen in the next scene because there’s no script. They just did what I told them to do and only after they did it would they know what the story was and what the relationships were. I think this is pretty rare in the history of Hong Kong cinema. Anthony Wong and Francis Ng are first-rate actors. If they weren’t, they couldn’t have followed my direction.

ST: Another classic sequence is the long take in Breaking News. How did you conceive that one? JT:

I had never done a long take before. I wanted to challenge myself, to experiment with doing a long take in a big sequence.

ST: You said you were influenced by Akira Kurosawa in The Mission. Who influenced you on this long take?

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

JT:

235

No one. This is something that is entirely my own … I wanted to find out just how I could draw out a scene. Firstly, I wanted to experiment with something that I had never done before. Secondly, the two actors Richie Jen and Nick Cheung had never before done an action movie. I wanted them to have a taste of how a gunfight was like. The best method was to have them involved throughout the whole sequence. I wanted them to be really involved in the whole sequence and feel what a gunfight on a Hong Kong street would be like. Even when they are not in the scene, they’ll still be acting because the camera hasn’t stopped. That way, I hoped they would throw themselves into the scene.

ST: How long did it take you to shoot the sequence? Was there a long rehearsal period? JT:

Very long. We took some two months to find the location. Then, we had to mock-up the whole street because all the shops were closed since the whole street was to be demolished by the government. That took another month. We rehearsed the scene for three days. Then we calculated that we would only have one take. What you see in the movie is that one take.

ST: That’s outstanding. JT:

If there was an NG, that would be it, because we didn’t have the money. So there was no room for NG. We were lucky. It wasn’t just the actors, or the photographer or me, the director, if something happened to the equipment, it would be the end. It was a huge challenge. I was also determined not to use special effects. Everything that you see in the scene is done manually, including the newspaper that floats down to the car.

ST: Going back to The Mission. How did you bring about that dramatic twist at the end of the film? JT:

I wanted to show that the triads have a rule that suppresses the energy of people. This is the idea of the jianghu, which has its own rules, one of which is that you can’t covet your brother’s wife — stuff like that. It’s very contradictory. You have to protect a brother but if a brother does something wrong, you have to punish him. This is the rule and everybody in the jianghu must abide by it. There’s no appeal. And for the men, this involves lofty sentiments and sacrifice. A brother has done wrong and he must die, but the sentiments among brothers are such that they don’t want him to die. Such a contradiction results in different attitudes. One brother has to carry out the execution, another has to make a stand. What I want to describe is the sentiment between brothers. Each has his own method of settling the affair. The smart way is Anthony Wong’s method; the impulsive way is Francis Ng’s method. I had two other versions of the ending. One version I don’t want to divulge but the other I can tell you and that is that their trick is

236

Appendix 2

discovered and they don’t have a good ending. So they take the risk, all because of friendship. The message of the film is that they are forever under the rule — this is how it is in the “black society” (hei shehui, the Chinese metaphor for the criminal underworld). Though they haven’t been friends for long, they have faced untold dangers together. The film is also about this male romanticism. The ending isn’t a dramatic twist; it was something that I had long decided on. ST: So you had already decided on the ending, as it stands now? JT:

That’s right.

ST: I read that you had not told your actors what the ending would be. JT:

Yes. As I told you, they didn’t know the whole plot. Because they are professionals, they accepted what I told them to do on faith. They didn’t know what the ending was, but each actor knew his own part, what the attitude was. They might notice some discrepancy and what to do about it, but from my perspective, if I saw that what they were giving me was sufficient, then that was enough.

ST: The film has a satisfactory ending. Everybody is satisfied — the triads, the brothers, and we the audience. JT:

As I said before, at this time, in 1999, I wanted to make films with more hope in the endings. Perhaps if I were to make the film earlier, say around the time of Loving You, or during the time of Expect the Unexpected and A Hero Never Dies, the ending might be different and you might see all the characters die. But from 1999 onwards, I was conscious of making films with happier endings. This is the case with Running out of Time, Needing You and so on. Times are depressed and people come under lots of pressure, so I wanted to change the tone of my films.

ST: With Breaking News, however, the ending and indeed the whole film doesn’t give you that sense of satisfaction. JT:

Well, the time is different.

ST: The film has a rather cynical attitude. It seems to mock the police for manipulating the media in order to achieve their own aims. JT:

What I want to say in Breaking News and similarly in PTU is that the police have its own world, its own rules, like the triads. If you don’t follow the rules, you will be isolated. If the police were to truly observe the law in carrying out their duties, their jobs would be doubly difficult. They have to beat you up to exact a confession; they have to set you up. If the law doesn’t permit these things, then the law protects the bad guys. If some of them were uncomfortable with these tactics, would they spill on their colleagues? They

Johnnie To on Election

237

would shut their eyes and go about as if nothing has happened. This is already a judgment on the police but I am not blaming them because where human communities exist, these kinds of things happen. The police are really a gang, like the triads. The only difference is that the government is paying the police while the triads have to take care of themselves. In Breaking News, I wanted to make the observation that Hong Kong has become very politicized, particularly after 1997. Personally, I feel that the police are partial to the government to a certain degree. From the perspective of human rights and democracy, the police are not broad-minded enough. It tries to control information. I feel that the media will become a battleground on issues of the police, politics, liberty and human rights. ST: So you admit that Breaking News contains a political message? JT:

Quite a heavy political message I would think. The media has a lot of power. Without the media, many changes would not have been achieved so quickly. In future, the hardest problem may be not so much cops and robbers but the media.

ST: We see in Breaking News a connection between the police or the authorities and the media. Are you suggesting they will act in collusion? JT:

I wouldn’t say they will collude but rather that they will exploit the media. This is one of their weapons. The authorities will certainly resort to covering up and glossing over the news to protect themselves, and it is the media’s responsibility as to how they broadcast the news. Information technology has advanced so rapidly compared with even ten years ago. The media has its own standpoint but the police have their own ideas as to how to give out information. But whether everything is untainted or true, that is the question. How the media delivers the message is a problem of management. It will become a force to reckon with. The police will not only have to deal with guns or swords or crime, but the media in future. They’ll have to take a different attitude in dealing with information. In the past, when you’ve caught a criminal, you make a report, but now, the circumstances are different. Because change is so rapid, there are more dimensions to think about. In Hong Kong, the political voice has grown louder and you have to work harder at the media. The influence of the media on people in power or people who handle problems is very great — that is what I want to say in my film.

ST: I’d like to know your views on the robbers. They all die, but you seem to admire their sense of loyalty. JT:

There will always be cops and robbers in society, but it always appears that cops are always right and the robbers aren’t. Once you have broken the law, you have separated yourself from the interests of the community. The police are supposed to protect the community. The robbers violate the community

238

Appendix 1

or resort to criminal means to take something. That’s why they’re robbers. They are wrong to be sure, but they have their romantic or human face. Their point of departure is wrong — I don’t want to praise them as heroes. But such people know their destiny, and they don’t take the long view. If they did, they wouldn’t have taken the risk. My view of criminals is a romantic one … they may have more feelings than an ordinary person because they know they don’t have tomorrow. Their most romantic quality is that they will die … for what? Well, if their plan fails, they could at least die for their friends. ST: I understand you had entertained thoughts of becoming a policeman, and indeed, your elder sister joined the force, as I recall, since you mentioned this at the time of doing publicity for PTU. In making cops and robbers movies, is there a sense of wish-fulfilment on your part? JT:

Nothing of the kind. When I make such films, I try to gauge firstly, the receptivity of the Hong Kong audience. Secondly, with cops and robbers movies, there are more stories to tell. My tendency towards this type of movie or character stems from what I think the audience will accept, not from some aspiration on my part to become a policeman. It gives me a variety of plots and situations to tell my own stories.

Sundry Accomplishments ST: Fulltime Killer is about professional killers, not cops. It’s an interesting film which you target at a pan-Asian audience. The characters speak Japanese, English, Mandarin and Cantonese. It’s shot in Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Did you set out to make a pan-Asian film? JT:

Yes. Particularly following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, international trade has opened up and a very important effect is cultural exchange. The world is growing closer. My own view of Asia is that if it was more stable and prosperous, it could become like Europe. I think that in future Asians will want to see Asian films but we will need a bit more time to make a combined Asian film. You see this in Europe where you have pan-European films from Italy, Spain, or Britain — I remember the European spy movies in the 1970s, for example. Some cultures have commonalities, and film brings them all together. You see Hong Kong people watching Japanese and South Korean movies today. They find a lot of appeal in these movies. In Fulltime Killer, I wanted to experiment with making a pan-Asian product. The concept is derived from Europe.

ST: The film is very self-conscious. You even show a trailer of The Mission, and the film is like a commentary on your own films. What do you think of such a view?

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

JT:

239

The film has references to Alain Delon movies, and there’s a video shop girl who talks about who likes to rent what kind of movies. I put them in the movie to make the point that it’s something we seem to know or have seen but it’s not real. In Fulltime Killer, the characters aren’t real. It’s all fiction — we have a term “airwave novels” (kongzhong xiaoshuo), well that’s what it is. This is what I wanted to convey — people should feel that it’s not a realistic movie but it’s something you have seen. This is the attitude I wanted.

ST: What do you think of your achievement in Fulltime Killer? JT:

It’s not a movie that a lot of people will like. But I think it’s a good experiment. I am quite satisfied with the style, and what I have imagined for the movie is all in there.

ST: You are a very prolific director and you’ve made many films which are hard to classify, such as Running on Karma and Throw Down. They are not really action films, but they have certain action elements in them. How would you describe a film like Running on Karma? JT:

It’s like a detective movie or rather it uses a detective plot to package a theme of preordained fate, or karma (yinguo). The film has a strong religious tone.

ST: Would you say your previous films also have a religious tone to them? JT:

My previous films deal with fate, or destiny, or perhaps an attitude towards life. But Running on Karma, from my own perspective, is a film about karmic retribution (yinguo baoying). In the film, we clearly depict scenes of violence — a person gets into a fight with someone over a minor matter, but in their previous lives, they could have been involved in a major dispute. This is karmic retribution. You cannot change it, you have to accept the cause. The Cecilia Cheung character dies in the end. She may ask why, but karmic retribution is not something to be questioned. Why should I accept what a Japanese soldier did in a previous life? Because you are the Japanese! This is something that is difficult to explain to foreigners, but the Chinese believe in the wheel of fate (lunhui). When we speak about it, we might seem to understand it but not deeply. The film is basically a suspense detective movie but in substance, it is a “message movie” (zhuti pian). Its message is that of karmic retribution.

ST: Why did you make Andy Lau into a body-builder? JT:

Because we felt that if we didn’t give him a new image, he wouldn’t appear fresh. Giving him that new image would make him feel that he isn’t Andy Lau — he’ll become another character: a body-builder. I’ve made many films with Andy Lau in which he assumes different shapes, like in Running out of Time, he plays an old man and a woman, and then in Love on a Diet, he plays a fat man. I feel he’s totally different [in these roles]. So here he’s a body-

240

Appendix 1

builder. To someone who has played many roles, if you’ve given him something new to play with, he wants more. ST: Was this a role that Andy Lau himself designed? JT:

No, we designed it for him. The most important idea of the role is that a strong big man like him cannot change everything. Human beings are weak. The film ultimately tells us that since we cannot change our karma, it may be possible to change ourselves. You must do what is right in your present life so that you might reverse your karma if you had expected it to be bad. If you do something bad and nothing happens, your bad deed remains and you should expect karmic retribution.

ST: Can we see Running on Karma as a sort of conclusive statement? Your previous films more or less deal with this notion of karma as a struggle of good and evil. JT:

I don’t think Running on Karma offers any solution on the whole. I am only dealing with the subject of karma in that film. I don’t think there is a need for any conclusion. Each situation is independent. Maybe I am not as accomplished. I can’t reach any conclusions … I’ve made so many films but my thinking may change when I make another film.

ST: Throw Down is a very quirky movie. You were paying a tribute to Akira Kurosawa. Could you tell us why you made the film in the way you did? JT:

The film is about taking a positive view of life (jiji rensheng). So positive that whatever happens to you, it doesn’t mean that you are without hope or that you will die. You should try to be even more brilliant than you were before. You should encourage yourself to live and add more value in your life. This is the whole spirit of the film. Some people think the film is too loose or that there isn’t a complete story or that the characters don’t know what they are doing. I think this is all wrong. I can tell you that this is my favourite of all the recent films I have made.

ST: More than … JT:

… more than everything I’ve made. This is the one film that I am most satisfied with. I really feel strongly about this film. Because I feel that in today’s society, many young people give up too easily. The movie also evokes the 1970s because I am really paying a tribute to the television series Sugata Sanshiro at the same time. The series was very popular in Hong Kong in the 70s, and it was adapted from Kurosawa’s movie. In the 70s, the youth — people of my generation — were more positive. So long as we work hard, everyday was full of hope. But today, youth has lost confidence; they have lost the strength to struggle. The film is about the Louis Koo character, a judo champion who is going blind, but going blind isn’t important because it’s

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

241

already determined, you should try to excel even more in what you do. In this film, I wanted to show fragments more [than to tell a complete story]. It may not be a complete story but there’s no need for a strong drama. I am saying that life is full of hope. I am clearly being subtle in the film because I want to give the audience a feeling, not a story. People criticize the film for being strange or “quirky” and they thought perhaps I shot the film quickly and without a script. Wrong. This film, from conception to shooting, took about eight months — more time than most of my films, with the exception of PTU. The reason why I dedicated the film to Akira Kurosawa is because when I saw Sugata Sanshiro, I was struck by the scene of the hero jumping into the pond. For those who remember the scene, they will understand why I shot the film in the way I did. I am giving the audience a space in the same way that Kurosawa was giving his audience a space for the imagination when he made his film. Also, I used a scene from Kurosawa’s film, his most romantic one where the hero helps the girl put on a clog — this inspired the scene in my film where the girl helps the hero put on his shoe after he’s been beaten up by thugs. Although it’s a minor scene, the sentiment is deeply felt. Human relationships are built on little things like these, not on declarations of love or paying some kind of price. Perhaps after ten years, the man will remember the girl helping him with his shoe, and she will remember that he picked up her shoe and threw it back to her in her departure scene. They may not see each other again but they will remember it for the rest of their lives. It’s scenes like these, fragments of human feelings … this is what society is. There’s no point in asking why because then it wouldn’t be romantic. ST: When I said your film was quirky, I was referring more to the structure … JT:

Well, it’s not the four steps in essay writing (qicheng zhuanhe) …

ST: You have Louis Koo always going to the video games parlour, and video games seem now to appear frequently in your films. Why? JT:

I’ve never played video games. I just feel that it’s very colourful, and very noisy. Also the players are completely focused on what they are doing, oblivious of their surroundings or the people next to them. When I conceive of scenes in video game parlours, I can see it’s very rich. I love those locations.

ST: Finally, I’d like you to comment on those films where you’ve chosen women as your leads. JT:

Many Hong Kong critics say I don’t make women’s films. You seem to have turned your question the other way around.

ST: Well, you’ve made quite a number of films, melodramas and love stories … JT:

… comedies … .

242

Appendix 1

ST: Certainly comedies, and dramas, with female leads, as in Needing You and others. Could you say something about these women’s movies? JT:

I don’t know how to see films from the female perspective. In my films, women — whether leads or supporting parts — are not the most important aspect. They are supplementary to my characters. I’m no good at fathoming women. Now, I’m not insulting the female sex, but in my view, their existence is because of men (laughs). They support the men; they are not strong leaders or decision-makers. Perhaps what they want to do is important but it’s not decisive. Men are more rigid and selfish. This is what I think. It’s superficial, isn’t it? It is, and it just goes to prove that I can’t describe women. That’s why in my films, women are not primary, except perhaps in the comedies …

Conclusion ST: Well finally, I’d just like you to freely comment on yourself, your career so far … JT:

Well, up to now, many people say I am prolific and I make films of all genres and they think that I don’t care what kind of films I make. I feel they don’t understand my attitude. I am still learning about film. I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that my achievement is great but I would certainly say that I’ll carry on. And in carrying on, I feel I have achieved something each time. I’m getting deeper into film and understanding it more. I’m advancing and learning … it’s like going to university, and one day, I hope to choose a road which I’ll be satisfied to travel on.

ST: So you feel you aren’t satisfied with the road you are travelling on right now? JT:

I love movies and I will carry on making movies but I haven’t affirmed myself yet. I have no way as yet to determine what the method and the direction of my thinking is. I need to make more films, and see more films, including the classics. I know there is no ending to this road but I hope to find the solution of cinema. I don’t make films for the money because the bosses give me the same amount of money no matter how many films I make. What kind of director will I be? That’s the aim. I’ve given myself a time limit. In three years at least, I will have the solution.

ST: Your career has taken place in the most difficult years of the Hong Kong film industry. Yet you were able to continue making films. How do you see the future of Hong Kong cinema? JT:

I think the film industry is very fair. There’s a reason why you’re able to survive, and there is a reason why you fail. This is true of every industry. Why do some people survive and some don’t? You have to persist. That’s

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

243

the most difficult thing to do and you have to suffer for it. But you can’t lose sight of the thing you are persisting in. In terms of the market, my greatest consideration is how much money I can make for the boss if he were to invest in my movie. At least, I’ll try to earn back his capital and perhaps a little more. If he were to lose money, it wouldn’t be a great deal. In the process of persisting after my own line of thought, I wouldn’t make the boss lose his money. I remember I only had HK$2.5 million to make The Mission and I told the boss not to care about what I was doing. He didn’t and the film actually made a profit. The same with PTU: don’t ask when I will finish the film and what I am making. When I have finished it, I’ll hand the film over and you release it. That was okay. Consequently, I made the film for $4 million and it made a profit. ST: What about Throw Down? JT:

Perhaps not right away, but in time, it will make a profit. When I make such films, I know where the market is. This is my method of survival. The thing I want to persist in is to enrich oneself, to strengthen oneself, to give oneself more value. This value is the value of the film. If your film has no value, whatever film you make won’t be good.

ST: Have you received any offers from Hollywood? JT:

Quite a few.

ST: Why don’t you go, or are you thinking of going? JT:

Not just for the sake of going. If there is a good screenplay that is right for me, and I like it very much, then I think it’s worth a try. I won’t go just to fulfil a “Hollywood dream”. I know it will take a lot from me if I were to go, in terms of culture and the way the industry works over there. How will I adjust myself? I’ll need to start all over again. But I don’t need to make a decision right now.

ST: Who are the directors you like? I know you admire Kurosawa … JT:

Kurosawa, of course, Coppola, Scorsese, and Sam Peckinpah. All these directors have influenced my thinking.

ST: Kurosawa’s techniques, such as the use of rain, slow motion, etc, seem to have influenced you a lot. JT:

I don’t admire his techniques so much as I admire his philosophy towards life. All those things are visual; they must supplement the drama or what the final thought is. I admire Kurosawa’s films for his view of life. As a director, what is important is how a film looks at humanity or how it prods the audience to look back at man. Kurosawa’s films are humanist. Coppola’s films are epic, more literary. Even in films like The Godfather, he uses a literary style — the

244

Appendix 1

same in Apocalypse Now. Sam Peckinpah is a romantic, particularly in the nature of violence — a romance found in the extremities of human behaviour. You see this in the rape scene in Straw Dogs. He’s not a great story-teller but a great romanticist. Scorsese is very modern. He uses emotion. His plots aren’t as good as his emotion — the emotion of characters and the emotion of situations. He’s very contemporary, very New York, where there are many types of people, with all kinds of rules, seemingly without feelings, they are all brought together. This is what people today are like; it’s the same in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and New York. In cities where there are so many people, you get many abnormal problems. We know these problems because we are in touch with them, because we are all of the contemporary world. ST: One final question: as a director, what is your favourite visual technique? JT:

For me, the best thing is a shot that doesn’t move. Everything inside the shot must express itself. It stays there, without moving. That is the best. But I still can’t attain it (laughs).

ST: On that note, thank you very much.

Author’s Interview with Johnnie To

245

Appendix 2: Johnnie To on Election

The following is excerpted from an on-stage interview that I conducted with Johnnie To in a public forum in Melbourne on 6 August 2005. To was a guest of the Melbourne International Film Festival which had chosen Election as its closing film. ST: Election is Mr. To’s newest film. While most of his previous films focus on gunplay, there is not a single gun in Election. Why do you not use guns in the film? Would it not be more natural to use guns? JT:

The Hong Kong triads have always tried their utmost not to use guns. In most cases, they use swords. What you have seen in my films or in the films of others where the gangsters use guns in a most stylish manner, that’s not the way of the triads. In Hong Kong, the triads are very clever. They know that in the Hong Kong justice system, if you use guns, you get a longer prison sentence if you are arrested. If you use swords, the most you get is seven years. So they would rather use swords. The question is why when I was so fond of guns in my previous films, I don’t use them in Election. I wanted to show a Buddhist notion of cause and effect relating to the history of the Chinese triads. They have a 300-year history where the original aim was to oppose the Qing and restore the Ming. But today, the triads have forgotten the principles of the founding fathers in the Hong Men society; they have forgotten brotherly affections.

ST: The film is nevertheless quite violent although you don’t use guns. However, I think the violence is very much based on character. For example, Tony Leung’s character is outwardly very violent, whereas Simon Yam’s character is very calm, but he has a capacity for violence. Did you plan it this way? — to show violence through character. What is your view on violence? JT:

Gangsters are violent. They can use whatever means to kill a person. Martin

246

Appendix 2

Scorsese has shown all kinds of violence. The Italians have their own manner of violence, the British too, and the Americans. The Chinese have their own style of violence. As a gangster, violence is used to inspire fear. In Hong Kong, when a gangster comes at you with a knife or sword, it is meant to instill fear. It is a means to show your power. If they don’t do that, they can’t control their people. Violence is a means of control; they will kill you, they will kill everybody you know, they will kill your family. Of course, in my movie, I didn’t want to focus too much on violence itself, but I want to show that this is a means of control over people. ST: Election is a highly interesting film because it is about triads choosing a leader. This could be seen as an allegory of Hong Kong — about the fact that Hong Kong people cannot choose their leader. The leader is chosen by a small group of people who are handpicked by the Communist Party, and it has been said that the organization of the Communist Party is very much like a triad. Did you mean to have this kind of allegorical representation? JT:

What I wanted to show is a tradition. In China, there has been a long history of secret societies and the largest secret society of them all is the Communist Party. I wanted to show a continuity of tradition.

ST: When I last met you in Hong Kong, you told me you were making a twopart picture. Election is the first part. Have you already shot the second part? JT:

The second installment of Election will focus on the future of the Hong Kong triads after 1997. It will show how the Mainland government gradually has succeeded in keeping the triads under control, something which they promised they could do after the takeover, and which the British government never fully succeeded in doing.

ST: Was the film based on real life people and incidents? JT:

Well indeed, but you can’t make a documentary (laughs). I wanted to dramatize it. Some people may not see it as a “hero” movie (yingxiong pian). Hong Kong journalists have told me that in Cannes (where the film was competing in the 2005 edition of the festival), it frightened a lot of the audience because it was very violent. That surprised me a little, and I wondered whether the audience actually found it violent, because violence is only 10 percent of what the movie is. I can tell you quite humbly that I did not deliberately set out to make a violent gangster film. I only wanted to make a film that shows the history of Hong Kong, or the history of the Chinese people. I can tell you that Election is a film that no mainland Chinese director can make, because he or she wouldn’t know what the triads are about. Only someone from Hong Kong can understand the triads. You can call them the shame of the Chinese people, or you could say that they are a part of the culture or history, but I wanted to make such a film.

Johnnie To on Election

247

ST: You showed a scene of ritual, and every action and behavior of the characters seemed very real and authentic. How did you research the film? Did you have a consultant from the triads? JT:

I spent many years doing research. I got to know many “big brothers”, I wined and dined with them. I told them what I wanted to do and that I wouldn’t be making a “hero” movie. The gangsters are the oppressors, but they put a lot of emphasis on the principle of justice and righteousness (dao and yi). Without these principles, they are practically bandits or brigands — they are certainly not heroes, and the “big brothers” themselves, whether they are from the Sun Yee On or the Wo Shing societies, acknowledge as much. I have heard a lot about them and also seen them in action — and they are no heroes. When I was eight years old, my family moved into the Kowloon Walled City, so I practically grew up with gangsters. In the Walled City, you had drugs, prostitutes, gambling. Later, when I was bigger, we moved to Lok Fu, and that was a district dominated by gangsters. And then later, we moved to Ngau Tau Kok, another gangland. It was only after I entered television to begin my working career in TVB that I became distanced from gangsters. Many of my classmates were gangsters — some were winners, some were losers; some died in the streets, some became drug addicts. What was it all about, really? It was all about survival.

ST: Did you face any censorship problems over the release of the film, either in Hong Kong or in China? JT:

In China, definitely, you can’t show it in its present state because of its subject. To show it in China, you have to come up with a version that is acceptable to the censors there. In Hong Kong, I expect a Category III rating, and I am very glad to have that — so long as they don’t ban my film. Just two weeks ago, the censors decided to give it a Category III rating without any re-edits. For me, it is important that I can show the film as a testament of the culture of the triads, and I would accept that there is a limit to what you can show. If the censors suggested cuts from a moral perspective, I can live with that, but not if they had any political motive or pressure.

ST: In your films, there is usually one scene that is like a set piece. What do you consider in Election to be your most outstanding scene? JT:

(laughs) I don’t know why people always tell me there is one scene in my films that is very good. In The Mission, people tell me that the scene where the bodyguards kick the paper ball around is a really great scene. I didn’t think it was that great, just that the film needed that scene. We shot it for about an hour; the actors just kicked a paper ball, and that was that. What it was describing was boredom. But everybody loves that scene. Now you ask me what the most outstanding scene in Election is. I don’t know. My favorite

248

Appendix 2

scene may not be the audience’s favorite, and what the audience considers their favorite scene may not necessarily be my favorite. My own favorite movie is Throw Down, but nobody is talking about it.

5 Notes

Chapter 1 1

2 3

The spellings and uses of English first names in the Hong Kong cinema can be a very dicey matter for scholars who crave consistency. To’s name was initially spelt “Johnny” in the English credit titles of his early films. As he became more successful and began to earn more recognition, the name was spelt “Johnnie”. This tendency of changing the spellings of English names (and in some cases, changing whole names entirely) is an informal if also oft-used practice in the Hong Kong film industry: witness the changing of “Jacky” to “Jackie” in the case of Jackie Chan and Jackie Cheung as both became more recognised. Apart from speculating that the superstitious and fengshui-conscious Hong Kong Chinese have an aversion to the letter “y” and that the letters “ie” somehow resemble the number 8, signifying fortune, I can offer no other explanation as to why such a practice has come about in the cases mentioned. In other instances, it is the US market that determines spelling changes, for example, Stephen Chow, whose name I have in previous writings rendered as “Stephen Chiau” following the orthography of the credit titles in the star’s early films, has since been changed to “Steven Chow” following his attempts to break into the US market with Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle. For the purposes of this book, I have adopted “Stephen Chow” as my own form of compromise in the attempt to be consistent with previous usage. Based on the rationale of Chow’s spelling-change for the US market, Johnnie To’s name is sometimes rendered “Johnny To” in American writings, and if To at some point in the future decides to move to Hollywood, he may inevitably have to drop “Johnnie” for “Johnny”. See Barry Keith Grant, “Experience and meaning in genre films”, in Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 114–128. Ibid., p. 115.

250

4

5 6

7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

Notes for pp. 2–6

On the subject of action as spectacle, see the editors’ introductions in Jose Arroyo (ed.), Action/Spectacle Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2000), and Yvonne Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Bey Logan’s Hong Kong Action Cinema (London: Titan, 1995) identifies action with the martial arts genre. See Fran Mason, American Gangster Cinema: From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002); Thomas Leitch, Crime Films (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Leitch views the gangster film and detective film as sub-genres of the crime film. In the same vein, the Hong Kong gangster film and the policiers can be seen as sub-genres of the crime film; or, as I am suggesting, both gangster and crime films are subgenres of the “action film”. Steve Neale groups three main genres within the classification of the crime film — the detective film, the gangster film and the suspense thriller; see Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 71–85. James M. Welsh, “Action films: The serious, the ironic, the postmodern”, in Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed.), Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), p. 161. Welsh, ibid., p. 170. Mark Gallagher, “I married Rambo: Spectacle and melodrama in the Hollywood action film”, in Christopher Sharrett (ed.), Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), p. 205. See Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), p. 27. Ibid., pp. 27, 29. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 33. Ibid. John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984), p. 13. See Jacobs, “Gunfire”, in Arroyo (ed.), Action/Spectacle Cinema, 9–16, p. 9. Robert Warshow, “Movie chronicle: The Westerner”, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1972), p. 135. On technology and guns in the gangster film, see also Colin McArthur, Underworld U.S.A. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), pp. 30–32. Richard Slotkin coins the title “The Two-Gun Man of the Twenties” in one of his chapter sections in Gunfighter Nation to describe gangster films produced in the 1930s; see Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in the Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), p. 260. One crucial aesthetic influence is Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), which can be seen as a logical extension of the mythic Western frontier as Leone has interpreted it in his series of Westerns. In a sense, Once upon a

Notes for pp. 6–10

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

251

Time in America reinterprets the Western for the contemporary age by reverting back to the East and its urban gangster milieu of New York. Warshow, ibid. See Jason Jacobs, “Gunfire”, ibid., p. 12. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 401–402. Jason Jacobs, “Gunfire”, ibid., p. 12. Richard Dyer, “Action!”, in Jose Arroyo (ed.), Action/Spectacle Cinema, 17– 21, p. 18. Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 156. See Pang Laikwan, “Masculinity in crisis: Films of Milkyway Image and post1997 Hong Kong cinema”, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 2, no. 3 (November 2002), pp. 325–340. Jacobs, ibid. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid. See Walter Benjamin, “Critique of violence”, in Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), pp. 277–300. See Aaron Anderson, “Kinesthesia in martial arts films: Action in motion”, Jump Cut, no. 42 (1998): 1–11. See Anderson, ibid., p. 1. Meaghan Morris observes that this model of “kung fu pedagogy” cinema goes through a “practice of mimesis — a specific art of imitation involving an ethical as well as bodily effort of learning to becomelike the ideal embodied by the teacher”. See Meaghan Morris, “Transnational imagination in action cinema: Hong Kong and the making of a global popular culture”, in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (2004), 181–199, p. 186. See Nicole Brenez, “The secrets of movement: The influence of Hong Kong action cinema upon the contemporary French avant-garde”, in Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu (eds.), Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 163–173, p. 166. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., pp. 169–170. Cawelti, ibid., p. 13 Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 70. See Tasker’s “Introduction” to Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema, pp. 6– 7. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood, p. 52. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 65. Tasker associates “muscular cinema” with bodybuilding and the rise of stars such as Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the 1980s, but each previous decade has had its tradition of muscular cinema when we recall Western icons such as Johnny Weissmuller (30s), Victor Mature (40s), and Steve Reeves (50s and 60s), and Eastern ones such as Bruce Lee, who best

252

39 40

41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49

50 51

Notes for pp. 10–12

symbolized muscular cinema in a Chinese context in the 1970s. The term “muscular cinema” may actually have a Chinese antecedence if we trace it to director Zhang Che’s coinage of yang gang (meaning masculine hardness) back in the late 1960s to describe a new kind of martial arts film in the Hong Kong action cinema featuring lithe muscular Chinese bodies (Zhang also applied the precept to non-martial arts films, as in the contemporary setting of the youth culture movie Dead End [1969] featuring Di Long, one of Zhang’s muscular icons). Spectacular Bodies, p. 8. See David Bordwell, “The art cinema as a mode of film practice”, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, 6th edition (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 774–782. See Peter Wollen, “The auteur theory”, in Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Expanded Edition) (London: BFI, 1998), p. 71. Bordwell, ibid., p. 778. See Tasker, Action and Adventure Cinema, p. 7. On the concept of “body genre”, see Linda Williams, “Film bodies: Gender, genre and excess”, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), pp. 141–158. Williams identifies three “body genres” — the pornographic film, horror and melodrama. On the action movie as a “body genre”, see Linda Ruth Williams, “Ready for action: G. I. Jane, Demi Moore’s body and the female combat movie”, in Yvonne Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema: 169–185, p. 170. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 4. From a sociological viewpoint, fighting back is a duty for the man, as Pierre Bourdieu has shown in Masculine Domination: “Manliness, understood as sexual or social reproductive capacity, but also as the capacity to fight and to exercise violence (especially in acts of revenge), is first and foremost a duty”. See Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 51. See Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p. xii. Ibid. Kowloon Noir reflects To’s birth ties to Kowloon where he grew up (as a child To grew up within the Kowloon Walled City, an area originally under the control of the Qing government which gradually became a virtually independent crime-infested zone ruled mostly by the triads). To also maintains his office and studio in the industrial district of Kowloon Tong, which may explain why he chooses mainly to film his noirs on locations in Kowloon. See Paul Schrader, “Notes on film noir”, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II, 213–225, p. 220. Ibid., p. 219.

Notes for pp. 12–19

52 53 54 55 56 57

58

59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70

71

253

Ibid., p. 220. Gallagher, ibid., p. 210. See Tasker, “Introduction”, Action and Adventure Cinema, p. 4. Peter Wollen, ibid. See Stephen Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), p. 31. For studies of genre undertaken from the perspectives of directors, see Colin McArthur, Underworld U.S.A., and Jim Kitses, Horizons West (New Edition) (London: British Film Institute, 2004). See also Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 123. Ibid., p. 130. Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang, p. 416. The most sustained study of Hong Kong film genres have been the past catalogues published by the Hong Kong International Film Festival on their retrospective programmes on Hong Kong cinema, concentrating on genres such as kung fu, swordplay (wuxia), melodrama, horror, opera film and comedy. Though the quality of the articles is very mixed, the catalogues contain invaluable historiographical and filmographical data. The publication has been discontinued since 2001 though the Hong Kong Film Archive has taken on much the same function with their publications. Book-length studies on Hong Kong genres have concentrated on the martial arts genre: see, for example, Bey Logan, Hong Kong Action Cinema (London: Titan, 1995), and Leon Hunt, Kung Fu Cult Masters (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003). Neale, Genre, p. 10. Ibid., see pp. 9–10. Ibid., p. 41. Neale names directors such as Ophüls, Nicholas Ray, Murnau, Welles who attend to the skills to fill in “lack”. See Neale, ibid., p. 10 and p. 42. See Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 6. Arroyo asserts that although it is popular, action/spectacle is the “most critically derided mode of filmmaking in Hollywood”. See Arroyo, Action/Spectacle Cinema, p. 1. Neale, ibid, p. 9. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 43. Nicole Brenez, ibid., p. 164. To spoke briefly about his childhood in a news item “Du Qifeng jiuqi wenti toufang yihe weigui” (“Johnnie To: The question of 1997 projected on Election 2”), in Ming Pao, 6 April 2006. See also the excerpts of my conversation with Johnnie To in Appendix 2. Meaghan Morris, “Transnational imagination in action cinema: Hong Kong and the making of a global popular culture”, in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (2004), 181–199, p. 195.

254

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84

85 86

Notes for pp. 19–33

Ibid. Ibid. See Wollen, ibid., p. 61. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience, p. 27. David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 2. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), p. 123. Neale, Genre, p. 31. Fredric Jameson, ibid., p. 158. Robin Wood, “Ideology, genre, auteur”, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II: 59–73, p. 63. Ibid. Ibid. See Charles Leary, “What Goes Around, Comes Around: Infernal Affairs II and III and Running on Karma”, Senses of Cinema, Issue 3, January–February 2004, www.sensesofcinema.com. See Kenneth E. Hall, John Woo: The Films (Jefferson, N.C. and London: McFarland and Co., 1999), Lisa Morton, The Cinema of Tsui Hark (Jefferson, N.C. and London: McFarland and Co., 2001), and Stephen Teo, Wong Karwai (London: British Film Institute, 2005). Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 3. Peter Wollen says that “an auteur film is constructed a posteriori” (Signs and Meaning, p. 71). Based on this insight, the interpretations superimposed on an auteur film are merely the auteur’s own work and it is the task of the critic to decrypt and decipher them.

Chapter 2 1

2

3

Mark Gallagher, “I Married Rambo: Spectacle and Melodrama in the Hollywood Action Film”, in Christopher Sharrett (ed.), Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, p. 210. To’s collaboration with Chow was not a happy experience for the director. Chow’s star power meant that he was constantly interfering in To’s direction, which proved so traumatic for To that he took one year off from directing after finishing The Mad Monk. He returned to directing with Loving You in 1995, a film that he was determined to make in his own style. See “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. To at this stage seems to have a thing for babies and birth-giving, a motif in The Heroic Trio that is also visible in The Mad Monk where Stephen Chow’s Dragon Fighter and his sidekick Tiger Fighter (played by Ng Mang-tat), two heavenly immortals sent to earth to do good deeds, are humorously reincarnated

Notes for pp. 35–43

4 5 6 7

8 9

10 11

12 13

14 15 16 17

255

through two pregnant women, quite randomly selected, who are at the point of giving birth. See Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang, p. 2. Richard Dyer, “Action”, in Arroyo (ed.), Action/Spectacle Cinema, p. 18. See “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. John Cawelti gives four modes of generic transformation: humorous burlesque, evocation of nostalgia, demytholigization of generic myth, and the reaffirmation of myth as myth. See John Cawelti, “Chinatown and generic transformation in recent American films”, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II, 227–245, p. 243. It is difficult to say just what mode The Big Heat falls into though perhaps demytholigization is more appropriate to the aim and manner of the Hong Kong filmmakers in remaking Lang’s classic. Tom Gunning, ibid. One other film that should be mentioned under this gore-slasher-horror category (and the reason why I have excluded it from this study) is Intruder, which To and Wai Ka-fai produced for Milkyway, directed by Tsang Kan-cheong, released in 1997. Wu Chien-lien plays a Mainland woman who murders a prostitute and assumes her identity to come to Hong Kong where she abducts a taxi driver, keeping him prisoner in his own home, finally to chop off his hands which are then transplanted onto her husband, a fugitive from the Mainland. The gross violence of the film led the Hong Kong censors to give it a Category III rating. The film is briefly discussed in Darrell Davis and Yeh Yueh-yu’s “Warning! Category III”, in Film Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 4, 2001, 12–26. Lisa Morton, The Cinema of Tsui Hark ( Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland and Co., 2001), p. 158. The 1997 syndrome of anxiety engulfing Hong Kong society and the theme of corruption in high places can also be found in another Cinema City policier, Blue Lightning (1990), directed by Raymond Lee (but not produced by Tsui Hark). The detective hero (Tony Leung Ka-fai) investigates a woman’s murder with clues pointing to the involvement of a distinguished personage; he comments to a colleague, “Come 1997, we still wouldn’t solve the case!” David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong, p. 234. Ibid. The device of the hero experiencing a sudden infirmity in his gunhand is a familiar one in the Western, genre, once again marking the affinity between To’s action films and the Western (both the American and Italian forms). Ibid., pp. 234–235. Tom Gunning, ibid., p. 425. Ibid., p. 420. See Marc O’Day, “Beauty in motion: Gender, spectacle and action babe cinema”, in Yvonne Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema, 201–218, p. 205. The cult influence of The Heroic Trio and Executioners on the West is demonstrated in the film version of Charlie’s Angels (2000), which Sheldon Lu says, “is to some extent a Hollywood version” of the two films. See Sheldon

256

18

19

20

21 22

Notes for pp. 44–46

Lu, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, bouncing Angels: Hollywood, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and transnational cinema”, in Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yeh Yuehyu (eds.), Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), 220–233, p. 228. The 1981 Australian camp classic Turkey Shoot, a sci-fi variation of The Most Dangerous Game aka The Hounds of Zaroff (1932), contains a scene in which a mutant creature tears off the little toe of a human prey and puts it into its mouth. To conceivably might have based this character on the creature in Turkey Shoot. In any case, it is an example of the global intertextuality that binds the Hong Kong cinema to Western generic counterparts. It should be noted also that the director of Turkey Shoot, Brian Trenchard-Smith, has a connection with the Hong Kong cinema, having helmed The Man from Hong Kong (1975), a Hong Kong-Australian co-production, starring Jimmy Wang Yu. See Pang Laikwan, “Violence and new Asian cinema”, Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia: Copyright, Piracy and Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 56. See François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Touchstone, 1985), p. 109. Truffaut uttered these words in the context of his interview with Hitchcock, while they were discussing the scene in Sabotage (1936), where a boy is killed in an explosion having unknowingly carried the bomb. Truffaut’s pronouncement was perhaps too strong and self-righteous, despite eliciting Hitchcock’s agreement on the matter. Interestingly, filmmakers have not been deterred from killing off children in cinema. A few years after the first edition of Hitchcock was published in 1967, Claude Chabrol, Truffaut’s contemporary and a Hitchcock admirer, showed a graphic killing of a young boy in Que la Bête Meure (1969), and horrific violence inflicted on a young child in La Rupture (1970). Then, in the early 1970s, came the Japanese “Lone Wolf and Cub” series in which a young child is witness to the violence inflicted by his father on scores of samurai. In the context of the Hong Kong action movie, The Heroic Trio’s use of babies may be described as somewhat “goofy and campy”, to quote from Manohla Dargis’s critique of the hospital scene in Hard-Boiled in comparison with the scene of the murder of the child which opens Face/Of f. Dargis makes the point that the babies came across “not as victims but as willing co-conspirators in a spectacle that’s every bit as unreal as it is daft”. See Manohla Dargis, “Do you like John Woo?”, in Jose Arroyo (ed.), Action/Spectacle Cinema, 67–71, p. 71. “Unreal” and “daft” are operative words that could generically apply to The Heroic Trio, but to my mind, they only emphasize the ethical and mythical dimensions of violence. Robert Warshow, “Movie chronicle: The Westerner”, The Immediate Experience, p. 151. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of violence”, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Peter Demetz (ed.) (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 277–300, p. 294.

Notes for pp. 46–56

23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45

257

On Niobe, see Benjamin, ibid., pp. 294–295. Ibid, p. 294. Ibid., p. 295. Anne T. Ciecko and Sheldon H. Lu, “The Heroic Trio: Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung, Michelle Yeoh — Self-reflexivity and the globalization of the Hong Kong action heroine,” Post-Script, vol. 19, no. 1, Fall 1999, p. 72. For a reading on the crisis of masculinity in the Milkyway films, see Pang Laikwan, “Masculinity in crisis: Films of Milkyway Image and post-1997 Hong Kong cinema”, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 2, no. 3 (November 2002), pp. 325– 340. Yvonne Tasker, Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 69. Ibid. Ibid., p. 68. Marc O’Day, ibid., p. 216. Ibid. Ibid., p. 208. See “Too many ways to be a filmmaker: Interview with Johnnie To”, Hong Kong Panorama 98–88, p. 65. See Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 1. Ciecko and Lu, ibid., p. 71. See Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins, Sex and Zen and A Bullet in the Head (New York: Fireside, 1996), pp. 51–52; and Fredric Dannen and Barry Long, Hong Kong Babylon (New York: Hyperion, 1997), pp. 243–244, cited in Ciecko and Lu, ibid., see p. 83, footnote 13. Ciecko and Lu, ibid., pp. 74–75. See Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover, City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema (London and New York: Verso, 2001), p. 133. Ciecko and Lu, p. 75. See “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. The character was based on a real-life cop named Chan Si-kei who was shot in the head during a gun battle with Mainland gangsters in Tai Kok Tsui in 1992. After a surgical operation that saved his life, Chan lost his sense of taste, and complications set in whereby brain fluid would leak out of his nose. He fought a long legal battle to demand compensation from the Hong Kong Police Force, and being constantly in the news, the local Chinese press dubbed him wuwei shentan (the tasteless detective). Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 157. Ibid. The One-Armed Swordsman was influenced by the Japanese “Zatoichi” film series featuring a blind swordsman, and both heroic prototypes were cast together in a film Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsman (1971). To himself was obviously

258

Notes for pp. 57–77

influenced by these prototypes when at the end of Casino Raiders II (1991), his gambling heroes Andy Lau and Wang Jie enter the final match physically handicapped, Lau is blind and Wang has only one arm (having cut off his other arm earlier). Blindness also features in Throw Down, and there the inspiration of the Zatoichi films forms a part of the overall Japanese influence of the work, being a film about judo and a tribute to Kurosawa. 46 In this respect, another Hollywood firefighting movie with which Lifeline also shares superficial similarities is Ladder 49, released in 2004; however, the depictions of group-bonding in Ladder 49 are uncomfortably ridden with clichés and characterized by mawkish sentimentality. 47 See To’s comments in the “making of” documentary contained in the Hong Kong DVD edition of Lifeline, published by Mei Ah.

Chapter 3 1 2

3

4

5

See “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. The figure of the female assassin was popularized in the Hong Kong cinema in the 1990s, possibly influenced by John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor (1985) where Kathleen Turner plays such a figure. Here, the female assassin is a reinterpretation of the hitman, as Fran Mason points out, with Turner’s portrayal betraying a “post-feminist modernity”. See Fran Mason, American Gangster Cinema: From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction, p. 142. Wu Chien-lien’s female assassin is a postfeminist figure in the generic comic-book vein of the Hong Kong cinema (cf. the female assassins played by Chingmy Yau in Clarence Fok’s The Naked Killer [1992], and by Carman Lee in The Odd One Dies, discussed in this chapter). Beyond Hypothermia ran for just one week in Hong Kong and grossed only HK$2 million. See Ah Ngoi (A Dai), “Sheshi 32° , zhi zhi erbai wan” (“Beyond Hypothermia: Worth only 2 million?”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 459 (14–27 November 1996), p. 105. Pierre Bourdieu informs us that a woman going on top is a negative inversion of the phallus, representing the world turned upside down, topsy-turvy. See Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, p. 18, and footnote on same page. This is pretty self-evident in the film and not so much a case of allegorizing by the filmmakers so that it requires political interpretations from critics. Hence, Pang Laikwan’s contention that the China/Taiwan choice “carries no real meaning” smacks of denial. See Pang Laikwan, “Masculinity in crisis: Films of Milkyway Image and post-1997 Hong Kong cinema”, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 2, no. 3 (November 2002), 325–340, p. 329. Pang skirts over this selfevident truth in order to make her real argument — that the film is really about a crisis of masculinity in the choice it offers Kau of “two (opposing) forms of masculinity”. The film “does not necessarily favour the takeover by one form of the other, as it does not legitimize the transition as a certain rite of passage

Notes for pp. 78–86

6

7 8

9

10

11

12 13

14 15

259

for Ah Kau to attain manhood”. Pang makes the interesting point that the crisis of masculinity depicted in the film “is not socio-political but cinematic”. In other words, the crisis of masculinity is purely a cinematic crisis not related to “empirical reality but the … existential question of who (Kau) is and the performativity of his gender identity” (see p. 331). I would argue that one does not cancel out the other — that the crisis of masculinity is both cinematic and socio-political. As Judith Butler states, a viable choice of gender identity depends on individual agency which is “bound up with social critique and social transformation”. See Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 7. See interview with Johnnie To, “Too many ways to be a filmmaker”, Hong Kong Panorama: 98–99, 23rd Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1999), p. 64. See “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. Wai’s 2005 Chinese New Year comedy Himalaya Singh comes close to the zestful anarchic manner of Too Many Ways, but the film is just anarchic in a boisterous, disastrous sort of way with little to show by way of substance, which tends to prove that To’s creative role in the partnership is much greater than we would think, and certainly more crucial to Wai than the other way around. See Gary, “Wang Jiawei de yizhang yingbi” (“Wong Kar-wai and a coin”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 427 (24 August–6 September 1995), p. 33. Lau Ching-wan reveals that Wai used 9.8 mm lens to shoot the film. See Lawrence Pun (ed.), Milkyway Image, Beyond Imagination (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2006), p. 32. See Cheung Kwok-cheung (Zhang Guoxiang), “Huanxiang fang’an: yingxiang pincou shiyan, liangge zhineng huo yige” (“Fantasy file: Image and experiment in The Odd One Dies”) in Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 465 (3–19 February 1997). See “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. I have borrowed the term “musculinity” from Yvonne Tasker, a play on muscular and masculinity referring to those qualities associated with masculinity being “written over” the female body in action films. “‘Musculinity’ indicates the way in which the signifiers of strength are not limited to male characters”. See Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 149. See interview with Yau, “Expect the Unexpected — Japanese soap in Patrick Yau’s action thrillers”, Hong Kong Panorama: 98–99, p. 81. To, however, was always forthright in claiming authorship in public forums, interviews and in the Extra Features on the Hong Kong-published DVD editions of The Longest Nite and Expect the Unexpected. As the credited director of these two films, Patrick Yau is barely acknowledged in the “Making of ” or “Star interviews” features. It is always To who answers the questions and explains the themes and motivations of the films — a clear sign of To’s authority which he probably also exerted on the set.

260

Notes for pp. 87–92

16 See interview with Wai Ka-fai, “Common passions, Wai Ka-fai on Johnnie To”, Hong Kong Panorama: 98–99, p. 68. 17 See Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (New York: Anchor Press, 1977), p. 227. 18 Ibid. 19 See To’s interview in the special features of the DVD of PTU. 20 The introductory prologue explaining the gang wars was not included in the original version previewed in Hong Kong over the Christmas period in 1997. Other scenes from the original version were also missing in the version that was released on New Year’s Day, 1998. For an account of the two different versions, see Ah Ngoi (A Dai), “You xingfen dao kaifen — xinjiu banben de ‘anhua’” (“From excitement to anger: Two versions of The Longest Nite”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 489 (8–21 January 1998), pp. 70–71. My analysis of the film is based on the DVD version published by Universe Laser and Video Company, Hong Kong. This DVD version contains those scenes that were described in Ah Ngoi’s article as cut out from the original preview version, but it retains the introductory prologue of the release version. As it stands, this prologue sequence appears as if it had been hastily shot and added into the film because the preview audience had found the plot confusing (the original version opened with a shot of one of the protagonists shaving his head, which, if it was put back into the DVD version, would have the function of telegraphing the double theme). 21 Mirrors, as well as shadows, are long-established devices in literature to suggest the double, as Otto Rank has shown in his pioneering study of the double, inspired by the silent classic The Student of Prague (1926). The cinema constituted a “modern treatment” of an ancient theme and was unique in its ability to “visibly portray psychological events”, with “exaggerated clarity”. See Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. Harry Tucker, Jr. (London: Karnac, 1989), p. 4, p. 7. See also Ralph Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psychology (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1949). 22 Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 158. Freud drew on the work of Rank, who demonstrates the close connection between narcissism (the double motif cast by reflection and on occasion, shadow or twin) and the fear of death in The Double. See in particular his last chapter “Narcissism and the Double”. 23 Tasker, ibid. 24 Otto Rank, The Double, p. 16. 25 Ibid., p. 79. 26 Ibid., p. 17. 27 Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 160, p. 162. 28 Ibid., p. 144. 29 See “Making Of ” in the DVD extras of The Longest Nite (Universe Laser and Video Co., Hong Kong).

Notes for pp. 94–110

261

30 The geography of this key location and of the action that takes place in later scenes is revealed in the dialogue, although To may not necessarily have shot on these actual locations. 31 See interview with Johnnie To in the “Star Interviews” extras of the DVD of Expect the Unexpected, published by Universe Laser and Video Company, Hong Kong. 32 To addressed the criticism of negativity in the “Special Features” section of the DVD of the film. 33 See “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. 34 See “Expect the Unexpected — Japanese soap in Patrick Yau’s action thrillers” Hong Kong Panorama: 98–99, p. 81. 35 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 188. 36 See Bun Nei (Bin Ni), “Feichang turan: yushui de siwang yishi” (“Expect the Unexpected: Rain and its death consciousness”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 499 (23 May–11 June 1998), p. 47. 37 Interview with Johnnie To, DVD of Expect the Unexpected.

Chapter 4 To stated in an interview that A Hero Never Dies was conceived in 1997 but the shooting was put off until 1998 because of scheduling problems with the actors. See Cinnie, “Du Qifeng: wei dianying er anzhan” (“Johnnie To: Struggling in the dark for cinema”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 508 (1–15 October 1998), p. 38. See also “Common passions, Wai Ka-fai on Johnnie To”, Hong Kong Panorama 98–99 (Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1999), p. 68. 2 See “Beyond Running out of Time and The Mission: Johnnie To ponders one hundred years of film”, Hong Kong Panorama 1999–2000 (Hong Kong: Leisure and Cultural Services Department, 2000), p. 46. 3 See “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. 4 Fredric Jameson, “Magical narratives: Romance as genre”, New Literary History, vol. 7, no. 1, Autumn 1975, p. 141. 5 See Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 144. 6 Ibid., p. 159. 7 Jameson, ibid., p. 153. 8 Ibid., p. 141. 9 Robert Warshow, “The gangster as tragic hero”, The Immediate Experience, p. 129. 10 Warshow, “Movie chronicle: The Westerner”, The Immediate Experience, p. 151.

1

262

Notes for pp. 111–122

11 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1993), p. 88. 12 Running out of Time marks the first occasion that To worked with foreign writers, a conscious decision on To’s part to try to make his films more international, although in fact To found the work of the two Frenchmen to be incompatible with his vision and he had to ask Yau Nai-hoi to rewrite the script. See “Beyond Running out of Time and The Mission: Johnnie To ponders one hundred years of film”, Hong Kong Panorama 1999–2000, p. 49; and “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. 13 Jameson, ibid., p. 153. 14 See “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. 15 Ibid. 16 Ken’s character is most likely inspired by the phenomenon of real-life policemen being heavily indebted to loan sharks in the post-97 depression — the subject of Herman Yau’s Shark Busters (2002). 17 Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 567. 18 See Johnnie To, “Qianghuo: Shot by shot” (“The Mission: Shot by shot”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 537 (11–24 November 1999), p. 48. See also “Beyond Running out of Time and The Mission: Johnnie To ponders one hundred years of film”, p. 48. 19 See “Beyond Running out of Time and The Mission: Johnnie To ponders one hundred years of film”, p. 48. It is in this instant of stillness that we might grasp the meaning of Nicole Brenez’s prognosis on movement: “cinema … can never really show Martial Art, because it is a spiritual movement. But on the other hand, cinema can always develop many and more ways to describe the nonfigurative phenomenon of psychic energy”. See Nicole Brenez, “The secrets of movement: The influence of Hong Kong action cinema upon the contemporary French avant-garde”, in Morris, et al (ed.), Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema, p. 169. 20 To himself describes the music as a “lively Cha-Cha beat, which hopefully would lead the audience to look at the five bodyguards as if they were puppets on a string, dancing to the orders of the godfather, with no control over their destinies”. See Johnnie To, “Ruhe yong jingzhi jingtou buzhuo qiangzhan donggan: Qianghuo zhizuo shouji” (“How to use static shots to capture the sense of motion in gunfights: Production notes of The Mission”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 537 (11–24 November 1999), p. 47. 21 Jameson, ibid., p. 142. 22 Johnnie To, “Ruhe yong jingzhi jingtou buzhuo qiangzhan donggan: Qianghuo zhizuo shouji” (“How to use static shots to capture the sense of motion in gunfights: production notes of The Mission”), p. 46. 23 Here, I assert that Thomas Schatz’s notion of “determinate space” (in which the gangster genre exists) as a space of sustained conflict “violently enacted

Notes for pp. 122–128

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34

263

… according to a prescribed system of rules and behavioural codes” can be transmogrified into an indeterminate space through the formal, abstract elements arising from the characters’ conduct of action. In the indeterminate space, the principal characters struggle “to bring their own views in line … with one another’s”. See Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres, pp. 27, 29. See Wright, Sixguns and Society, p. 86. See Pang Laikwan, “Masculinity in crisis: Films of Milkyway Image and post1997 Hong Kong cinema”, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 2, no. 3 (November 2002), 325–340, p. 335. Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, p. 51. Ibid., p. 53. See Forrest, “Qianghuo” (“The Mission”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 539 (9–22 December 1999), p. 91. Johnnie To, “Qianghuo: Shot by Shot” (“The Mission: Shot by shot”), p. 48. See Gilles Deleuze, The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 136. Patrick Tam criticizes the sequence for its “inaccuracy of the editing”, emphasizing that the timing is off, pointing as an example to those shots of the nightwatchman launching the attack on the group as they go down the elevator while he is on the other side going up the elevator. Tam does not accept the application of cinematic time in this sequence, since To eschews the use of slow-motion. Tam differentiates cinematic time from narrative time (or diegetic time) and considers that the whole sequence is driven realistically by narrative diegetic time, demanding a need for accurate editing. Conversation with Patrick Tam, 21 March 2005, Hong Kong. My argument is that space and time are already distorted as the bodyguards stand still on the elevator, and when the action erupts, all the protagonists move into their “inner worlds” of action. See Cecilia Wong, “Du Qifeng: Jiujing wo zui xiang jiang mie” (“Johnnie To: What do I want to say, exactly?”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 626 (10–23 April 2003), p. 49. Ibid, p. 48. Though the plot broadly recalls Lu Chuan’s Mainland production Missing Gun (2002), the film has since brought up associations with a real-life incident that occurred in Tsimshatsui on 17 March 2006 in which an off-duty policeman named Tsui Po-ko had apparently shot two policemen on patrol, killing one of them and seriously injuring the other. It was said that Tsui, who was killed in the incident, had planned to rob his colleagues of their guns and bullets. It was later revealed that the gun he used was reported missing and had belonged to a policeman who was shot dead in March 2001; the same gun was then used in December that year in a robbery that resulted in the death of a security guard. Tsui was probably responsible for both incidents. This truth-is-stranger-than-

264

35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43

44

45 46

Notes for pp. 129–141

fiction parallel with To’s gangster and police dramas invests a sense of uncanny doubling between cinema and real life that has marked To’s works, particularly evident in Loving You, Lifeline, and The Longest Nite. To jokingly says that if there was a single location where he would have wanted to stage a gunfight battle, it was Cameron Road, but he could not get permission from the police to do it. See Cecilia Wong, ibid., p. 51. To revealed in a conversation with me that the Canton Road shootout sequence was actually shot not in Canton Road but in Ap Lei Chau on the south side of Hong Kong Island. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 80. Warshow, “The gangster as tragic hero”, The Immediate Experience, p. 131. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 234. Johnnie To, “Director’s interview” in Special Features of the PTU DVD, published by Media Asia, Hong Kong. Ibid. See “Johnnie To: What do I want to say exactly?”, City Entertainment, p. 50. To shot a prologue scene, deleted in the Hong Kong version (but apparently included in the Mainland version, on the request of the Chinese censors), showing the Mainland robbers meeting in a café to plan their robbery in Hong Kong, their meeting being secretly photographed by Chinese detectives who also lip-read their conversations. This information is then passed on to the Hong Kong CID which leads to the scene which now opens the film. This deleted scene is included in the DVD edition of Breaking News, published by Media Asia, Hong Kong. The Mainland version, which I have not seen, would thus have interrupted the rhythm of the opening, breaking the impact of the long take sequence. See “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. The scene was shot on Chun Wing Street, Tai Kok Tsui, where the shop buildings had been earmarked by the government for redevelopment and were fully vacated, which suited To’s purposes to use the entire street as a set. See also Hong Kong on Location, newsletter of the Hong Kong Film Services Office, issue no. 12, p. 4, available online at http://www.fso-tela.gov.hk/newsletter.cfm. See “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. Interestingly, Patrick Tam criticizes the sequence for its absences (action that is still going on which we do not see). Tam emphasizes that the idea of a long sustained take is to “show it all” and that To’s focusing on certain aspects of presence while letting other aspects go absent negates the integrity of the long take. The sequence should therefore be edited, according to Tam (conversation with Patrick Tam, 21 March 2005, Hong Kong). “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. The geography in Breaking News is much more sequential and logical than in PTU, and I take this to be a sign of To’s more objective assessment of the

Notes for pp. 143–159

265

characters who aren’t as touched by inner panic and fear as are the characters in PTU. 47 Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres, p. 41.

Chapter 5 1

2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16

See Tzvetan Todorov, “The methodological heritage of formalism”, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 248–251. Roland Barthes, “The world of wrestling”, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 24. Fredric Jameson, “Magical narratives: Romance as genre”, p. 135. Stephen Neale, Genre, p. 19. To’s overcoming of constraints takes place against the background of postmodern millenarianism, with its cry of the End of Time and the End of History, which has a particular resonance in Hong Kong in the last decade of the 20th century: some of the finer cinematic examples of this trend in Hong Kong and the global cinema are Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time (1994) and Happy Together (1997), Tsui Hark’s The Blade (1995), Fruit Chan’s The Longest Summer (1998), Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), P. T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), and Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995). See Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, modernism and postmodernism”, New Left Review, no. 152 (1985), pp. 68–69. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), p. 23. Eagleton, ibid., p. 68. The story was adapted by Wai Ka-fai and Yau Nai-hoi from a radio play which To had happened to hear on the radio. See Ernie Au “Du Qifeng: gunan guanü xin qishi” (“Johnnie To: The new inspiration of Needing You”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 553 (22 June-5 July 2000), p. 41. See Jonathan Clements and Motoko Tamamuro, The Dorama Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese TV Drama Since 1953 (Berkeley, California: Stone Bridge Press, 2003), pp. 219–220. See Yvonne Tasker, Working Girls, p. 6. Noël Carroll, “Notes on the sight gag”, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 146. See Carroll, ibid., p. 150 and p. 153. Ibid., p. 146. See Braudy, The World in a Frame, p. 114. To spoke of Fulltime Killer as a “mid-way station” towards making films fully spoken in English. The rationale was to broaden the market for Hong Kong

266

17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24

Notes for pp. 159–163

films, particularly in the traditional Southeast Asian market, because relying on the Hong Kong domestic market alone would not bring about a “big resurgence” of the Hong Kong cinema and reverse its present decline. See Cheung Kwok-man (Zhang Guowen), “Du Qifeng: maixiang Yazhou hua diyi bu” (“Johnnie To: The first step towards Asianization”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 581 (19 July-1 August 2001), p. 37. Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 36. Ibid., p. 35. Examples of Cantonese films set in the Southeast Asian diaspora are Song of Malaya (1954), Love in Penang (1954), Moon under the Palm Grove (1957), Blood Stains the Valley of Love (1957), She Married an Overseas Chinese (1957), Kuala Lumpur Nights (1958), Grass by the Lake (1959), Merdeka Bridge (1959), Bride from Another Town (1959), The Fragrance of Durians (1959), The Curse (1965), Love with a Malaysian Girl (1969). Hong Kong’s Mandarin cinema also produced numerous features about the Diaspora, including Nyonya (1952), Baba and Nyonya (1956), Rendezvous in the South Sea (1960), The Lovers and the Python (1961), The Girl from Phnom Penh (1963). Perhaps the most famous of all the Southeast Asian-set features is Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss (1971), which is set in Thailand and dubbed into Mandarin and Cantonese versions. For a filmography of Hong Kong films dealing with the Diaspora at large, see the 16th Hong Kong International Film Festival catalogue Overseas Chinese Figures in Cinema (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1992), pp. 124–127 (in Chinese only). The majority of these films were set in pre-independence Malaysia, showing effectively a strong Chinese immigrant flow between Hong Kong and the British-administered territories of Malaya, the Straits Settlements (including Singapore and Penang), Sarawak and North Borneo, before all these territories were incorporated into the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 (North Borneo was renamed Sabah after joining Malaysia). Ien Ang, ibid., p. 36. See interview with Andy Lau, Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 581 (19 July-1 August 2001), p. 40. Intimations here of Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), where the phrase “print the legend” comes from. As with the motif of illnesses which render a hero’s gunhand useless in crucial moments, the Western genre is a rich source for such motifs. Edward Dmytryk’s Western Warlock (1959) contains a scene of the hero Richard Widmark being pinned down by the villain sticking a knife in his hand. It is not clear whether To has seen Warlock, a film largely neglected but which has developed a cult reputation and is one of the classical Western influences on Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West (1969). See “Johnnie To: The first step towards Asianization”, Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 581, p. 37.

Notes for pp. 165–169

267

25 See Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 109. Mark Gallagher makes almost the same point in his thesis of the action film as a genre which fetishizes the male body: “Action films, through their overemphasis on the terrain of action, suggest the crisis of masculinity that lurks beyond the edges of spectacleoriented narratives.” See Gallagher, “I married Rambo: Spectacle and melodrama in the Hollywood action film”, p. 209. 26 The quotes are taken from “Interview with Yvonne Tasker”, The Velvet Light Trap, no. 49 (Spring 2002), pp. 45–46. 27 See Mary Ann Doane, “The voice in the cinema: The articulation of body and space”, in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 335. 28 Ibid., p. 336. Doane asserts that the spectator is aware of the gap between body and voice, and to this extent, the phantasmatic body is an indicator of the spectator as the “invisible subject” whose natural inclination is to fill in the gap, hence the function of unity which Doane attributes to the phantasmatic body. However, in the case of Running on Karma, the spectator would be aware that there is a gulf between what is seen of Andy Lau’s body in the film and what is generally known of Andy Lau in real life as a slim and slender male star. For example, the film plays on the enticing possibility of seeing Andy Lau in the nude but the artificial body keeps his natural body from us, though we do catch a brief glimpse of him nude at the end, shed of his body suit. 29 The role could have been played either by Ruby Wong or Maggie Siu, both members of To’s repertory of actors, who appeared in PTU, for example. Though they were more suitable for the role, both actors did not have the star power of Cecilia Cheung, and for this reason, To did not see fit to give either Wong or Siu the breaks they deserved by casting either one in the role opposite Andy Lau. Cheung was also cast because she had worked with Andy Lau for the first time in the Chinese New Year comedy Cat and Mouse (2003) prior to Running on Karma, and both stars were felt to have good chemistry. 30 Wai Ka-fai, in “Making Of ” extra feature on DVD of Running on Karma, published by Mei Ah, Hong Kong. 31 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 148. 32 See interview with To in the extras of the DVD edition of Throw Down, published by Panorama, Hong Kong. See also “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. 33 These films include John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960), Martin Ritt’s The Outrage (1964), Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), Jimmy Murakami’s Battle beyond the Stars (1980), George Miller’s Max Max beyond Thunderdome (1985), Sammo Hung’s The Moon Warriors (1993), Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing (1996), and many other films that are influenced by Kurosawa’s films or scenes from his films or by Kurosawa’s various techniques.

268

Notes for pp. 169–180

34 Interview with To, DVD of Throw Down. 35 See Jimmy Ngai (Wei Shaoen), “Roudao longhu bang de gancao lüye” (“Character actors and fresh faces in Throw Down”), http://ent.sina.com.cn (30 August 2004). 36 These scenes set in the video game parlor are meant as a counterpoint to similar scenes in PTU showing petty gangsters being humiliated by Simon Yam’s cop. To says he was attracted to video game parlors because “the players are completely focused on what they are doing, oblivious to their surroundings or the people next to them” (see “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1), which illustrates the subjectivity of To’s characters, the idea that they are totally absorbed in their inner worlds. This is partly induced by their professions, thus the bodyguards in The Mission are totally concentrated on the job, and in this manner, Szeto is therefore a typical To character, while Brother Savage is atypical, being highly eccentric to the point of pathology, who nevertheless complements Szeto in his interiority, symbolized by the setting of the video game parlor. 37 Interview with To, DVD of Throw Down. 38 Roland Barthes, “The World of Wrestling”, Mythologies, p. 16. 39 Ibid. 40 Interview with To, DVD of Throw Down.

Chapter 6 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8

9

Conversation with Johnnie To in Melbourne, Australia, 6 August 2005. A term borrowed from Marc O’Day, see O’Day, “Beauty in motion: Gender, spectacle and action babe cinema”, in Action and Adventure Cinema, p. 208. See Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, in particular the section on symbolic violence, pp. 33–42. Bourdieu, ibid., p. 41. On Kurosawa’s influence on Peckinpah, see Stephen Prince, “Genre and violence in the work of Kurosawa and Peckinpah”, in Yvonne Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema, 331–344, pp. 339–340. To was influenced equally by Peckinpah as he was by Kurosawa in devising the violence of Election and Election 2 in the sense of “their attitude to violence” as Prince writes, “that gave them (Kurosawa and Peckinpah) the power and skill to show it in horrific and haunting ways” (p. 342). See Walter Benjamin, “Critique of violence”, in Reflections, 277–300, p. 287. Ibid., p. 286. For a reading of the localism of Election, see Shu Kei, “Election: A film that refuses to compromise”, in Lawrence Pun (ed.), Milkyway Image, Beyond Imagination, 318–326. To’s quoted remarks were uttered in a Commercial Radio interview heard by the author in Hong Kong, broadcast on 18 April 2006 about a week before

Notes for pp. 180–188

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21

22

23 24 25

26

269

the release of Election 2. See also To’s interview with Lawrence Pun in Pun (ed.), Milkyway Image, Beyond Imagination, 306–314, p. 312. See Peter Ip Pau-fuk, “Organized crime in Hong Kong”, paper delivered in a seminar Organized Crime and the 21st Century at the Hong Kong University on 26 June 1999. See http://www.crime.hku.hk/organizecrime.htm. Sek Kei (Shi Qi), “Hei shehui de xuanju wenti” (“The problem of election in Election”), Ming Pao, 8 May 2006. Ibid. See Frank Viviano, “Hong Kong Triads’ new frontier”, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 May 1997. Sek Kei, ibid. See Benjamin, ibid., p. 295. See Lawrence Pun, ibid., p. 314. See Pang Laikwan, Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia: Copyright, Piracy and Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 56. See Meaghan Morris, “Transnational imagination in action cinema: Hong Kong and the making of a global popular culture”, in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (2004), 181–199, p. 186. Ibid. Louis Koo himself refers to Jimmy as the “coolest, with the highest IQ and the highest EQ” of the characters in the Wo Sing. See interview with Louis Koo in Dianying shuangzhou kan (City Entertainment), no. 705 (20 April–3 May 2006), p. 33. On the other hand, it also demonstrates the prevalence of yang violence, so much so that it infuses female action figures so that they are regarded as ambiguous — the notion that “the action heroine is ‘really a man’”, which is a point that Tasker makes, with her formulation of “musculinity”. See Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 132. Pang Laikwan, “Masculinity in crisis: Films of Milkyway Image and post-1997 Hong Kong cinema”, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 2, no. 3 (November 2002), 325–340, p. 337. Ibid., p. 326. Ibid., p. 334. The hell-on-earth motif in recent Hong Kong gangster films was given its most prominent treatment in the Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002–03). The trilogy’s Chinese title Wujian dao refers to the Buddhist Avici hell where suffering is at its most prolonged suggesting that Hong Kong is the Avici hell of the title — another allegorical sign of the times demonstrating the connection between the genre and Hong Kong’s economic depression and political dejection in the post-97 era. One of the archaic rituals performed during the investiture ceremony of Lok in Election was the priest smacking the inductees with a sword from behind, asking the question “Do you love gold or your brethren?” to which the

270

27

28 29 30

31

32

33

34

35 36

Notes for pp. 188–195

inductees reply “My brethren!” Presumably, if someone had answered “Gold!”, his head would have been cut off. Sek Kei suspects there may be a third edition because, in his view, Election 2 “has not in fact ended”. He writes, “The Public Security Bureau exerts pressure on Louis Koo forcing him to make the Wo Sing Society a family enterprise and to end the system of elections, but how will this be achieved? If Koo were to scrap elections, difficulties would surely arise and there would be more slaughter.” See Sek Kei, “Yihe weigui gong’an tuchu” (“The Public Security Bureau stands out in Election 2”), Ming Pao, 9 May 2006. Sek Kei, “The Public Security Bureau stands out in Election 2”. Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, p. 40. The press notes provided by Media Asia state that the film is set in 1998, which I can only assume is a mistake since it is clear from the plot that the action takes place over the three days before the handover on December 20 1999: the final shootout culminates just as the handover comes into effect. The Macau setting is apposite to To’s inscription of a running commentary on the politics of the triad-police collusion in Macau and Hong Kong and the corruption of the Macau police force, which is the subject of The Longest Nite. To had originally toyed with the idea of shooting the film in Cuba and then in Buenos Aires but eventually gave up on these locations for budgetary reasons (I thank Shan Ding for this information). Macau was therefore chosen because it was the cheapest place to shoot in, but though it allowed To to retain the concept of shooting the film in a “Latin” setting, Macau’s reputation as a coven of triad activities and the prevalence of gang wars during the years before the handover completely fits To’s purposes and probably bring out his function as a political commentator more appropriately than shooting the film in Cuba would. Here, I am invoking the concept of the fetishistic look as the spectacle of male bodies, described in Steve Neale’s article “Masculinity as spectacle” — a spectacle accentuated by To through the use of slow motion. See The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 285. According to the Hong Kong censors, the handshake was done in the fashion of a triad ritual. The Mandarin-dubbed version which I saw in Singapore carries this scene intact. The security guard, Sergeant Chen, played by Richie Jen, is a temporary member of the group but he is, fundamentally, an outsider who, like Hui Shiuhung’s inspector, is a law enforcer. Significantly, these outsiders survive because they cannot enter the subjective inner worlds of the protagonists. The women, on the other hand, do enter the inner world and the threat they represent to this masculine world is therefore more palpable. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 27. See Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang, p. 428.

Notes for pp. 196–205

271

37 38 39 40

Walter Benjamin, ibid., p. 283. Ibid., p. 284. Ibid. Florence Colombani, “Stratégie et violence froide pour le sceptre de Hongkong” (“Strategy and cold violence for the Hong Kong sceptre”), in Le Monde, 15 May 2005. 41 Ibid. 42 Benjamin, ibid., p. 299.

Epilogue 1

2

3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

According to statistics published by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, the Hong Kong film industry produced 63 films in 2004, down from 77 in 2003, the year of the SARS crisis. In 2005, only 50 films were produced, the worst downturn since the plunge in production in 1997–98 following the Asian economic crisis. See Ackbar Abbas, “The new Hong Kong cinema and the déjà disparu”, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1997), p. 16. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), p. 156. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 156. Altman sees genre cinema as “a cultural problem-solving device”. His concentration on Hollywood genres and his own bias for the musical (on which he has written a major study, The American Film Musical [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], from where the quote is taken, see p. 27) may well have influenced his optimistic line of generic pleasure and civilizational restoration. American genre films are generally considered as redemptive and restorative (the film noir being the only exception): see The American Film Musical, pp. 360–361. Since the Hong Kong cinema is patterned after Hollywood, Hong Kong’s genres historically tend to be redemptive and optimistic, at least up until the 1990s when the industry started to decline. To’s films therefore exemplify the characteristics of the changed dynamics of the Hong Kong action film, as I go on to explain in the main text. Altman, Film/Genre, p. 156. Altman, The American Film Musical, p. 5. Ibid. See “Author’s Interview with Johnnie To”, Appendix 1. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 159. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres, p. 33. Ibid, p. 32. Ibid., p. 33.

272

Notes for pp. 206–213

14 David Bordwell, “The art cinema as a mode of film practice”, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, p. 719. 15 Thomas Schatz, ibid., p. 31. 16 Nicole Brenez, “The secrets of movement: The influence of Hong Kong action cinema upon the contemporary French avant-garde”, in Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema, p. 164. 17 I am here paraphrasing the words of Gilles Deleuze who refers to the narrative cinema, as opposed to the experimental cinema, as “a cinema which creates rather than experiments”. See Deleuze, The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 204. 18 Conversation with Patrick Tam, 21 March 2005, Hong Kong. 19 See Gilles Deleuze’s “Theses on movement” in The Movement-Image, pp. 1– 11. 20 Deleuze, The Time-Image, p. 248. 21 Charles Leary points out that Andy Lau’s presence as the star of the project and his involvement on the production side through his company Teamwork Pictures betokens To’s influence because of Lau’s association with To on Running out of Time and other films. The rooftop scenes in Running out of Time and its sequel were of course a direct line of influence on Lau’s rooftop encounter with Tony Leung in Infernal Affairs. See Leary, “Infernal Affairs: High concept in Hong Kong”, Senses of Cinema, no. 26 (May-June 2003), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/26/internal_affairs.html. 22 The box-office grosses of To’s films were PTU (HK$2,984,097), Breaking News (HK$7,842,282), Throw Down (HK$8,231,079), Election (HK$15,895,622), Election 2 (HK$13,577,941), while the three Infernal Affairs films grossed over HK$110 million in total. Figures are taken from Dianying Shuangzhou Kan’s (City Entertainment) annual tables of first-run films released in Hong Kong. 23 Wong Jing’s direction of Colour of the Truth (he also wrote the screenplay) makes it the wittiest of the films in the post-97 Hong Kong noir cinema. Regarded as a spin-off of the first Infernal Affairs film, it is also a knowing tribute to a number of Johnnie To films, including The Big Heat and The Mission. 24 See Jean-François Lyotard, “Acinema”, in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 353.

Bibliography

273

Bibliography

Articles Anderson, Aaron. “Kinesthesia in martial arts films: Action in motion”, Jump Cut, no. 42 (1998): 1–11. “Beyond Running out of Time and The Mission: Johnnie To ponders one hundred years of film”, Hong Kong Panorama 1999–2000, 24th Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hong Kong: Leisure and Cultural Services Department, 2000). Ciecko, Anne T. and Lu, Sheldon H. “The Heroic Trio: Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung, Michelle Yeoh — Self-reflexivity and the globalization of the Hong Kong action heroine”, Post-Script, vol. 19, no. 1 (Fall 1999). Colombani, Florence. “Stratégie et violence froide pour le sceptre de Hongkong” (“Strategy and cold violence for the Hong Kong sceptre”), Le Monde, 15 May 2005. “Common passions, Wai Ka-fai on Johnnie To”, Hong Kong Panorama: 98–99, 23rd Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1999). Davis, Darrell and Yeh, Yueh-yu. “Warning! Category III”, in Film Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 4 (2001), 12–26. Eagleton, Terry. “Capitalism, modernism and postmodernism”, New Left Review, no. 152 (1985). “Expect the Unexpected — Japanese soap in Patrick Yau’s action thrillers”, Hong Kong Panorama: 98–99, 23rd Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1999). Hong Kong on Location, Newsletter, issue no. 12 (2004). Hong Kong Film Services Office. “Interview with Louis Koo”, Dianying shuangzhou kan (City Entertainment), no. 705 (20 April–3 May 2006), 32–33. “Interview with Yvonne Tasker”, The Velvet Light Trap, no. 49 (Spring 2002).

274

Bibliography

Ip, Pau-fuk, Peter. “Organized crime in Hong Kong”, paper delivered in a seminar Organized Crime and the 21st Century at the Hong Kong University on 26 June 1999, http://www.crime.hku.hk/organizecrime.htm/. Jameson, Fredric. “Magical narratives: Romance as genre”, New Literary History, vol. 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1975). Leary, Charles. “What goes around, comes around: Infernal Affairs II and III and Running on Karma”, Senses of Cinema, issue 3 (January–February 2004), www.sensesofcinema.com/. ____. “Infernal Affairs: High concept in Hong Kong”, Senses of Cinema, no. 26 (May– June 2003), www.sensesofcinema.com/. Morris, Meaghan. “Transnational imagination in action cinema: Hong Kong and the making of a global popular culture”, in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (2004), 181–199. Pang, Laikwan. “Masculinity in crisis: Films of Milkyway Image and post-1997 Hong Kong cinema”, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 2, no. 3 (November 2002), 325–340. Sek, Kei (Shi Qi). “Hei shehui de xuanju wenti” (“The problem of election in Election”), Ming Pao, 8 May 2006. ____. “Yihe weigui gong’an tuchu” (“The Public Security Bureau stands out in Election 2”), Ming Pao, 9 May 2006. Teo, Stephen. Review of Election, Sight and Sound (June 2006), 47–48. “Too many ways to be a filmmaker”, Hong Kong Panorama: 98–99, 23rd Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council, 1999). Viviano, Frank. “Hong Kong triads’ new frontier”, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 May 1997.

Chinese language references Ah Ngoi (A Dai). “Sheshi 32° , zhi zhi erbai wan” (“Beyond Hypothermia: Worth only 2 million?”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 459 (14– 27 November 1996). ____. “You xinfgen dao kaifen — xinjiu banben de ‘anhua’” (“From excitement to anger: Two versions of The Longest Nite”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 489 (8–21 January 1998). Au, Ernie. “Du Qifeng: gunan guanü xin qishi” (“Johnnie To: The new inspiration of Needing You”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 553 (22 June–5 July 2000). Bun Nei (Bin Ni). “Feichang turan: yushui de siwang yishi” (“Expect the Unexpected: Rain and its death consciousness”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 499 (23 May–11 June 1998). Cinnie. “Du Qifeng: wei dianying er anzhan” (“Johnnie To: Struggling in the dark

Bibliography

275

for cinema”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 508 (1–15 October 1998). Gary. “Wang Jiawei de yizhang yingbi” (“Wong Kar-wai and a coin”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 427 (24 August–6 September 1995). Cheung, Kwok-cheung (Zhang Guoxiang). “Huanxiang fang’an: yingxiang pincou shiyan, liangge zhineng huo yige” (“Fantasy file: Image and experiment in The Odd One Dies”) in Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 465 (3– 19 February 1997). Cheung, Kwok-man (Zhang Guowen). “Du Qifeng: maixiang Yazhou hua diyi bu” (“Johnnie To: The first step towards Asianization”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 581 (19 July–1 August 2001). “Du Qifeng jiuqi wenti toufang yihe weigui” (“Johnnie To: The question of 1997 projected on Election 2”), in Ming Pao, 6 April 2006. Forrest. “Qianghuo” (“The Mission”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 539 (9–22 December, 1999). Ngai, Jimmy (Wei Shaoen). “Roudao longhu bang de gancao lüye” (“Character actors and fresh faces in Throw Down”), http://ent.sina.com.cn/ (30 August 2004). Pang, Edmond (Peng Haoxiang). Quanzhi shashou (Full Time Hitman) (Hong Kong: Nowhereland Publications, 1999). To, Johnnie (Du Qifeng). “Qianghuo: Shot by shot” (“The Mission: Shot by shot”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 537 (11–24 November 1999). ____. “Ruhe yong jingzhi jingtou buzhuo qiangzhan donggan: Qianghuo zhizuo shouji” (“How to use static shots to capture the sense of motion in gunfights: Production notes of The Mission”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 537 (11–24 November 1999). Wong, Cecilia. “Du Qifeng: jiujing wo zui xiang jiang mie” (“Johnnie To: What do I want to say, exactly?”), Dianying Shuangzhou Kan (City Entertainment), no. 626 (10–23 April 2003).

Books Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1997). Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). ____. Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999). Ang, Ien. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Arroyo, Jose (ed.). Action/Spectacle Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2000).

276

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1993). ____. S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of violence”, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Peter Demetz (ed.) (New York: Schocken Books, 1986). Bordwell, David. “The art cinema as a mode of film practice”, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). ____. Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). ____. Planet Hong Kong (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2000). Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). ____. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984). Braudy, Leo. The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (New York: Anchor Press, 1977). Brenez, Nicole. “The secrets of movement: The influence of Hong Kong action cinema upon the contemporary French avant-garde”, in Morris, Li and Chan (eds.), Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema, 163– 173. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). Carroll, Noël. “Notes on the sight gag”, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Cawelti, John. The Six-Gun Mystique (Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984). ____. “Chinatown and generic transformation in recent American films”, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II, 227–245. Clements, Jonathan and Tamamuro, Motoko. The Dorama Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese TV Drama Since 1953 (Berkeley, California: Stone Bridge Press, 2003). Dannen, Fredric and Long, Barry. Hong Kong Babylon (New York: Hyperion, 1997). Dargis, Manohla. “Do you like John Woo?” in Arroyo, Jose (ed.), Action/Spectacle Cinema, 67–71. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). ____. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Dixon, Wheeler Winston (ed.), Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2000). Doane, Mary Ann. “The voice in the cinema: The articulation of body and space”,

Bibliography

277

in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Dyer, Richard. “Action”, in Arroyo (ed.), Action/Spectacle Cinema, 17–21. Foucault, Michel. “What is an author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977). Frayling, Christopher. Sergio Leone: Something to Do With Death (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 2000). Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957). Gallagher, Mark. “I married Rambo: Spectacle and melodrama in the Hollywood action film”, in Sharrett (ed.), Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Grant, Barry Keith (ed.). Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). ____. “Experience and meaning in genre films”, in Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 114–128. Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000). Hall, Kenneth E. John Woo: The Films ( Jefferson, N.C. and London: McFarland and Co., 1999). Hammond, Stefan and Wilkins, Mike. Sex and Zen and A Bullet in the Head (New York: Fireside, 1996). Jacobs, Jason. “Gunfire”, in Arroyo (ed.), Action/Spectacle Cinema, 9–16. Kitses, Jim. Horizons West (New Edition) (London: British Film Institute, 2004). Leitch, Thomas. Crime Films (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Logan, Bey. Hong Kong Action Cinema (London: Titan, 1995). Lu, Sheldon. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, bouncing Angels: Hollywood, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and transnational cinema”, in Lu and Yeh (eds.), Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, 220–233. Lu, Sheldon and Yeh, Yueh-yu Emilie (eds.). Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005). Lyotard, Jean-François. “Acinema”, in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Mason, Fran. American Gangster Cinema: From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction (Basingstoke, Hamps: Palgrave, 2002). McArthur, Colin. Underworld U.S.A. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972). Morris, Meaghan, Li, Siu Leung, and Chan, Ching-kiu Stephen (eds.). Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005).

278

Bibliography

Morton, Lisa. The Cinema of Tsui Hark (Jefferson, N.C. and London: McFarland and Co., 2001). Neale, Steve. Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980). ____. “Masculinity as Spectacle”, The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 277–287. ____. Genre and Hollywood (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). O’Day, Marc. “Beauty in motion: Gender, spectacle and action babe cinema”, in Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema, 201–218. Pang, Laikwan. Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia: Copyright, Piracy and Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). Prince, Stephen. “Genre and violence in the work of Kurosawa and Peckinpah”, in Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema, 331–344. Pun, Lawrence (ed.). Milkyway Image, Beyond Imagination (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2006). Rank, Otto. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. Harry Tucker, Jr. (London, Karnac, 1989). Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981). Schrader, Paul. “Notes on film noir”, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II, 213–225. Sharrett, Christopher (ed.). Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999). Shu Kei. “Election: A film that refuses to compromise”, in Pun (ed.), Milkyway Image, Beyond Imagination, 318–326. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in the Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992). Stokes, Lisa Odham and Hoover, Michael. City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema (London and New York: Verso, 2001). Swales, John M. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (Cambridge University Press, 1990). Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). ____. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). Tasker, Yvonne (ed.). Action and Adventure Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Teo, Stephen. Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997). ____. Wong Kar-wai (London: British Film Institute, 2005). Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973).

Bibliography

279

____. The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977). Truffaut, François. Hitchcock (New York: Touchstone, 1985). Tymms, Ralph. Doubles in Literary Psychology (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1949). Warshow, Robert. The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1972). Welsh, James M. “Action films: The serious, the ironic, the postmodern”, in Dixon (ed.), Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2000). Williams, Linda. “Film bodies: Gender, genre and excess”, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 141–158. Williams, Linda Ruth. “Ready for action: G. I. Jane, Demi Moore’s body and the female combat movie”, in Yvonne Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema: 169–185. Wollen, Peter. Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Expanded Edition) (London: BFI, 1998). Wood, Robin. “Ideology, genre, auteur”, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II: 59–73. Wright, Will. Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1975).

Filmography

Filmography

Films as Director 1980 The Enigmatic Case (Bishui hanshan duoming jin) 1986 The Happy Ghost 3 (Kaixin gui zhuang gui) (co-dir.) 1987 The Seven Year Itch (Qi nian zhi yang) 1988 The Eighth Happiness (Baxing baoxi) The Big Heat (Chengshi tejing) (co-dir. with Andrew Kam) 1989 All about Ah Long (A Lang de gushi) 1990 The Fun, the Luck, and the Tycoon (Jixing gongzhao) The Story of My Son (Ai de shijie) (also co-scr.) 1991 The Royal Scoundrel (Shatan zai yu Zhou shinai) Casino Raiders II (Zhijun wushang II zhi yong ba tianxia) 1992 Lucky Encounter (Ti dao bao) Justice My Foot (Shensi guan) 1993 The Heroic Trio (Dongfang sanxia) (co-dir. with Ching Siu-tung) The Barefooted Kid (Chijiao xiaozi) The Mad Monk ( Ji gong) Executioners (Xiandai haoxia zhuan) (co-dir. with Ching Siu-tung) 1995 Loving You (Wuwei shentan) 1996 A Moment of Romance 3 (Tian ruo you qing III fenghuo jiaren) 1997 Lifeline (Shiwan huoji) 1998 A Hero Never Dies (Zhenxin yingxiong) (also prod.) 1999 Where a Good Man Goes (Zaijian A Lang) (also prod.) Running out of Time (An zhan) (also prod.) The Mission (Qianghuo) (also prod.)

281

282

Filmography

2000 Needing You (Gunan guanü) (co-dir. with Wai Ka-fai) (also executive prod.) Help! (Lashou huichun) (co-dir. with Wai Ka-fai) (also prod.) 2001 Wu Yen (Zhong Wuyan) (co-dir. with Wai Ka-fai) (also prod.) Fulltime Killer (Quanzhi shashou) (co-dir. with Wai Ka-fai) (also prod.) 2002 Love on a Diet (Shoushen nannü) (co-dir. with Wai Ka-fai) (also executive prod.) Running out of Time 2 (An zhan 2) (co-dir. with Law Wing-cheung) (also prod.) 2002 Fat Choi Spirit (Ligu ligu xinnian cai) (co-dir. with Wai Ka-fai) (also prod.) My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (Wo zuo yan jian dao gui) (co-dir. with Wai Ka-fai) 2003 Love for All Seasons (Bainian haohe) (co-dir. with Wai Ka-fai) (also executive prod.) PTU (also executive prod.) Turn Left, Turn Right (Xiangzuo zou, xiangyou zou) (co-dir. with Wai Kafai) (also executive prod.) Running on Karma (Dazhi lao) (co-dir. with Wai Ka-fai) 2004 Breaking News (Da shijian) (also prod.) Throw Down (Roudao longhu bang) (also prod.) Yesterday Once More (Longfeng dou) 2005 Election (Hei shehui) (also prod.) 2006 Election 2 (Hei shehui yihe wei gui) (also prod.) Exiled (Fangzhu) (also prod.)

Films as Producer 1990 1992 1995 1996 1997

1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003

A Moment of Romance (Tianruo youqing) (directed by Benny Chan) A Moment of Romance 2 (Tianruo youqing 2) (directed by Benny Chan) Only Fools Fall in Love (Dailao baishou) (directed by Vincent Kok) Beyond Hypothermia (Shesi 32° ) (directed by Patrick Leung) Final Justice (Zuihou panjue) (directed by Derek Chiu) Too Many Ways to Be Number One (Yige zhi tou de dansheng) (directed by Wai Ka-fai) The Odd One Dies (Liang ge zhi neng huo yi ge) (directed by Patrick Yau) Intruder (Kongbu ji) (directed by Tsang Kan-cheong) The Longest Nite (Anhua) (directed by Patrick Yau) Expect the Unexpected (Feichang turan) (directed by Patrick Yau) Sealed with a Kiss (Tianyan miyu) (directed by Derek Chiu) Spacked Out (Wuren jiashi) (directed by Lawrence Ah Mon) Comeuppance (Tian you yan) (directed by Derek Chiu) Gimme, Gimme (Ai shang wo ba) (directed by Lawrence Ah Mon) Second Time Around (Wuxian fuhuo) (directed by Jeff Lau) Looking for Mr. Perfect (Qifeng dishou) (directed by Ringo Lam)

Index

283

Index

1997 syndrome, 42, 77, 92, 148, 156, 255n11 97 Young and Dangerous (1997), 181 2000 AD (2000), 212 Abbas, Ackbar, 201 Aces Go Places (series), 32 Aces Go Places: Our Man in Bond Street (1984), 36 action babe cinema, 50; action babe heroines, 43, 185 Ah Ying (1982), 24 airwave novels (kongzhong xiaoshuo), 239 All about Ah Long (1989), 24, 32–4, 103, 218, 219 All the Wrong Clues ( for the Right Solution) (1981), 36 Altman, Rick, 20, 202–4, 271n5 Anderson, Aaron, 9 Anderson, Lindsay, 155 Anderson, P. T., 265n5 Ang, Ien, 159–60, 163–4 apartment blocks (action in), 40–2, 58, 94–5, 97, 134–5, 221 Apocalypse Now (1979), 244 Arroyo, Jose, 18 art film, 10, 27, 205–6

As Tears Go By (1988), 67, 153 Ashes of Time (1994), 49, 265n5 Au Kin-yee, 200 “author-function” (Foucault), 15, 100 Avici, 211, 211f, 212 Backdraft (1991), 57, 60 Bare-Footed Kid, The (1993), 31–2, 63, 95–6, 217 Barthes, Roland, 111, 163, 173–4 Battle beyond the Stars (1980), 267n33 Beast Cops (1998), 37 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 85 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 45–6, 179, 182, 196, 198 Besson, Luc, 163 Better Tomorrow, A (1986), 5, 24, 34–5, 37, 53, 218 Beyond Hypothermia (1996), 2–3, 28, 65, 67–72, 77, 83, 85–6, 92–3, 95–6, 99, 103, 106, 115, 157, 162, 219, 227, 258n3 Big Bullet (1996), 66, 67 Big Heat, The (1988), 3, 13, 24, 28, 31– 43, 49, 53, 55, 58, 62, 66, 71, 93, 118, 136, 157, 159, 205f, 219–22, 255n7, 272n23 Big Heat, The (Fritz Lang), 37, 42, 195

284

Index

Bigelow, Kathryn, 163 black society (hei shehui), 2, 236 Blade, The (1995), 265n5 Blood Brothers (1973), 5 Blue Lightning (1990), 255n11 Boat People, The (1982), 24 “body genre” (Linda Williams), 11, 252n44 Bordwell, David, 10, 20, 40–1, 204, 206 Bourdieu, Pierre, 29, 122–3, 178, 183, 252n46, 258n4 Branded to Kill (1967), 163 Braudy, Leo, 87, 157 Breaking News (2004), 1–4, 6, 8, 10–3, 18, 27–8, 40, 67, 92–4, 96, 101–3, 112, 122, 126, 133–43, 146, 154, 157, 160, 168, 174, 185, 190, 201, 205, 207–13, 219, 221, 229, 232, 234, 236–7, 264n46, 272n22 Breathless (1959), 85 Brenez, Nicole, 9, 18, 207, 262n19 Bresson, Robert, 168, 175 Britannia Hospital (1982), 155 Buddhist: notion of death and reincarnation, 148, 167; cause and effect, 245; Avici, 211, 269n25 Bullet in the Head, A (1990), 53 Bullets over Summer (1999), 212 Butler, Judith, 50, 259n5 Butterfly Murders, The (1979), 23, 217 Cambodia, 70–1, 158 Cameron, James, 4, 10, 12 Cameron Road, 128, 264n35 Cannes Film Festival, 27, 246 Canton Road shootout (sequence in PTU ), 128–9, 132–3, 143, 190, 209, 264n35 Carbon, Julien, 114 Carroll, Noël, 150–1 Casino Raiders II (1991), 13, 24, 34, 42, 72, 258n45 castration threat/anxiety, 193

Cawelti, John, 5, 9, 255n7 censorship, 201, 247 CEPA (Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement), 201 Cervantes, 18 Chabrol, Claude, 256n20 Chan, Benny, 66–7, 143, 152, 212, 228 Chan, Fruit, 25, 102, 265n5 Chan, Gordon, 37, 102, 212 Chan, Jackie, 165, 249n1 Chan, Jordan, 155, 170 Chang, Sylvia, 32, 51, 103, 218 Charlie’s Angels (2000), 255n17 Chen, Kelly, 103, 137, 139, 142 Chen, Teddy, 212 Cheng Siu-keung, 200 Cheng, Ekin, 114, 116–7, 143, 155, 157, 181 Cheng, Mark, 187 Cheng, Sammi, 149–50, 165 Cheung Siu-fai, 139, 170, 187 Cheung Tat-ming, 73 Cheung, Alex, 25 Cheung, Cecilia, 155, 164, 167, 239, 267n29 Cheung, Jacky, 5 Cheung, Maggie, 31, 43, 48, 49f, 49– 51, 96, 222, 257n26 Cheung, Nick, 134, 136–7, 187, 189, 192, 232, 235 Cheung, Roy, 119, 189–90 Cheung Sha Wan District, 94, 141 Chiang, David, 180 China Star, 102, 210 Chinese Ghost Story, A (1987), 37, 70 Chinese New Year comedies 24, 145 Chineseness, concept of, 159–60, 164 Ching Siu-tung, 32, 43, 49, 52, 62, 220, 222 Chiu, Derek, 77 Choi Yat-chi, 170 Chow Yun-fat, 22, 24, 32–4, 103, 218

Index

Chow, Stephen, 22, 24, 33–4, 78, 151, 249n1, 254nn2–3 Chu Kong, 37–8, 40–1 Chung King-fai, 216 Chung, Billy, 212 Chung, Cherie, 39 Chungking Express (1994), 80, 82 Ciecko, Anne, 47, 50 Cinema City, 24, 32, 35–6, 38, 52, 66, 145, 218, 255n11 “cinematic specificity” (Neale), 14 “City in the Sea, The”, 96 City on Fire (1987), 5, 34 coincidence (motif of ), 12, 75, 91–2, 94–6, 132, 232 Colombani, Florence, 196 Colour of the Loyalty (2005), 212 Colour of the Truth (2003), 212, 272n23 Come Drink with Me (1966), 50 Con Air (1997), 4 Convergence ( Jackson Pollock’s painting), 189 coolness (manifestation of ), 69, 71, 77, 139, 141, 154 cops and robbers, 2–3, 28, 32, 87, 90, 138, 140, 219, 221, 224, 237–8 Coppola, Francis Ford, 180, 243 Corleone, Michael, 196 Courtiaud, Laurent, 114 Craven, Wes, 35 crime film/movie, 2–3, 250n6 “Critique of Violence” (Walter Benjamin), 45, 179, 196 Croft, Lara, 48 Cugat, Xavier, 81 Curtiz, Michael, 146 Dangerous Encounter — First Kind (1980), 24 Dargis, Manohla, 256n20 Days of Being Wild (1989), 81 Dead End (1969), 252n38 Dead Man (1995), 265n5

285

Deleuze, Gilles, 97, 126, 208–9, 272n17 Delon, Alain, 239 Desperado (1995), 163 Destiny-machine, 11, 35, 46–7, 60, 72, 91, 99, 106, 109, 123, 150–1, 174, 183, 195–7, 203 Di Long, 31, 252n38 Diaspora: 157, 160–1, 164, 266n19; diasporic identity, 159–61, 163, 175 Disciples of Shaolin (1975), 31 Dmytryk, Edward, 266n23 Doane, Mary Ann, 165–6, 267n28 Dog Day Afternoon (1975), 112 Don Quixote (Orson Welles), 18 Donner, Richard, 4 double/doubles, 55–6, 67, 87–91f, 105, 108, 112–5, 117, 147, 184–5, 211, 231, 260nn21–2 Duke of Mount Deer, The (1984), 24 Dyer, Richard, 7, 36 Eagleton, Terry, 149 Eighth Happiness, The (1988), 24, 32, 34, 78, 218, 220 Election (2005), 2–5, 8, 10, 19–20, 26– 7, 29, 37, 63, 72, 157, 177–80, 183– 8, 195–7f, 200–1, 205, 209–11, 245– 7, 268n5, 268n8, 269n26, 272n22 Election 2 (2006), 2–5, 8, 13, 19, 27, 29, 37–8, 63, 93, 157, 177–88, 190–1, 195–7, 201–2, 205, 209–13, 268n5, 269n9, 270n27, 272n22 Election films, 87, 212 Enigmatic Case, The (1980), 22–3, 31, 39–40, 62, 216–8 “enunciator” (Gunning), 15–6, 68, 122 Executioners (1993) 13, 22–4, 28, 31–2, 47, 50–2, 62–3, 68, 97, 255n17, 219– 20, 222 Exiled (2006), 2–3, 13, 29, 177, 189, 189f, 190–5, 201–5, 207 Expect the Unexpected (1998), 2–3, 10, 11,

286

Index

13, 28, 40, 65, 67–8, 72, 86–7, 93– 9, 101, 103, 116, 118, 121–2, 125, 132–4, 136, 142, 156, 164, 174, 192, 194, 199, 201, 203–5, 207–8, 211, 219, 221, 228, 231–2, 236, 259n15

Fulltime Killer (2001), 1, 3, 13, 24, 28, 39, 71, 87, 102, 162–3, 146–8, 157– 60, 175, 202, 210, 238–9, 265n16 Fun, the Luck and the Tycoon, The (1990), 34

Face/Off (1997), 256n20 Fallen Angels (1995), 79–80, 86, 163 Fat Choi Spirit (2002), 24, 145, 153 fatalism: 8, 10–1, 28, 31, 35, 61, 63, 92– 3, 95–6, 98–9, 116, 121, 133, 141– 3, 152, 173, 203, 205, 211–3, 231; heroic, 103–4, 106–10, 138; magical, 110–2, 114, 206; mechanical, 106 fate, 11, 35, 35f, 46–7, 68, 77, 84, 97, 99, 104, 106, 109, 110, 122–3, 125, 138, 150–4, 164, 167, 173–4, 182– 3, 205, 230–1, 233, 239 Father and Son (1981), 24 Fenghuang studio, 216 film noir, 4, 9–12, 210, 271n5 Film Workshop, 35–6, 38, 66 Final Justice (1997), 77 Final Option, The (1994), 37 Fistful of Dollars, A (1964), 267n33 Fok, Clarence, 258n2 Fong Ping, 105, 108–10 Fong Wing Kee Restaurant, 128–9 Fong, Alex, 58–60 Fong, Allen, 24–5 Fong, Eddie, 25 Fong, Mona, 53 Ford, Glenn, 195 Ford, John, 14, 146, 266n22 Foucault, Michel, 15 “Four Tables” sequence (in Throw Down), 170, 171f, 173–4, 176, 207–8 French: avant-garde, 207 Freud, 90, 260n22 Frye, Northrop, 5, 168 Full Alert (1997), 212 Full Moon in New York (1989), 51 Full Time Hitman, 159

Gallagher, Mark, 4, 12, 267n25 gambling movies, 34, 224 game (motif of the), 67, 91–3, 108, 110– 7, 143, 172–3, 231, 233 gangster film/movie, 2–6, 20–1, 29, 32, 34, 86, 110, 163, 197, 210, 217, 219, 246, 250n6, 250n16, 269n25 Garley Building fire, 59–60, 225 generic pleasure, 202–7, 271n5 genre: action, 4, 10, 12, 16, 22, 24–6, 28, 31, 37, 49, 52, 56, 65, 103, 116, 118, 128, 136, 143, 177, 195, 200– 1; action-adventure, 3–4, 9–10, 19, 32, 34, 50, 57, 112; cinema, 21, 27, 29, 71, 126, 197, 199, 202, 208, 210, 271n5; cognition, 2; convention, 18, 154, 195; horror, 3, 20, 35, 37, 43, 147, 222, 252n44, 253n61, 255n9; martial arts, 25, 31–3, 43, 217, 250n5, 253n61; mixing, 20, 35; romance, 5, 24, 145; slapstick, 78; theory, 1, 14, 17, 18, 148, 206; see also melodrama Girard, Rene, 90, 105, 195 Godard, Jean-Luc, 85–6 Godfather trilogy, 180,196 Godfather, The (1972), 243 Golden Harvest, 66, 229 GoodFellas (1990), 180 Grant, Barry Keith, 2 Granville Road, 128 Great Escape, The (1963), 89 Great Train Robbery, The (1903), 4 Gunfighter Nation (Slotkin), 250n16 gunfire: 6–8, 11, 16, 18, 34, 43, 118–9, 125–6, 141f, 184–5, 189, 191, 189; action films, 7, 177 Gunmen (1988), 38

Index

Gunning, Tom, 11, 15, 35, 37, 42, 195 gunplay: 2, 9, 26, 28, 34, 114, 118, 136, 147, 153, 209, 219, 222, 224, 232, 245; action, 5, 31, 34, 57, 65, 115, 118–9, 125, 154; action film genre, 210; action format, 126, 147, 149; films, 29, 136, 175, 209, 219 guns, 5–9, 16, 19, 29, 34, 120–1, 125– 6, 178–9, 183–6, 191, 221, 237, 245, 250n16, 263n34 Hanoi Road, 129 happy ending, convention of, 29, 96, 154, 202–5, 213 Happy Ghost 3, The (1986), 24, 218 Happy Together (1997), 265n5 Hard-Boiled (1992), 5–6, 38, 45, 256n20 Harryhausen, Ray, 52 Hau Wong Road, 129 Hawks, Howard, 19, 146 Help! (2000), 3, 11, 24, 28, 146–8, 153– 7, 160, 175, 203, 209 hero movies (yingxiong pian), 2, 53, 106, 183, 224, 246 Hero Never Dies, A (1998), 1, 3, 6, 8, 11, 28, 39, 68, 72, 87, 91, 101–10, 114, 116–7, 138, 143, 152, 156–7, 164, 174, 180, 184, 186, 194, 204–5, 207, 209, 211, 219, 231–2, 236, 261n1 Heroic Duo (2003), 66–7, 143, 212 Heroic Ones, The (1970), 5 Heroic Trio, The (1993), 3, 13, 24, 28, 31– 3, 41–5, 47–8, 49f, 49–52, 52f, 54, 59–60, 62–3, 68, 70, 82, 97, 103, 118, 154, 156, 182, 185, 192, 217, 219– 20, 222, 254n3, 255n17, 256n20 Heung, Charles, 154 high culture, 17–19, 149 Hill, Walter, 267n33 Himalaya Singh (2005), 259n8 Hitchcock, Alfred, 14, 147, 256n20 Ho, Josie, 192–3 Hollywood: action films, 3, 27, 57,

287

258n46; genres, 250n6, 253n57, 253n66, 271n5; influence on Hong Kong cinema, 4, 16, 20, 43, 100, 146, 210, 271n5; migration of Hong Kong action directors, 21, 22, 25, 163, 243, 249; silent comedies, 151; and To’s action cinema, 50, 52, 57, 60, 112, 163, 171, 209, 255n17 Homecoming (1984), 24 homosocial/homosociality, 7–8, 10, 13, 16, 39, 50, 122–3, 138 Hon Sang-woo, 71 Hong Kong Film Archive, 253n61 Hong Kong Film Awards, 34, 101, 114, 126, 154, 187, 200 Hong Kong film industry 1, 18, 20–1, 22, 71, 100, 148, 199, 200–1, 210, 242, 249n1, 271n1 Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF), 101–2, 253n61 Hong Kong New Wave, 24–5, 210 Hong Kong Second Wave, 25, 210 Hooper, Tobe, 35 hospital scenes in To’s films, 38, 42, 44– 5, 55–6, 58–60, 62, 69, 75–6, 82, 96, 104, 128–9, 154–7, 193, 223–4, 226, 256n20 Hounds of Zaroff, The (1932), 256n18 Hui Shiu-hung, 115–6, 190, 270n34 Hui, Ann, 24–6 Hung, Sammo, 267n33 Huston, John, 258n2 hybridity 161, 163–4 icewoman, 69–72 identity, theme of, 71 Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002–3), 26, 143, 200, 211–2, 269n25, 272nn21–3 inner world, 104, 109, 121–4, 126, 129, 190–1, 263n31, 268n36, 270n34 Inside Man (2006), 112 “Internationale, The”, 117, 233 Intruder (1997), 255n9

288

Index

Jackson, Samuel L., 112 Jacobs, Jason, 6–7 Jameson, Fredric, 21, 104, 109–10, 115, 121, 148 Jarmusch, Jim, 265n5 Jen, Richie, 134, 136, 142, 235, 270n34 Jianghu (2004), 212 jianghu, 5, 8, 72–3, 79, 90–2, 104, 106, 109, 120–2, 126, 204 Judo Saga (Sugata Sanshiro [1943]), 169 Jurassic Park (1993), 4 Justice My Foot (1992), 24, 33, 43, 47, 54, 56, 217, 220 Kam, Andrew, 34 Kaneshiro, Takeshi, 51, 80, 80f, 82–6, 91, 95, 104, 110, 230 karmic retribution (yinguo baoying), 239– 40 Killer, The (1989), 25, 38, 87 Kilmer, Val, 112 King Hu, 14, 26, 50 Ko, Eddy, 119 Kok, Vincent, 77, 228 Koo, Louis, 18, 37, 55, 169, 184, 184f, 240, 269n20, 270n27 Kowloon, 12, 19, 58, 94, 123, 128–9, 252n49 Kowloon City, 128–9, 214 Kowloon Noir, 11–2, 123–4, 129–30, 133, 190, 252n49 Kowloon Walled City, 19, 247, 252n49 Kubrick, 35 Kung Fu Hustle (2004), 249n1 Kurosawa, Akira, 97, 118–9, 125, 142, 168–9, 174–5, 179, 234, 240–1, 243, 258n45, 265n5, 268n5 Kusturica, Emir, 265n5 Kwan, Stanley, 25, 51 Kwok, Aaron, 31, 169 La Rupture (1970), 256n19 Ladder 49 (2004), 258n46

Lady from Shanghai, The (1948), 89 Lai, Leon, 104, 109f, 110, 114, 143 Lam Ka-tung, 183, 187, 193 Lam Suet, 59, 102, 115, 117, 119, 128, 183, 187, 189–90, 193, 158, 233 Lam, Ringo, 5, 21, 26, 34, 43, 66–7, 102, 119, 212, 228 Lang, Fritz, 11, 15, 34 Last Man Standing (1996), 267n33 Lau Chen-hoi, 53 Lau Ching-wan 53–6, 58–61, 70, 72– 3, 76–7, 79, 87–8, 90–2, 95–7, 102– 6, 109–17, 143, 209, 223, 226, 231, 233, 259n10 Lau Kar-leung, 31 Lau, Andrew, 25–6, 211 Lau, Andy, 5, 13, 66, 102, 110–6, 143, 150, 153, 157–9, 161, 164–7, 203, 211, 233, 239–40, 258n45, 267nn28– 9, 272n21 Lau, Damian, 47, 59 Laughton, Charles, 102 Law Wing-cheung 116, 200, 229 Law, Clara, 25 Leary, Charles, 272n21 Lee, Bruce, 25, 74, 165, 251n38, 266n19 Lee, Carman, 53, 58, 74–5, 80f, 82–6, 91–2, 95, 103–4, 258n2 Lee, Raymond, 255n11 Lee, Spike, 112 Lee, Waise, 35, 37, 111 Legend of the Condor Heroes, The (1983), 24 Leitch, Thomas, 250n6 Leon, the Professional (1994), 163 Leone, Sergio, 194, 250n17, 266n23, 267n33 Lethal Weapon series, 4 Leung Chiu-wai, Tony, 88, 88f, 90, 113–4, 143, 209, 211, 231, 272n21 Leung Ka-fai, Tony, 37, 55, 169, 173f, 184, 187, 245, 255n11 Leung, Fiona, 104–6, 108

Index

Leung, Patrick, 25, 67–8, 71, 227, 228 Lewton, Val, 100 Li Hanxiang, 66 Liaozhai Zhiyi, 70 Lifeline (1997), 3, 11, 13, 28, 31–2, 35, 39, 54–5, 57–8, 61–3, 68, 94, 97, 103, 118, 122, 156, 221, 223–4, 226– 7, 258n46, 264n34 lifts (action in), 6, 37–8, 56, 58, 60, 85, 94, 114, 140, 155, 221, 226 Lin, Brigitte, 49 Lin, Kelly, 158 Lo Hoi-pang, 170 Lok Fu, 19 Lone Wolf and Cub series, 45, 256n20 long take, 134–6, 141, 174, 190, 208, 229, 234, 264 Longest Nite, The (1998), 2–3, 28, 56, 65, 68, 72, 86–93, 97, 99, 101–3, 105, 108, 110, 113–6, 128, 132, 136, 164, 180, 186, 190, 194, 199, 202, 204– 5, 207, 209, 211, 219, 227–8, 231– 2, 259n15, 260n20, 264n34, 270n31 Longest Summer, The (1998), 265n5 Love for All Seasons (2003), 145 Love on a Diet (2001), 145–7, 153, 165, 209, 239 Loving You (1995) 3, 11, 13, 24, 28, 31– 2, 39–40, 42, 53–6, 58–9, 62–3, 67– 8, 76–7, 87, 91, 95–7, 103, 110, 136, 152–6, 219–21, 223–4, 236, 254n2, 264n34 low culture, 18, 26, see also popular culture Lu Chuan, 263n34 Lu, Sheldon, 47, 50, 255n17 Lui, Jackie, 119 Lukács, Georg, 19 Lumet, Sidney, 112 Lyotard, Jean-François, 213 M (1931), 35

289

Macau, 32, 88–9, 92, 102–3, 113, 158, 190–1, 193–4, 270n31 Mad Max beyond Thunderdome (1985), 267n33 Mad Monk, The (1993), 24, 33, 220, 254nn2–3 “magical narratives” (Jameson), 110, 116 Magnificent Seven, The (1960), 267n33 Magnolia (1999), 265n5 Mak, Alan, 211 Mak, Marco, 212 Maka, Karl, 36, 66 Malaysia, 39, 70, 158, 238, 266n19 Man from Hong Kong, The (1975), 256n18 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (1962), 266n22 Mann, Michael, 72 martial arts: 2–3, 9, 20, 34; action, 25, 43, 164; choreography, 23; director, 31–2; drama serials, 32, 216–7, 222; genre, 25, 31–3, 43, 217, 250n5, 253n61; novels, 9; movie, 26, 32, 95, 217, 252n38; powers, 164; practitioners, 123; training, 165 masculine: action, 185; domination, 178, 183, 188, 252n46; group identity, 10; identity of violence, 82; structure, 7, 125; value of action, 8; values, 11, 123, 182; violence ,187–8, 192 masculinity: 13, 49, 54, 122–3, 125, 165, 167, 185, 187–8, 193, 259n13, 270n32; crisis of, 7, 47, 49, 188, 192– 4, 257n27, 258n5, 267n25; end of, 193–5, 197; macho-masculinity, 48, 53; of violence, 8; see also “muscular” and “musculinity” Mason, Fran, 258n2 Mature, Victor, 251n38 McQueen, Steve, 89 Melbourne International Film Festival (2005), 245

290

Index

melodrama: 3, 4, 12–3, 22, 24, 26, 32– 4, 93, 103, 217–8, 241, 252n44, 253n61; action mode, 13, 32; violence as, 42, 72 Melville, Jean-Pierre, 10 “mental machinery” (Neale), 148 message movie (zhuti pian), 239 meta-criticism, 8, 142, 152, 175, 182 Metz, Christian, 148 Milkyway company, 2, 58, 65, 71, 78, 87, 98, 100–2, 210, 227, 229, 255n9, 257n27; films, 15, 28, 61, 66–8, 72, 75, 77, 80–1, 83, 85–6, 92, 95–6, 98– 102, 104, 106, 117, 121, 138, 143, 185, 219–20, 229; projects, 79, 72, 78 Miller, George, 267n33 mimed metaphor, 151 Minden Avenue, 128 Missing Gun (2002), 263n34 Mission, The (1999) 1, 3–6, 8–12, 18, 25, 27–8, 37–9, 84, 87, 97, 101–2, 117– 8 , 122–8, 130–1, 133, 136, 139, 142–3, 146, 154, 156–7, 163, 168, 174, 177, 180, 185–6, 188–94, 201, 204–5, 207–10, 212–3, 219, 221, 233–5, 238, 247, 272n23 Moment of Romance, A (1990), 66–7, 97, 152–4, 167, 199, 220, 228 Moon Warriors, The (1993), 267n33 Morris, Meaghan, 19, 184, 251n30 Morton, Lisa, 38 Most Dangerous Game, The (1932), 256n18 movement: 8–9, 119, 130, 239, 262n19; aberrant movements, 209; actionmovement, 9; camera movement, 126, 136; false movement, 208–9, 212; Kurosawa’s influence, 118–9, 133 Movement-Image, The, 126 Mui, Anita, 33, 43–8, 50, 52, 59, 70, 97, 222

multiple-axial montage, 208 Mung, Yoyo, 94, 104, 106, 108, 112 Murakami, Jimmy, 267n33 muscular: action films, 3; body/bodies, 49, 165, 167, 187; cinema, 10–1, 251n38; hero, 165; heroine, 83; “muscular memory” (Anderson), 9; “musculinity” (Tasker), 82–3, 259n13 My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (2002), 145–7, 152–3 Naked Killer, The (1992), 258n2 nanyang, 160 Nathan Road, 60, 128 Neale, Stephen, 9, 14, 17, 20–1, 148, 250n6, 253n64 Needing You (2000), 3, 24, 28, 66, 146– 7, 149–50, 152–4, 169, 175, 203, 236, 242 Negotiator, The (1998), 112 New Police Story (2004), 66, 212 Ng Mang-tat, 254n3 Ng, Francis, 74, 75f, 79, 92, 119, 189, 192, 194, 234, 235 Ngai, Jimmy, 169 Ngau Tau Kok, 19 Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), 35 Niobe, 46, 46f, 47 Nomad (1982), 24 Noyce, Philip, 112 “O Tannenbaum”, 117 O’Day, Marc, 43, 49 object analog (Carroll), 151 OCTB (Organized Crime and Triad Bureau), 94, 95, 137 Odd One Dies, The (1997), 2–3, 8, 13, 28, 65, 68, 79–82f , 85–6, 91–2, 95, 99, 103–4, 110, 114, 199, 205, 207, 219, 229, 258n2 On Not Speaking Chinese, 159 Once upon a Time in America (1984), 250n17

Index

Once upon a Time in the West (1969), 194, 266n23 One Hundred Years of Film, 102, 154 One Nite in Mongkok (2004), 212 One-Armed Swordsman, The (1967), 56, 257n45 Only Fools Fall in Love (1995), 77, 229 opening plan-sequence (Breaking News), 139, 171, 207–8 Ophüls, Max, 253n64 Othello (1952), 18 Outrage, The (1964), 267n33 pan-Asian: audience, 238; consciousness, 157; film, 163; identities, 158; multiculturalism, 71; settings, 39 Pang Laikwan, 122, 183, 185, 258n5 Pang, Edmond, 25, 159 Peace Hotel (1995), 68 Peckinpah, Sam, 7, 179, 192, 194, 243– 4, 268n5 Peking Opera Blues (1986), 24 phantasmatic body, 165–6, 168, 267n28 Point Break (1991), 163 policier, 2, 34–5, 37–8, 57–8, 250n6, 255n11 Poe, Edgar Allan, 96 Pollock, Jackson, 189, 192 popular culture, 17–9, 159 Porter, Edwin S., 4 postmodernism, 149 Prizzi’s Honor (1985), 258n2 professional killer movies (shashou pian), 2–3; professional killers (as action stereotype), 1, 28, 70–1, 85, 88, 104, 106, 123, 138, 158–9, 163, 238 Protégé (2007), 212 psychological thrillers, 10 PTU (2003) 1, 3–6, 8–12, 27–8, 37, 39, 55, 87, 92–6, 101–2, 122, 126, 128– 33, 136–7, 139–40, 142–3, 146, 154, 156–7, 160, 174, 186, 190, 201, 205, 207–13, 219, 221, 232, 236, 238,

291

241, 243, 264n46, 267n29, 268n36, 272n22 Pu Songling, 70 Purple Storm (1999), 212 rain: significance of, 97, 243 Rank, Otto, 90, 260nn21–2 Ray, Nicholas, 253n64 “Red Flag, The”, 117, 206, 233 redemption, 63, 79, 85, 95, 148, 152, 167, 169, 172–5, 212 Reeves, Steve, 251n38 renqing (humanness), 55, 59 Ritt, Martin, 267n33 Rock, The (1996), 4 Rodriguez, Robert, 163 Rothrock, Cynthia, 49 Running on Karma (2003), 3, 10, 13, 24, 28, 37, 102, 105, 110, 146–8, 164, 166f , 168, 175, 185, 205–6, 209, 212–3, 239–40, 267n28 Running out of Time (1999), 1, 3, 11, 28, 39, 56, 58, 67, 84, 87, 91, 101–2, 105, 110–7, 136, 142–3, 161, 164, 184, 201, 205–7, 211, 219–21, 231, 233, 236, 239, 262n12, 272n21 Running out of Time 2 (2001), 1, 3, 24, 102, 112, 114, 116–7, 206 Sabotage (1936), 256n20 Saint, The (1997), 112 Sakamoto, Kyu, 108 Sanshiro, ballad of, 17 Schatz, Thomas, 4, 205-6, 262n23 Schrader, Paul, 12 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 10, 165, 168, 251n38 Scorsese, Martin, 170, 180, 243–4, 246 screwball comedy, 4 Seberg, Jean, 85 Sek Kei (Shi Qi), 180–2, 188, 270n27 “self-reflexivity”, 50–1 Selznick, David O., 99

292

Index

serial-killer movies, 3 Seven Samurai (1954), 118 Seven Year Itch, The (1987), 218 sexuality: 49, 150; bi-sexuality/transsexuality, 49; homosexuality, 123, 150 Shakespeare, 18 Shaolin Soccer (2001), 249n1 Shark Busters (2002), 262n16 Shaw Brothers, 25, 31, 53, 224 Shaw, Run Run 224 Shek, Dean, 36, 66 Shining, The (1980), 35 Shiu, Maggie, 91 “Shopping mall” sequence (in The Mission), 118, 124–5, 136, 143, 189– 90, 207–8, 234 sight gags, 150–2 Simpson-Bruckheimer films, 4 Singapore, 158, 162–3, 238, 266n19, 270n33 Siqin Gaowa, 51 Siu, Maggie, 182, 267n29 Sixguns and Society (Wright), 122 slasher film, 35 Slotkin, Richard, 6, 117, 129, 250n16 slow-motion, 23, 39, 40, 56, 61–2, 118, 126, 132f, 133, 143, 179, 189, 191– 2, 209, 216, 243, 263, 270 Somebody Up There Likes Me (1996), 67 Sorimachi, Takashi, 158 space: determinate/indeterminate, 4, 122, 262n23; mythic, 4, 72, 94, 129 Spacey, Kevin, 112 Spectacular Bodies (Tasker), 10, 49, 165, 187 speed: in the action film, 36–8, 40, 42, 84, 112, 119 Spielberg, Steven, 4 Stallone, Sylvester, 10, 165, 251n38 Star Wars (1977), 267n33 stasis: within movement, 9, 119, 126, 127f, 129, 133, 208; inner stasis, 174

static shots, 125, 234 “static violence” (Deleuze), 126, 208 Stephen Chow comedies, 33–4, 151, 220 Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, 70 Straw Dogs (1971), 244 Student of Prague, The (1926), 260n21 Sturges, John, 267n33 Sturges, Preston, 14 subjective world, 123, 126, 129, 190, 270n34 Sugata Sanshiro (1943), 169, 240–1 “Sukiyaki”, 108 Sun-luen, 216 Suzuki, Seijun, 163 Sword, The (1980), 23 Swordsman III: The East is Red (1993), 49 Swordsman, Part Two (1992), 49 Szeto Kam-yuen, 91–2, 99 Tam, Patrick, 22–5, 208, 229, 263n31, 264n44 Tao Siju, 181 Task Force (1997), 67 Tasker, Yvonne, 7, 9–11, 13, 18, 48–9, 53–4, 82, 90, 150, 165, 187, 251n38, 259n13, 269n21 Tasteless Detective, The (Wuwei shentan), 53 Teamwork Pictures (Andy Lau’s production company), 272n21 Terminator, The (1984), 52 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (1974), 35 Thailand, 69–71, 104, 106, 158, 238, 266n19 Throw Down (2004), 3, 8, 11, 18, 24, 27– 8, 55, 84, 97, 119, 146–7, 168–77, 201, 205, 207–13, 239–40, 243, 248, 258n45, 272n22 Time and Tide (2000), 2, 12, 40, 53, 56 Titanic (1997), 4 To Kei-fung, 1 To, Johnnie : auteur status, 10, 15, 27– 9, 100–2, 144, 200; and auteur theory,

Index

14, 19, 20, 34, 147; auteur function, 14–6, 18–20, 199, 202, 206, 208, 210; auteurism, 17–8, 20, 148; auteurship, 65, 87, 91, 93; Best Director Award, 101, 126, 154, 200; childhood, 215– 6, 247, 253n70; Chineseness, 160; contribution to Hong Kong Cinema, 200–2; cultural specificity, 16, 20; as enunciator, 15–6, 68, 122; “exercises”, 112, 126, 128, 130, 136, 143, 145–6, 157, 171–2, 199, 207, 209–11; experimentation, 178, 207– 10; formalism, 102, 118, 124–6, 147, 149, 157, 170, 207; on impermanence (wuchang), 96, 98, 104, 125, 143, 231– 2; his name, 1, 249n1; “neoexercises”, 146, 157, 162, 168, 177, 199; philosophy of jiji rensheng,168, 240; and Wai Ka-fai, 78, 87, 93, 99, 101, 146–7, 153–4, 160, 168, 227, 229–30, 255; on women and female roles, 103, 120, 123, 139–40, 193, 241–2; and Patrick Yau, 68, 85–7, 93, 97, 227–30, 259n15 Todorov, Tzvetan, 18, 149 Too Many Ways to Be Number One (1997), 2–3, 28, 65–6, 68, 72–81, 85– 6, 92, 99, 103–6, 110, 147, 154, 156, 202, 219, 227, 229–30, 259n8 Top Gun (1986), 4 Tou Chung-hua, 53, 87, 91, 97 Touch of Evil (1958), 134 Touch of Zen, A (1970–71), 50 Trenchard-Smith, Brian, 256n18 triads: 2, 73, 93, 157, 179–83, 188, 190– 1, 193, 201, 211, 235–7, 245–7, 252n49; triad movies, 2, 3, 79, 217, 224 True Colours (1986), 38 True Lies (1994), 12 Truffaut, François, 45, 256n20 Tsang Kan-cheong, 255n9 Tsimshatsui, 82, 128–9, 263n34

293

Tsui Hark, 35–8, 40, 42–3, 49, 53, 56, 62, 66–7, 70, 102, 119, 212, 217, 220, 222, 228, 255n11, 265n5 Tsui Po-ko, 263n34 Turkey Shoot (1981), 256n18 Turn Left, Turn Right (2003), 145, 147, 209, 210 Turner, Kathleen, 258n2 TVB, 24–5, 215–6, 224, 247 uncanny, the (Freud), 90 Underground (1995), 265n5 urban Westerns, 4–7, 9, 18, 107, 250n17 Van Damme, Jean-Claude, 165 Victim (1998), 212 violence: aesthetics of, 183, 195; divine, 63; feminised, 184; infrastructure of, 5–6, 94, 114, 226; lawmaking, 179, 183, 196; mythical, 7-8, 45–7, 54, 62–3, 182–3; realistic, 37, 130; static, 126, 208; symbolic, 178–9, 182–3, 187–9, 194, 268n3; yang, 185, 269n21; yin, 184–7 Wai Ka-fai, 25, 68, 78–9, 85, 87, 93, 99, 101, 146–7, 153–4, 160, 167, 200, 227, 229–30, 255n9, 259n8, 259n10, 265n9 Walsh, Raoul, 146 Wang Jie, 258n45 Wang Tianlin (Wong Tin-lum), 26, 120, 130, 216, 217 Wang Yu, Jimmy, 256n18 Warlock (1959), 266n23 Warshow, Robert, 6, 19, 45, 110, 129 Weissmuller, Johnny, 251n38 Welles, Orson, 18, 89, 134, 253n64 Welsh, James M., 3–4, 10 Where a Good Man Goes (1999), 13, 39, 68, 87, 97, 102–3, 143, 192 Who Am I? (1998), 66 Widmark, Richard, 266n23

294

Index

Wild Bunch, The (1969), 7, 192 Wild, Wild Rose (1960), 26, 216 Williams, Linda, 252n44 Willis, Bruce, 10 Wohu (Operation Undercover) (2006), 212 Wollen, Peter, 10, 14, 19, 34, 254n86 Wonder Woman, 43, 45–8, 50 Wong Ching-po, 212 Wong Jing, 66, 212, 228, 272n23 Wong Kar-wai, 25, 27, 40, 49, 62, 67, 79–81, 84–6, 153, 163, 230, 265n5 Wong Tin-lum (see Wang Tianlin) Wong, Anthony, 37, 41, 44, 119, 188– 9, 191–4, 204, 234–5 Wong, Kirk, 21, 25–6, 38, 43 Wong, Raymond, 36, 58, 60, 66, 95, 152, 218 Wong, Ruby, 102, 115, 132, 139, 58– 60, 73, 95, 97, 267n29 Wong, Shirley, 70 Woo, John, 4–5, 21–2, 24–7, 34, 38, 40, 42, 45, 53, 67–8, 72, 106, 119, 183, 256n20 Wood, Robin, 21 Wright, Will, 122 Wu Chien-lien, 13, 66, 69–71, 83, 106, 153, 162, 255n9, 258n2 Wu Yen (2001), 34, 52, 145–7, 209, 210 wuchang (impermanence), 96, 98, 125, 231 wuxia, 5, 14, 22, 25, 50, 219, 222, 253n61

yakuza, 5 Yam Sai-koon, 104 Yam, Simon, 95, 119, 129, 139, 158, 163f, 163, 178–9, 184, 186, 190, 193, 194f, 245, 268n36 yang gang (masculine hardness), 252n38 Yau Chingmy, 258n2 Yau Nai-hoi, 91–2, 99, 114, 200, 233, 262n12, 265n9 Yau, Patrick, 68, 85–7, 93, 97, 227–30, 259nn14–5, 261n34, 262n16 Yee, Derek, 212 Yeoh, Michelle, 43–4, 47–8, 50, 52, 222 Yesterday Once More (2004), 24, 145, 147, 201, 209–10 yi (righteousness), 5, 247 Yim Ho, 24–5 Ying, Cherrie, 158, 170 Yingxiong bense (The Essence of Heroes), 53 Yip, Wilson, 212 You Yong, 138, 181 Young and Dangerous (series), 79, 181, 187 yuanfen (romantic destiny), 72, 150–1 Yuen Bun, 32, 200 Zaijian A Lang (see Where a Good Man Goes), 103 Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsman (1971), 257n45 Zhang Che, 5, 26, 31, 56, 66, 252n38 Zhu Shilin, 66