Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad

Tang is a gangster, but he rules Shanghai like an Emperor. Xiao Jinbao acts like his queen, but she is more like his consort, who could lose her position at the snap of his fingers. Young Tang Shuisheng is just a lowly servant, but he is also part of the royal family as a distant Tang clan relative. He will learn some hard lessons regarding the price of loyalty in Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad, which re-releases virtually this Friday, in conjunction with Film Forum.

Shuisheng’s uncle sent for him from the provinces, because Boss Tang is more inclined to trust other Tangs. He will serve as Xiao’s errand boy and general whipping post. She does not make the transition easy for him, so the unsophisticated boy quickly starts to resent his mistress. Yet, she and the Tang organization will be the only support system he has after his uncle is fatally killed in a shootout.

Soon thereafter, Shuisheng must accompany Xiao and Tang, while they hide out on a nearly uninhabited island waiting for the bruhaha to blow over. Even he can see Xiao is trying to make trouble, but he remains unaware of her extremely risky infidelity.

Shanghai Triad is an excellent gangster movie, but it is more akin to Neil Jordan’s simmering Mona Lisa than Johnnie To’s ultra-cool Hong Kong epics. It was produced at a difficult time for Zhang. His personal relationship with lead actress Gong Li was coming to an awkwardly bitter end and the CCP authorities had barred him from leaving the country (still angry over the realistic depictions of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in his banned masterpiece, To Live). Yet, in some ways the resulting behind-the-scenes dynamics were perfect for Triad, such as the palpable sense of uneasy limbo during the island-bound scenes.

As for Gong, she truly takes no prisoners. She is a diva with verbal claws that draw blood. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford would be impressed. So will any movie lover. If maybe some of her frustrations with Zhang seeped into her scenes with Boss Tang, it only helped the film. Forget about over-hyped, over-acting stars like Streep. Film for film, Gong was probably the best thesp of the 1990s.

Maggie Cheung at Metrograph: 2046

It is the sequel to end all sequels. Frankly, it is hard to imagine they were conceived together, yet Wong Kar-wai reportedly was already planning it while he was filming the masterful In the Mood for Love. They might sound radically different on paper, but the same longing and regret is present throughout Wong’s 2046 (trailer here), which screens as part of the Metrograph’s retrospective series Maggie Cheung: Center Stage.

In one sense, 2046 might seem like a ringer in the Cheung series, because she only appears in brief flashback scenes, but her absence thoroughly dominates the film. Chow Mo-wan has returned from Singapore and Cambodia, picking up his literary and journalistic career as best he can. He never saw Cheung’s Su Li-zhen again, but her memory clearly haunts. In fact, his unresolved feelings make him incapable of maintaining a healthy relationship.

Chow and Su used to meet in room #2046 of his residency hotel, so he requests the same number in Mr. Wang’s seedy, but assignation friendly Oriental Hotel (we are still in the mid-1960s here). However, he will settle for #2047. At first, #2046 is occupied by Lulu, a.k.a. Mimi, a callback from Wong’s Days of Being Wild. When she precipitously moves out (a not-so uncommon practice in Wang’s establishment), Bai Ling moves in. Chow definitely notices her and can often hear her entertaining through the thin walls (and vice versa).

For a while, they carry on an ambiguous something, but he can never give her what she needs. He also assumes the role of a flirtatious Cyrano figure for Wang Jing-wen, the owner’s eldest daughter, who conducts a secret long distance love affair with a Japanese man her father disapproves of, due to national prejudice. Chow cannot even make things work with the second Su Li-zhen, a mysterious professional gambler who saves his skin in Singapore.

Yet, Chow himself duly notes, the women who lose patience and exit his life often turn up in his fiction, particularly his science fiction stories, “2046” and “2047.” In this dystopia universe, 2046 is ambiguously both a time and a place of stasis, reachable by a train staffed with sexually compliant automatons (two of whom look like Wang Jing-wen and Lulu). Heartsick lovers often travel there to revisit past memories, but nobody ever came back, until Tak (a dead ringer for Wang’s Japanese lover) embarks on a return trip.

When seen in close succession, Mood and 2046 pack a mean one-two combination punch. We definitely miss Cheung’s Su, but that is the whole point. We also fall hard for Bai Ling, Wang Jing-wen, and the second Su, yet we understand exactly why Chow is so emotionally hobbled.

Even with his Errol Flynn mustache, “Little” Tony Leung Chiu Wai just radiates broken-hearted weariness. He has panache, but he cuts a rather gloomy, existential figure. However, it is Zhang Ziyi who really gives viewers a kick in the teeth as the radiate but heart-rending Bai Ling. Arguably, Faye Wong covers an even greater spectrum as the more upbeat Wang Jing-wen and the exquisitely tragic gynoid. Carina Lau makes the most of her diva turn as Lulu, but Gong Li is an outright showstopper as the Singapore Su. Nobody else could wring so much intrigue and dark romance out of such limited screen time.

Production on 2046 was inconveniently interrupted by the SARS outbreak, but you would not know it from the finished film. It is seductively sad in a way that flows naturally from Mood, even during its flights of fantastical speculation. Without question, it features some of the best screen thesps of our time, working with one of the most distinctive international auteurs and accomplished cinematographers (Christopher Doyle, with an assist from the skilled Kwan Pung-leung), all of whom are working at the peaks of their creative powers. Very highly recommended, 2046 screens twice today (12/18) at the Metrograph, as part of Maggie Cheung: Center Stage.

Old School Kung Fu ’16: A Terra-Cotta Warrior

He is like the Golem, except more heroic. General Meng Tian Fang was promoted to Lord Chamberlain after saving the life of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. The decent Meng quickly starts to doubt whether the emperor deserved saving, but he has no reservations when it comes to the lovely Snowy. Unfortunately, it be another three thousand years before he gets another shot at protecting her in Ching Siu-tung’s A Terra-Cotta Warrior (trailer here), which screens this weekend as part of Subway’s Cinema’s Old School Kung Fu 2016, with the support of Warner Archive, which released the era-spanning romance in their series of Golden Harvest classics on MOD (manufactured on demand) DVD--to order, fans must visit the Warner Archive website: www.warnerarchive.com

Meng does indeed save Qin Number One, so unlike the rest of the Imperial guards on duty, he gets to live. He is also promoted, but he is profoundly disillusioned by the way old Qin conducts business. Seeking to satisfy the Emperor’s desire for immortality, court alchemist Xu Fu has struggled in vain to develop an eternal elixir. To save his head, he convinces the Emperor to back a dodgy pilgrimage involving five hundred male and female virgins. That is how Meng initially spies Snowy. The attraction is mutual, but her virgin status obviously implies trouble.

Love truly hurts when the love of your life slips you an eternal elixir before the despot you ever so loyally serve immolates her before your eyes and then encases you in clay to guard his mausoleum for the rest of time. However, Meng’s lonely vigilance will be interrupted by a Republican era film crew. Actually, the film they are making, a dubious Chinese remake of Gone with the Wind, is just a cover for the treasure-seeking leading man and director. However, star-struck extra Zhu Lili is convinced it will be her big break. She also happens to be the spitting image of Snowy.

Frankly, Terra-Cotta sometimes feels like a film that should have quit while it was ahead. The Qin-era scenes are wonderfully tragic in a wuxia kind of way. There are also some rousing action scenes and some suitably murky intrigue. As the star-crossed lovers, Gong Li and Zhang Yimou (then the real life first couple of Chinese cinema) have immediate, smoking hot chemistry.

Unfortunately, the fish-out-of-water comedy of act two is pretty shticky. The camera still loves Gong, but Zhu is a problematically shallow character. Still, if you persevere, things perk up considerably in the tomb-raiding climax. There are some inventive action scenes, a few “borrowings” from Indiana Jones, and the legion of Terracotta Warriors in all their glory.

The surviving Terracotta Warriors are quite a sight to behold in person, so it is cool to see Ching try to convey that on film. There are also some clever callbacks in the epilogue, especially given the rumored destination of Xu Fu. In comparison, all the bickering slapstick in between just seems like such a miscue. Even (or rather especially) in 1990, most movie fans would much prefer to see Gong and Zhang in a tragic embrace than mugging at each other.

Arguably, that makes Terra-Cotta a good film for home viewing, because you can fast forward the jokey parts. On the other hand, there are some stunning visuals, particularly in the Qin-Era sequences that cry out for the big screen. Of course, when you really get down to it, every Gong Li film is worth seeing. Recommended for wuxia fans who understand its eccentricities, A Terra-Cotta Warrior screens this Saturday (4/9) as part of Old School Kung Fu at the Metrograph and is available for sale online at Warner Archive.

The Monkey King 2 in 3D: Aaron Kwok Wears the Monkey Suit

After causing an uproar in Heaven, Sun Wukong needs to repent. However, monkeys are not good at contrition, nor are kings or demigods. Nevertheless, the Monkey King agrees to do penance by protecting Buddhist monk Xuanzang on his pilgrimage in search of scriptures. Unfortunately, a seductive demoness will try to end the epic Journey to the West prematurely in Cheang Pou-soi’s The Monkey King 2 in 3D (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

The Goddess Guanyin offers the Monkey King an offer he cannot refuse. In exchange for his freedom, Sun Wukong will loyally protect and serve Xuanzang during his journey. Of course, this will be easier said than done. To restore her demonic life force, the wicked White Bone Spirit is determined to eat the monk, thereby ingesting his spiritual essence. As a result, Xuanzang’s party is constantly surrounded by minor demons in human guise, but the monk remains obstinately blind to their true nature.

The two constantly argue over Sun Wukong’s apparently groundless fighting and killing. The Monkey King’s comrades, Zhu “Pigsy” Bajie and Sha “Sandy” Wujing find themselves stuck awkwardly between the monkey and the monk, but they have a sinking feeling the hairy demigod is more right than wrong.

Unlike Surprise, Monkey King 2 largely plays it straight, or at least as straight as possible when the protagonist is hyperactive primate. This time around, Aaron Kwok steps into Donnie Yen’s monkey suit and just basically goes nuts in a way we never knew he had in him. Watching him zip around in the hirsute makeup sort of brings to mind Robin Williams. Frankly, it is kind of stunning that he can bring this kind of chaos. Reportedly, Kwok trained hard for the role, but the physical is the least of it. Still, he definitely looks good performing Sammo Hung’s zippy, otherworldly action choreography.

While Kwok is a minor revelation, Gong Li re-confirms she is one of the best in the business as White Bone Spirit, a.k.a. Baigujing. She has to be the most alluring and sophisticated supernatural temptresses perhaps ever seen on-screen. She brings all kinds of sinister élan, yet drops subtle hints of her long buried humanity. In contrast, William Feng Shaofeng is a bit wooden as Xuanzang, but it is hard to compete with Kwok and Gong.

Monkey King 2 is so frenetically supercharged, it sort of leaves viewers dazed. At times, the gravity-defying Sun Wukong looks more like a character in a video game than a movie. However, you have to give Kwok credit for pushing himself. As crazy as it gets, Gong still classes up the joint and even manages to outright steal the show. Recommended for fans of big, bold wuxia madness, The Monkey King 2 in 3D open tomorrow (2/5) in New York, at the AMC Empire.

Shanghai: Gong Li Lights Up the Foreign Concessions

We tend to forget Japan fought with the Allies in WWI. Afterward, British and American interests were just as determined to exploit the Foreign Concession system as their Japanese counterparts. Yet, Shanghai’s complicated and contradictory multinational governance made it one of only two completely open safe harbors for Jewish refugees during the so-called “Solitary Island” period. Obviously, the city is the perfect place to conduct espionage. Unfortunately, one of America’s best agents has just been murdered, but his friend and colleague intends is out to find the killer and make him pay in Mikael Håfström’s Shanghai (trailer here), which opens this Friday in select theaters.

Paul Soames has assumed the cover of a National Socialist-sympathizing journalist, but he is really a democracy and freedom loving Naval Intelligence officer. However, his friend Conner was the true idealist. Yet, his prescient warnings about National Socialist and Imperial Japanese aggression were routinely ignored. Soames soon deduces Conner seduced Sumiko, the opium-addicted mistress of Tanaka, the police captain of the Japanese Concession and more importantly the local intelligence chief. Now suspiciously missing, Tanaka is turning the city inside out looking for her.

Soames’ search for Sumiko brings him into the orbit of gentleman gangster Anthony Lan-Ting and his society wife Anna. Lan-Ting has accepted an alliance with the Japanese for the sake of business, but his wife has secretly risen through the ranks of the resistance. Soames ingratiates himself with both Lan-Tings when he saves Anthony from an attack on Japanese officers organized by his wife, but executed without the surgical precision she had expected. She genuinely loves Lan-Ting, but like the wife of the local German military contractor, she finds Soames jolly fun to flirt with. Yet, as Tanaka cranks up the pressure, the attraction shared by her and Soames becomes more seriously ambiguous.

If you watch Shanghai soon after Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home, you will be astonished by Gong Li’s range. While she just rips viewers’ hearts out as the achingly tragic mother in Zhang’s literary masterwork, she plays Håfström’s noir heroine with all the va-va-voom you could ever hope for. She makes the screen smolder, even opposite a little twerp like John Cusack. Yet, she also compellingly projects the inner turmoil of a woman whose loyalties are divided between her husband and her country. It is a big, juicy, psychologically complex role, but Gong has the skills to pull it off.

Cusack just is not right for a Rick Blaine-ish romantic role, but fortunately, his gee whiz, fish-out-of-water persona works well enough for most of his solo scenes navigating the various intrigues. Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Conner with characteristic intensity in his flashbacks (too bad he wasn’t the one paired up with Gong), but the ever-reliable David Morse is grossly under-employed as Soames’ embassy contact.

Of course, Gong owns the film, but Ken Watanabe basically walks away with every scene she is not in. He is hardly another Captain Renault, but he is no Maj. Strasser either. Watanabe rather keeps us guessing, humanizing Tanaka, while playing his extremes to the hilt. Strangely, Chow Yun-fat is the one most conspicuously short-changed for screen time, but you can rectify that by watching The Last Tycoon, a natural companion film that focuses on a similar gangster-turned reluctant patriot. Unfortunately, Rinko Kikuchi is just squandered as the seldom seen Sumiko.

Attentive eyes will also spot future-star-in-the-making Andy On as one of Anna Lan-Ting’s comrades-in-arms. His appearances are brief, but his screen presence and action chops still come through loud-and-clear. Also look for Benedict Wong, who is quite good in the small but significant role of Juso Kita, Soames’ informer.

Håfström shifts gears from big historical set pieces to noir intimacy relatively adroitly. Hossein Amini’s screenplay intelligently incorporates the circumstances of the Foreign Concessions, as well as the events leading up to Pearl Harbor. Although he is clearly riffing on Casablanca, he wisely avoids paralleling the Bogart classic beat-for-beat. As a result, it all works quite well, in a pleasingly old fashioned kind of way.

Frankly, it is rather baffling why Shanghai’s release has been so long-deferred. In the intervening time, On’s star has risen, but Cusack’s has fallen, yet Gong remains on top of her game. She is more than enough reason to see Shanghai, along with Julie Weiss’s elegant costuming, Watanabe’s slyly villainous turn, and an unusual deep and accomplished supporting cast (blink and you miss Downton’s Hugh Bonneville). Recommended for fans of historical espionage thrillers, Shanghai opens this Friday (10/2) in key markets.

Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home

Most ballets tell tragic stories, but the Maoist-era Red Detachment of Women caused them. It certainly contributed to the woes of Lu Yanshi’s family during the Cultural Revolution. Their wounds will never fully heal, even when he is finally “rehabilitated” and released from his prison camp in Zhang Yimou’s straight-up masterpiece Coming Home (trailer here), which opens this Wednesday in New York.

Lu Yanshi was a college professor—and therefore a class enemy during the Gang of Four’s reign of terror. Further compounding his guilt, Lu escaped from his labor camp, finding the half-starved life of a fugitive more bearable. Naturally, the Communist Party responded by pressuring his family. Lu’s wife Feng Wanyu will bear any risk to protect him, but their daughter Dan Dan has absorbed too much of the omnipresent propaganda. She is a gifted ballet dancer, but she could very well lose the lead role in Red Detachment of Women she has worked so hard to win. Convinced to inform on her father, she learns the hard way what sort of opportunities are available to the children of traitors.

Gaining nothing, Dan Dan’s relationship with her mother is nearly irreparably poisoned. Unfortunately, the years Feng spends separated from Lu are not kind to her. By the time he is released, Feng is already suffering from mild dementia. Due to some cruel form of amnesia, she is unable to recognize Lu. Worse still, she sometimes mistakes her distraught husband for the predatory Officer Fang, who used Lu’s safety to extort sexual favors from Feng, like any good Communist would. However, Lu quickly reconciles with his deeply remorseful daughter.

If you think there is a better performance to be seen in a film this year than Gong Li’s turn-for-the-ages as Feng, you either have profoundly faulty aesthetic judgement or were simply even more struck by the achingly poignant dignity of Chen Daoming’s Lu. Watching Lu as Feng unknowingly tells him about himself is more devastating than a thousand Old Yellers getting shot. What they are doing is actually very complicated. They are playing scenes with each other in the moment, but also with each characters’ ghosts from the past. Yet they pull it off brilliantly. It is their work that leaves a lump in your throat, but Zhang Huiwen is still quite touching as the disillusioned Dan Dan—and also convincingly graceful in her dance scenes.

Frankly, Coming Home is not trying to be a political film, because the terrible implications of the Cultural Revolution need no belaboring. They are ever-present and inescapable. Instead, it is an exquisite tragedy, rendered with incredible sensitivity and humanism. Zhang has gone big with epics like House of Flying Daggers and made Fifth Generation-defining classics with Gong Li, like Red Sorgum and The Story of Qiu Ju, but with the perfectly balanced Coming Home he expresses the pain and confusion of hundreds of thousands of families on a painfully intimate canvas. If you only see one film this year, you want it to be Coming Home. Very highly recommended, it opens this Wednesday (9/9) in New York, at the Angelica Film Center downtown and the Lincoln Plaza uptown.

Chinese Realities: The Story of Qiu Ju

It is hard to get around the symbolism of it all when a local village official deals a swift kick to a peasant’s family jewels.  Technically, that is not considered proper behavior, but getting justice from the Party is a tricky undertaking.  However, his pregnant wife is determined to extract an apology in Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju (trailer here), which screens tomorrow as part of MoMA’s Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions film series.

A Golden Lion award winner at Venice, Zhang adapted Chen Yuanbin’s novella with a documentarian’s eye for realistic detail—hence its inclusion in MoMA’s current retrospective.  Following Qiu Ju’s quest for redress, her Story makes a fitting companion film to Zhao Liang’s Petition (also screening at MoMA), even though it is considerably more ironic and less harrowing.  Regardless, justice was clearly an elusive proposition in 1990’s China (and remains so today).

During a stupid argument, Wang Shantang applied said kick to Qinglai.  While problematic under any circumstances, injury to Qinglai’s reproductive organ carries far greater implications for the couple due to China’s population control policies.  Should Qiu Ju miscarry, they could be permanently out of luck.  Regardless, Wang is not apologizing, so Qiu Ju presses her case up the administrative ladder, with little support from the sulking Qinglai.

Needless to say, Chinese officialdom is rather inclined to circle the wagons around one of its own.  There is indeed a pronounced Kafkaesque element to the film.  Yet, Qiu Ju is no standard issue victim.  Her indomitable spirit is rather ennobling, in marked contrast to the typically depressing protagonists of Sixth Generation social issue dramas and some of their Fifth Generation forebears.  Likewise, there is an unusual gender reversal afoot, in which Qiu Ju trudges from town to city for the sake of her principles, while the emasculated Qinglai hobbles about their cottage.

In a radical change-up from her glamorous image, Gong Li (an outspoken critic of Chinese censorship) looks, sounds, and carries herself like an out-of-her-depth peasant woman.  Yet, her Qiu Ju has a quiet fierceness and an affecting innocence that are unforgettable.  Likewise, Kesheng Lei’s Wang makes a worthy antagonist.  It is one of those slippery performances that are hard to either categorize or forget.

The Story of Qiu Ju is a significant film in Zhang’s canon and the development of Chinese cinema in the 1990’s.  In a way it bridges the Fifth and Sixth Generations, despite its multi-award winning star turn from the still charismatic Gong Li.  It certainly focuses a withering spotlight on contemporary China’s bureaucracy and legal system.  Highly recommended for China watchers and Gong Li fans, The Story of Qiu Ju screens tomorrow night as part of MoMA’s Chinese Realities.