ARCHIVE
Sergio Leone, Hong Kong Cinema
and Johnnie To?s Exiled
The Stop Smiling Film Review
(Magnolia)
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Exiled
Directed by Johnnie To
At select theaters
(Magnolia)
Reviewed by Mark Asch
Like Once Upon a Time in the West, Johnnie To’s Exiled begins with a group of hitmen arriving at a destination, waiting for a target designated for reasons buried deep in the past. But while Sergio Leone’s self-contained epic revealed its back story in flashback, Exiled’s opening, with its Hong Kong triads referencing their shared history, portends retribution for an act committed in another movie: the two pairs of gunmen — played by Anthony Wong and Lam Suet, and Francis Ng and Roy Cheung — were last seen together as bodyguards in To’s 1999 film The Mission, coping with their partner’s betrayal of their boss. Though they’re playing different characters (and though, ironically, the fifth member of the group, the one who ran afoul of the boss, was played by Jackie Lui in The Mission and Nick Cheung here), the resonance is unmistakable.
To’s movies always recall movies, demonstrating a very late-cycle awareness of action cinema: In Fulltime Killer, for instance, a hitman played by Andy Lau dons a rubber Bill Clinton mask to browse the titles in a video store; the clerk voice-overs that this particular customer reminds her of a movie she once saw; To cuts to a Point Break poster on the wall of the store, and pans all the way down. More generally, his bulging wide-angle lenses and slo-mo bullet ballets billboardize his debt to the protracted, almost sensual squib shows of John Woo’s “Heroic Cinema.” (The coinage, singularly appropriate for the romanticized action sequences and emphasis on brotherhood, is David Bordwell’s.)
The approach is, however, problematic: as Woo surely came to realize in the half-decade between A Better Tomorrow and the extended rescue-of-a-baby-from-a-burning-building set piece in his Hong Kong kiss-off Hard Boiled, there’s little room for evolution in a style founded on hyperbole. The against-all-odds poignancy of, for instance, Infernal Affairs (which explicitly references Hard Boiled in the scene when Anthony Wong gives Tony Leung a watch — reprising a scene Leung played exactly 10 years earlier) arose from its quixotic attempt to take on this stylistic echo chamber on its own terms, with its thundering music and agonizingly doubled-up father-son dynamics.
To, as movie-savvy as he is—and as committed to the Hong Kong film industry as he is, with his Milkway Studios among the most productive production companies in the industry, and his films among the best-received abroad, at festivals and in release — knows this, too. At his best, his films are glossy, stylistically impeccable exercises in transcendent shallowness (Running Out of Time) or canny referentiality, as in the deliberately outsized nocturnal poetics and macho Super-Mann gestures of A Hero Never Dies. For a long time, though, he couldn’t play it straight without resorting to the kind of slapstick interludes that marred his tone-deaf Stray Dog remake PTU, or the too-many-balls-in-the-air overreaching of his undercooked media commentary Breaking News. For that matter, The Mission was less than the sum of its parts, all set pieces and no connective tissue.
Eventually, To found his voice by reaching back further, with the grim viscerality, Gordon Willis-aping palette, and operatic scale — founded, like the Godfather movies, on father-son plots and the underworld’s inexorable corruption — of Election and Triad Election. Upon their unanimously hailed bow at New York’s Film Forum this spring, the pair consolidated his reputation in the US Credibly classical, without winking at the convention on which they’re built, the Elections look and feel like his most satisfying films. (Though his earlier and essentially parodic A Hero Never Dies, unreleased here, had more to say about film violence, literalizing its grandiose title with a hilarious but straight-played climax: a hero who triumphs in a shoot-out despite being technically dead.)
In Exiled, as the eventually reconciled triads band together to wage a surely suicidal war on their corrupt boss, the talk is of loyalty and brotherhood, and To reaches all the way back to Leone to give the action its scale: billowing trenchcoats, mile-long stare-downs preceding every shoot-out, a score wailing with Morricone-borrowed hysteric heroism and unconventional instrumentation, and a palette processed to recall the sepia-hued landscapes of a spaghetti western. It’s hard to think of two directors more temperamentally aligned: Leone’s movies were as indebted to and knowing about the conventions of the western as To’s are about the Hong Kong action film. (And for what it’s worth, Leone learned many of his tricks from Akira Kurosawa, whom To praised in the dedication of Throw Down, his tribute to Kurosawa’s debut Sanshiro Sugata, as “the greatest of all filmmakers.”)
Leone’s films both embodied and referenced the classical Western by exploding all of its individual tropes. Pauline Kael wrote of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: “If a man crosses a street in Santa Fe, the street looks half a mile wide; a farmer's hut has rooms opening into rooms into the distance, like the Metropolitan Museum; a cowtown hotel has a plush lobby big enough for a political convention. The movie is like High Noon and The Ox-Bow Incident and a dozen others all scrambled together and playing in a giant echo chamber (that phrase again!). The bad men are enormously, preposterously evil-larger-than-life parodies-and each wound they inflict is insanely garish. The change of scale is rather fascinating.”
The change of scale is rather fascinating in Exiled, too: A scene of a male-bonding excursion, the guys horsing around in their skivvies, pulls off the neat trick of rendering a homoerotic subtext as explicit text. Here and elsewhere, scenes are employed and for their archetypal heft and then enlarged. As with his not-a-sequel opening, To is wooing an audience with a deep knowledge of movies, flattering their knowledge by recalling its origins.