John Woo, Wong Kar-Wai, and Me: An Ethnographic Meditation
1996; Issue: 36 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics
ResumoI Unlike past festivals, where the arrival of certain films has been eagerly awaited, it seemed that this year there was much less pre-festival anticipation. In fact, the most heavily publicized / anticipated films of the season, Natural-Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, were not even in the festival. NBK was released before it began, and PF at least several weeks later. This countered the trends of past festivals where the big American fall release films opened, complete with stars and directors in attendance. These factors, together with the frustrating situation that many films sold out before the press tickets went on sale, meant that more blind experimentation was encouraged with regards to film selection. At any rate, I ended up on the last days of the festival with tickets to two films, Ashes of Time and Chungking Express, by a Hong Kong director, Wong Kar-wai, about whom I knew nothing. How had I arrived at this situation? A number of years ago, I had been introduced to Hong Kong cinema at a festival screening of John Woo's Once a Thief (1991). I had sat in the audience for the first twenty minutes or so, wondering what I was doing at this very commercial film, when the overproduced style and slight loopiness of the narrative began to intrigue me. However, Once a Thief is not a typical Woo film. It's very light-weight, a kind of Chinese screwball comedy, in its triangulated plot about three art thieves. Later that same year, I dragged my brother to see an earlier film by Woo, The Killer (1989) at the Ontario Cinematheque. Despite the ludicrously inept subtitles--apparently an occupational hazard for Hong Kong film fans--I was intrigued by the fast pace, balletically-choreographed shootouts, which served, for me at any rate, to distance the impact of the violence rather then heighten it in the Hollywood manner, and the character and style of the protagonist, played by Chow Yun-fat, a well-known Hong Kong actor who combines the comedic charm and grace of Cary Grant with the toughness of a bel-laid like Jean-Paul Belmondo or Robert De Niro. The following year, while waiting in a lineup for Reservoir Dogs, I got into a discussion with a young man standing in front of me about John Woo, whose latest film, Hard-Boiled (1992), was also being screened at the festival. He turned out to be an avid fan of Hong Kong films,(1) and recommended Suspect Video on Markham Street in Toronto as a local source for videotapes of these films which rarely get screened theatrically outside of Chinatown. Consequently, since then I have managed to see all of Woo's later films, from A Better Tomorrow (1986) to his first Hollywood venture, Hard Target (1993), which I caught at a matinee the day it opened, in a crowd neatly split between Jean Claude van Damme fans (mostly teenage boys) and John Woo fans (mostly Asians with a scattering of Caucasians). Needless to say, there were not many females present. In fact, my fondness for Woos films is one of those things that would come under what Film Comment used to term Guilty Pleasures, i.e., Im somewhat embarrassed by my attraction to films in which so much emphasis is on violence, and so many faceless, nameless people get killed in so many diverse ways. However, theres something about his films that reminds me of earlier American genres like 1940's film noir or 1950's Westerns like Anthony Mann's Man of the West (`58) or The Man from Laramie (`55), which have at their centre a strong moral code that is manifested in the protagonists behavior, no matter the odds against him. Loyalty, friendship, honour, dignity, even a sense of chivalry are the cardinal virtues which constitute this code. In the same way that the historical woman's film attempted to deal with issues of femininity, these male-centred films serve to work through definitions of masculinity which problematize rather than resolve the construct. There were no John Woo films at this year's festival, so I looked through the group of films listed under Asian Horizons to see if there was anything interesting. …
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