Chinese checkered?

The Hong Kong Film Fest shows signs of strain

by Peter Keough

THE HONG KONG FILM FESTIVAL. At the Museum of Fine Arts. Too Many Ways To Be No. 1 August 14 at 6 p.m. and August 29 at 1:30 p.m. Hitman August 14 at 8 p.m. and August 29 at 3:30 p.m. Chinese Midnight Express August 15 at 1:30 p.m. and August 21 at 6 p.m. Beast Cops August 15 at 3:30 p.m. and August 21 at 8 p.m. Eighteen Springs August 28 at 5:45 p.m. and September 5 at 1:45 p.m. Hero August 28 at 8:10 p.m. and September 5 at 4:10 p.m.

Whether the Museum of Fine Arts will be able to offer a festival of new Hong Kong features for many more years is doubtful. As the New York Times recently pointed out, mob infiltration, video pirating, the defection of major talent to the West (John Woo, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-Fat, and most recently Jet Li), a crashing Asian economy, and an uncertain future under the auspices of the Mainland have sadly reduced what was once one of the most prolific and exciting film industries in the world.

The half-dozen films (of which I was able to see four) featured in this year's MFA series seem both a reflection of Hong Kong's current turmoil and a reminder of what its studios are capable of. Take Stephen Tung's Hitman (1998), which stars Jet Li -- and makes Li's first venture into big-budget Hollywood, Lethal Weapon 4, seems even more the dull, unimaginative, bloated potboiler that it is. Unlike that formulaic pabulum, with its bogus buddies Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, an actually does base its thrills, excitement, and narrative in character.

Li, combining insouciance with guile in a persona that is part Johnny Depp, part Howdy Doody, plays a young, naive Mainlander, an army veteran looking for work in Hong Kong as a hired killer. Living with a multicultural bunch of fellow wanna-be assassins in a dorm run by a Fagin-like master, he's soon lured away by a scheming lowlife played by Eric Tsang -- an engaging character actor who fuses the best parts of Bob Hoskins and Lou Costello. Tsang has a job for our hero: a vastly wealthy Japanese corporate head has been murdered by a mystery man called "The Killing Angel" -- an executioner who goes after people who deserve it -- and in his will has offered $100 million to whoever identifies and does in his killer.

Like Lethal Weapon, Hitman boasts a political subtext -- in this case, a convincing one. In the sleekly atmospheric and tautly executed opening sequence, the soon-to-be victim is seen watching home movies of World War II atrocities and reminiscing about raping Chinese women moments before "The Killing Angel" descends. Li and Tsang, however, try not to get involved in the moral fine points of the job -- instead they're drawn into an ingenious web of deception (complicated by Li's inert romance with Tsang's straitlaced daughter). Despite Tsang's bumbling bad influence, however, the pair manage to elevate their principles and make the film's splendid concluding martial-arts battle emotionally resonant as well as visually dazzling.

From a film industry in which getting kidnapped by triad gangsters is business as usual, a universally corrupt world where decency, integrity, and compassion are dubious virtues is to be expected. The surprise is that this precarious system can still produce such subtle and rousing explorations of that theme as Wai Ka-Fai's Too Many Ways To Be No. 1 (1997).

Wai is clearly a young filmmaker feeling his oats as he unleashes a broadside of stylistic mannerisms -- tilting cameras (a key fight scene is filmed upside down), handheld photography, anamorphic lenses -- that create more confusion than clarity. Beneath the razzmatazz, though, is an ingenious "what if?" scenario that recalls more Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blind Chance than the recent, treacly Sliding Doors. Opening with a close-up of a watch, the film follows three variations in the fate of a third-rate hoodlum played by a hangdog but game Lau Ching-Wan. On the wrong side of 30, and prodded by a fortune teller who advises him to go for broke, he decides to join up with a raffish friend with big plans of forming a triad-affiliated gang.

Things go wrong fast as the motley bunch run over their erstwhile head while fleeing the botched robbery of a massage parlor. They seal up the dead man in a wall but forget to remove his pager; it beeps just as the robbery victims arrive and beat the crap out of them. To recoup their losses, they try ambushing a government bank haul, and the consequences are even more lethal and hilarious.

Or so goes the first version. Returning to the same watch and the same time, Lau's character gets a second chance, and then a third, each time making slightly different, slightly more moral choices, but not necessarily ending up any better. Although technically overexuberant and a bit heavy-handed in its humor, Too Many Ways To Be No. 1 is reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction in its narrative inventiveness and bloody irony.

Corruption and rectitude are all too straightforward in Billy Tang's Chinese Midnight Express (1997), as is its blatant ripoff of the Alan Parker movie implied in the title. Veteran Hong Kong actor Tony Leung plays Chin Ahn, a crusading reporter who believes that if he prints the truth, right will prevail. He learns the contrary when he tries to expose an impossibly malignant corrupt cop and is soon framed for drug possession and sent to prison.

There life seems to revolve around bodily functions and anal obsessions, but it proves a more honorable place than the world of hypocritical venality outside. After a few run-ins with horny triad bosses in the shower and a sadistic guard called "The Inhuman," Chin and his fellow inmates recognize one another's mutual humanity and overcome the system in a collaboration of the pen and the penitentiary. Its clichés and sentimentality enlivened only by its distastefulness, Express is the kind of rote, sub-Hollywood rubbish that's symptomatic of a dying cinema.

More promising is Ann Hui's overlong, overwrought, but ultimately poignant Eighteen Springs (1997). Set in a '30s-'40s Shanghai that exists only in the romantic imagination (like, what happened to World War II?), it follows the checkered love affair between working girl Manjing (Wu Chien-Lien) and upper-crust Shujun (Leon Lai), who meet by chance in her factory.

Told over the title time in flashbacks, flashforwards, and through the two lovers' alternating voiceovers, the film accumulates an emotional impact, overcoming the confusion and implausibility of a plot relating how coincidence, folly, and malice can both undo and clarify desire. Although at times exhausting, Eighteen Springs builds through its subtle rhythms and loving details into a reverie of nostalgia and loss -- a fitting swan song, one fears, for a cinema that once approached greatness.