easternkicks.com » Taiwan

Ang Lee to head Venice festival

Andrew Heskins — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:00:24 +0000

Director of Lust, Caution and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee, is to head the jury this year’s Venice Film Festival, organisers have said. The festival takes place from 2 to 12 September.

Lust, Caution released on DVD today

Andrew Heskins — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:00:00 +0000

Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Tang Wei, is released by Universal Pictures in the UK today. You can read our review, along with an insightful Q & A session, here.

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DVD: Lust, Caution

Andrew Heskins — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:40:11 +0000

Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Tang Wei, is released by Universal Pictures in the UK on 28 March 2008. You can read our review, along with an insightful Q & A session, here.

Lee slates China ‘ban’ on actress

Andrew Heskins — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:31:37 +0000

Director Ang Lee has criticised a reported Chinese media ban on the leading actress, Tang Wei, in his award-winning erotic spy thriller Lust, Caution.

Three films by Tsai Ming-liang

Andrew Heskins — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:30:58 +0000

An introduction to the work of director Tsai Ming-liang, both beautiful and confrontational. We look at I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone, The Wayward Cloud and Goodbye Dragon Inn. Just don’t expect a lot of dialogue…

From it’s opening scene, I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone is typically a Tsai Ming-liang film, only more so…

A ghettoblaster plays opera, while a paralysed man can only listen. The camera lingers for an uncomfortable amount of time, Tsai trademark style, forcing you to stare at this poor man. And stare. And stare. And unlike in real life, you can’t turn away. It’s the sort of confrontation with his audience that Tsai seems to enjoy.

There’s a disconnection, a distance between you and his creations that echoes the same disconnection his lead characters often have within their own worlds and lives. Little is ever said. In fact, that again is typically Tsai.

A poetical film, I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone shows us two men, both played by frequent collaborator Lee Kang-Sheng. One the son of a coffee shop owner, completely paralysed and looked after by his beleaguered carer Chyi (Chen Siang Chyi), the other Hsiao-Kang, an immigrant who is beaten and left for dead on the streets.

The implication is that one is dreaming the other. The beaten man is found and nursed back to health by another immigrant, Rawang (Norman Bin Atun) who still returns to the shell of a building he was involved in constructing, despite the work having been long abandoned. Kang soon falls for Chyi, unaware that his own carer Rawang has begun to develop feelings for him.

The directors’ characteristic lack of dialogue -which underlines his own ongoing agenda to compel his audience to ‘watch’ his movies, rather than be told their plotline -finds new meaning in a world where his protagonists are unable to communicate in words to each other. In a fast cut world, Tsai enjoys a leasiurely pace all but unheard of now.

It’s well known that Tsai Ming-liang toned down some of his initial ideas when he cast a Muslim in the role of Rawang, but the resulting fact subjectivity only adds power and tension to that attraction.

With a masterly eye for composition, giving an impression of control both over his cast and their environment, and how he wants his audience to fell. It’s ironic, then, that the most iconic scene in the film, where the butterfly lands on the lead characters shoulder, then flies off again, used a real and quite unpredictable butterfly. (After a long day filming hundreds of live butterflies!) The result is quite the most beautiful scene you might see in cinema this year.

It also features one of the funniest sex scenes you might see , as Chyi and Kang attempt to make out against the smog filled streets of Malaysia, their only vaguely protective surgical masks becoming obvious obstacles to their goal.

But then Tsai seems to find a lot of humour in the act of sex itself, even though he never shies away from candid, controversial and often quite explicit scenes – and The Wayward Cloud is one heck of a good example of that.

With Taiwan in the midst of a water shortage, the public are told to drink watermelon juice. Shiang-Chyi is secretly bottling water from public toilets in plastic bottles. Quite by chance she meets Hsiao-Kang, who she once bought a watch from when he was a street vendor, and a romance – of a sort – blossoms between them.

What she doesn’t realise is that he has quite a successful career now as a porn star, working in an apartment upstairs from her.

Despite its relatively explicit sex scenes, Wayward Cloud is perhaps one of Tsai’s most accessible movies. It’s a great introduction to his work, with the narrative interjected by fun lip synced dance routines to Taiwanese pop songs from the 50s and 60s, their innocent lyrics given new meanings.

Some of the biggest laughs in the movie come from the sex scenes from the porn movies filmed upstairs: from the first scene featuring a watermelon, to a shower scene faked due to the draught with bottled water (and then when they run out, who knows where it came from?), to Japanese porn actress who ‘losing’ a bottle cap.

Yet this tone dramatically changes when Chyi finds the Japanese actress unconscious in a lift, ultimately exposing Kang’s career. Having tried unsuccessfully to wake her, the Adult filmmakers decide they should get ‘back to work’, whether the actress is conscious or not. Their attitude is shown as grotesque, literally treating another human being like a piece of meat.

Tsai film is a eulogy for love in the 21st century, when anything can be bought, but strangely Kang cannot share the same sexual intimacy with Chyi as he does with his on film partners. Are love and sex truly different things, he asks?

Sexual relations also take a twisted form in Tsai’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, about the final performance at a cinema frequented by gay cruisers and ghosts. The box office girl pines for the projectionist, once again both leading seemingly solitary existences – a common thread to Tsai’s work.

Against the backdrop of an old wuxia movie – King Hu’s Dragon Inn – the director pays tribute to a dying for communal theatre going, and the sort of films that where once seen there.

There’s more than a slight comparison to be made with fellow Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee. Lee may have catapulted himself into the US mainstream with Jane Austin and Marvel comic adaptations (indeed his output was always mainstream, even when dealing with tricky subject matter), but has used this to give hive him greater freedom in his other work, especially his latest film Lust, Caution. But perhaps the nearest similarity is with Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, whose repeating of themes and characters mirror that of Tsai.

Tsai’s work demands much from its audience. He deliberately makes his films sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes confrontational, but often funny and always rewarding. And with the recent season at the BFI Southbank, he’s finally getting the recognition he deserves in the UK.

Lust, Caution: a preview and Q & A with Ang Lee

Andrew Heskins — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 12:30:57 +0000

A special preview of Ang Lee’s latest film, Lust, Caution, followed by a conversation with the director himself…

After six tragedies it would be nice to make a comedy again, admits Ang Lee. But then perhaps he should stop making such a good job of them?
The prestigious director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Ice Storm, Eat Drink Man Woman, Ride With the Devil and Brokeback Mountain, which rightfully won best director at the Oscars in 2006 (even if he did lose out on best picture to the contrived Crash) is at The Gate cinema, Notting Hill, London to discuss his latest movie, the superb and controversial Lust, Caution. (What is it with those commas, Mr. Lee?)

But first the audience are treated to a preview showing of the film itself. The film tells of a young student, Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) who has come to Hong Kong from China in 1938. Their bourgeois existence seems a world away from the Japanese occupied China she has left behind. Joining a drama society run by a fellow Chinese expatriate, Kuang (Wang Lee-hom) they put on a show to broadcast the fate of their fellows under Japanese rule.

Abandoned by her father, who has left her behind to escape to London, finds her true calling as an actress, able to move audiences by her performances. But Kuang wants the society to take a more active role in the Chinese resistance. He sets them on an ambitious plan to assassinate a top Japanese collaborator, Mr Yee (Tony Leung), with Wong as the hook to seduce him away from his bodyguards. She befriends his wife (Joan Chen) and soon becomes a trusted member of the family, with Yee becoming more attracted to her. Until disaster blows fatally their plan apart and Wong flees back to China.

Three years later, Hong Kong has fallen to the Japanese and Wong is in Shanghai. Kuang finds her again, now a member of the real resistance. Asking her to resume her role to ensnare Mr Yee and finish their plan to assassinate him. She must put on the performance of her life. But as Yee falls further for her, is she too falling for him, and if so what must come first – her love or country?

It’s a sumptuous recreation of 40s Hong Kong and China, painstakingly researched and quite believable, that adds substance to Ang Lee’s tale. There’s a deliberate nod to Hitchcock, particularly Notorious, where Cary Grant sets Ingrid Bergman on a course to uncover Nazi spy secrets at any cost, by showing first Ingrid in footage form Intermezzo, and then Cary in Penny Serenade. (He later admits that showing Notorious itself would have been too obvious.)

Tony Leung bringing humanity to a role that so easy could have been devoid of sympathy, with Tang Wei making a serious impression in her first major acting role. And then there are those scenes, the ones everyone has been talking about – the sex. Is it real? Well, it’s not as explicit as you might have thought, but it sure looks realistic.

Lust, Caution sees Ang Lee making a welcome return to his Chinese roots once again to create his most personal, and what could be one of his finest moments. It looks set to be one of the movie highlights for 2008 (it’s released in the UK in January).

(Warning, the following contains spoilers – see the film first!)

As with Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee has once again taken a short story as his source material and ‘filled it out’, as he puts it. Eileen Chang’s work was originally just 28 pages, but the process of bringing it to the screen became almost like a detective novel, taking a combination of what she wrote, and what she may have originally intended.

She’d become successful very young, with the majority of her most famous work published before she turned 25. Yet this story caused her no end of problems, she worked and reworked it, publishing it many years later. In conversation after the film, An Lee revealed at first he was quite shocked. The tone is unlike any of her other books, resembling more soft pornography. But it wasn’t just that, it’s the choice her lead makes: a diamond above patriotism? Love even? Not in China, he teases.

He suspects that she her whole career writing about what she knew, and that this story is actually about her self. He found it terrifying as nowhere before or since had he ever read in Chinese literature what women get from sex. (He still doesn’t know, he jokingly adds). Not only is she writing it about that, but pitting it against patriotism, and worse the Japanese war, perhaps the most sensitive in China’s history. How dare she?

In many senses he feels she was having the same problem with the story as him. Indeed, the parallels in this story with her life are plain to see. Her relationship with her quite abusive father, her first marriage to a man who was not only already married, but was also labelled a collaborator with the Japanese, and her a traitor because of her age. He feels she became a very bitter person in the process. That was her motive for making the lead an actress, so that it would not be her.

Similarly in the process of filmmaking, Ang Lee himself assumes the identities of others, and that distance actually allows you to get a lot closer to the truth. He believes she spent an afternoon writing that 28 pages, and 25 years trying to come to terms with it and cover it up. But the way in which she did so he found interesting. In adapting it he found himself trying to trace it back to the truth, really trying to figure out what she had wanted to write, and not be fooled by the brilliant manner in which so.

When adapting the story into a full-length feature, he realised he was making two movies. The first is a melodrama, the melodrama he grew up with in his culture, built around patriotism. There’s a certain innocence, that you’re supposed to sacrifice yourself for your cause. The acting is melodramatic too, all youthful exuberance and innocence, exaggerated. As are the colours, which reflect those used throughout Hong Kong and southern China, lots of red, green and white, and plaster, in that English colonial fashion. It’s a south east Asia sort of tropical look. Lots of sweat.

The second half is more of an old-fashioned film noir like that of the 40s, dark, romantic mysterious, but with very little colour. He realised he needed something between them to make that transition, and that’s when the stabbing scene became necessary.

Lee tells us that the idea first came from James Schamus, who has written or rewritten all of his films to date and also produces his work. We would never do something like that to Eileen Chang’s work, he jokes, it takes an American to do that. Lee refers to it as a ‘bar mitzvah’ scene, a coming of age for the students involved. The character of Wong has just lost her virginity, and now the male characters must become men, so for Ang this became a sort of ritual. And that became reflected in how he filmed it.

The performances from the actors are about much more than what is said. Ang Lee likes to imply the subtext, the real meaning to what the characters are saying, which could be completely contradictory. From Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on, he realised there was much more to a scene than simply getting coaching an actress to cry. There has to be thought behind it to make it moving.

Actors can do vain things, make big gestures that mean nothing, but he wants it to actually mean something. So he tells them what they should be thinking, and changes it to help keep it fresh. For instance, people keep asking him what is Tang Wei thinking when she takes the pill out, he explains. He doesn’t remember. He knows it was take 13, but not what he said. That’s been his process for his last few movies. Fortunately for him, he admits, most of the actors he works with are top notch.

On to the Lust part of the movie, Ang revealed how he kept the crew to a minimum to shoot the sex scenes. There were only four members of the crew and the actors themselves. He acted as continuity, recording, hair, make-up, chores, everything, as well as directing, then it was just the cameraman, assistant cameraman and boom operator. Everyone else was sent out, not just off the set, but out of the shooting stage. In all, those three scenes took 12 days to shoot.

The most difficult to shoot? The Mahjong scenes around the table. The continuity had to be spot on, and the women had to practise and practise for weeks to get it right. It was important to Ang that the actresses showed much more about what was going on than simply the game, hew wanted them to be telling us something about the war outside.

That was in a sense what attracted him most, that the story sees the war from a women’s point of view. You get a lot of information form their chatting, he tries to hint at how much Mrs Yee knows about her husband and his relationship. In some ways, he’s treating it like a war scene itself.

The casting of the Wong Chia Chi role was particularly difficult. Shortly after deciding to proceed with the project he realised no actress could play this part, so held an open call in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. In total he interviewed more than 10,000 actresses to get to Tang Wei. But when she walked in, that was it. He admitted he usually decides on a leading cast member in seconds.

Tang was perfect for the role. She belongs to the story, you could believe it happened to her. A lot of people were talented, good looking, even famous, but you just couldn’t believe that this crazy story happened to them. Tang had the same disposition of his parents, classy, rare and very difficult to find in modern China and Hong Kong.

Most of all, she reminded him of himself. He identifies with the character, wants to be the one that goes through the story, and he felt like when she walked in she was the female side of him. Usually the male leads are personifications of their directors, but on this occasion it is female role of Tang Wei that Lee connects with. He admits to being a little confused.

Lust, Caution is easily his most personal film to date. Well, it doesn’t get much more personal than lust. For Ang Lee, his goals are to keep making movies as good as he can. He acknowledges the freedom the success of Brokeback Mountain has given him (and the fact that his friend James is now the head of Focus) but awards aren’t really his ambition. He’d just like to make a comedy again. It was how he started, four very successful comedies in a row. He has two aims, ones which could be combined. One to make a comedy, the other, to make a film that doesn’t mean anything – that would be a very pure form of art for him.
Lust, Caution is released in cinemas around the UK on 4 January 2008

Learning to see again: an interview with Tsai Ming-liang

Andrew Heskins — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 19:30:48 +0000

easternKicks talks Tsai Ming-liang about the retrospective of his work at the BFI Southbank, London and the release of his two most recent films around the UK…

Somehow I’ve gotten it into my head that Tsai Ming-liang might be a difficult subject to interview. I’ve read a couple of interviews that portrayed his as moody and then there’s that tendency he has for having little more than a line or two of dialogue in an entire film – I’m concerned that with my lack of experience as an interviewer I might not get the best out of him. I needn’t have worried…

Ming-Liang is ensconced in a café area just off the main foyer in the Soho hotel in which he is staying, with his translator and several members of the Taipei Representative Office in the UK. Animated and laughing, he could hardly be more different than the characters he portrays, and considering he arrived on a flight early that morning, it seems incredible he even has that much energy.

But then Ming-Liang is so obviously excited to be in London. It’s the first time he’s properly been able to visit the land that, born in East Malaysia with it’s colonial past, he’s considered himself a British subject – at least at a certain time. For him it’s already been quite a magical experience, driving through London early that morning in a taxi and seeing Westminster and Big Ben in real life. What’s really caught his attention, though, is the London Eye, something he’d never even seen a picture of.

It reminds him of a Ferris wheel, which have fascinated him all his life, and he used so powerfully in his film What Time Is It There? He wanted to stop and take a picture, but sadly his camera was packed away in the boot. (I almost wonder if he might be considering a location for a future project?)

So how does he feel about having a retrospective of his work held by the BFI? Having always felt such a special connection with this country, he seems sincerely floored to receive such an honour. If anything, he doesn’t actually feel he’s made enough films or is even old enough to deserve it, though he’s pleased his films are starting to make such an impact in Europe. For him it proves that stylised, thoughtful films can have a more lasting impact than those that are simply fashionable or mainstream.

His latest work, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, is the film he’s made in his native Malaysia, having based himself in Taiwan as a filmmaker. Why did he return and what did he want to say with the film?

For him the film is very much about freedom.

He’d never really thought about going back before. He’d grown up in a changing Malaysia, where the degree of openness he’d seen as a child on TV, and in the way that all ethnic groups had lived, worked and eat together – be they Indian, Malay or Chinese – had gradually changed. Following the race riots of the late sixties, between the Chinese Malay and the indigenous Malay majority, restrictions came in over property, religion, even the whole legal system was changed to positively discriminate against in favour of the indigenous Malay. The atmosphere changed greatly.

Having left Malaysia after high school to study in Taiwan, going back hardly seemed a career choice – he knew how badly his creative freedom would suffer under both Malay’s cultural policy and religious regulation. However, that changed in 1998, when he felt that the Taiwanese film industry held some sort of grudge against him. Upset, he felt like going home, and an offer of funding from an American independent film company gave him an opportunity to do just that.

Returning to Malaysia, he refamiliarised with his home country, then suffering a financial crisis that had brought a booming economy to an end, and found himself attracted to the issue of foreign labour – finding parallels in the faces of migrant workers brought in for construction to the mix of people he saw as a child, and how important that blending together was. When the money didn’t materialise, he abandoned the script he was working on, but never forgot about his core idea.

Later in 2003 a Vienna production company offered him a chance to complete the film that became I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone. For him the significance of the film is that it’s when you escape from something, you are free form the limitations and constraints that bound you, but when you return you actually end up feeling just you did before you left. You still want to talk about the same issues. It’s pretty clear he means himself.

Ironically he had to make substantial cuts to get the film released in his home country, losing five whole segments of the film. It was a high cost to pay for someone who takes his creative freedom so seriously, but ultimately one he was prepared to make just to get the film shown there. On it’s release the Malaysian media asked him just what had made him so rebellious, to which he replied he was simply a product of the 60s. How could he have watched the gradual change in Malaysia and not have been affected?

As a writer and director of his own work, how clear a vision does he have of how the finished film will look? And when that has to change, as it did when he cast a Muslim in the role of Rawang in I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone – meaning that the relationship on screen had to be much less explicit than he had at first imagined, what effect does that have?

Ming-Liang explains how lucky he feels he has been, that in this age of globalisation, particularly in the film industry, he’s always been in a position to be true to his creations, to do exactly what he wants and cast whomever he chooses to. If he couldn’t then he’d rather not make films, what would be the point.

That can be tricky, though. Only the day before he had met with the Government Information Office, who’ve helped fund many of his films before due to the fact they’re not exactly commercial. He was trying to convince them to fund his latest project, to be set around the Louvre. One of the panel members asked him, exactly what relevance would this have to Taiwan?

He reply was he didn’t know, but the Malaysian Ministry of Culture had asked him the exact same question. Accompanied by the head of the Louvre museum, they had tried to get funding from them too, only to be asked if there where any cultural characteristics that would be attractive to a Malaysian audience. The head of the Louvre replied ‘Nah, but the director is Malaysian’.

Over the years he feels himself very lucky to have been supported by so many people, but he realises you can’t rely on that alone. And in the meeting with the Taiwanese panellists he tried to convince them that in this era of international co-operation, the idea of funding should be a flexible one, especially as the project already had French and Belgian funding. Instead of them asking how is the project relevant to them, he can do something for them. There are quite a lot of things you can do without losing the integrity of the film, he says.

In that respect his working process is rather freer. He has never begun filming from a finished script. Instead he fixes a general direction he wants the film to go in, and everyone follows that, allowing not only for improvisation, but for every sort of contingency – whether that be changes in actor or simply running out of money.

For instance, the big dance scene in The Wayward Cloud was originally meant to involve 60 people, however they didn’t have that much money left so changed it to 30, saving not only on actors but also there costumes.

For Ming-liang that is the enjoyable part of filmmaking. Being flexible enough to think of interesting ways around problems, whatever they are.

The most iconic scene in I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone, where the butterfly sits on the lead character’s shoulder, is another example of this flexibility in action. They bought hundreds of live butterflies to shoot the scene, taking all day to get the final shot. Everyone complained to him why didn’t he just use computer animation, to which he simply replied that he doesn’t trust computers.

The end result paid off, as the camera follows the butterfly up from his shoulder, then as it drops into the water only to struggle free and up into the air again. A beautiful scene and nothing that a computer could have every imagined. Of course, it’s so perfect now everyone thinks that it is CGI!

I ask him why so many of his characters lead such a solitary existence -why does that interest him so much?

For him being in the situation of being alone you are more true to yourself, and therefore the film itself is more truthful. When he first began making movies, he often wondered why it was considered to be such a negative thing to be alone. Actually it’s a very freeing situation, it allows you time to reconsider the relationships in your life like love or family. In his early films particularly he used the motif to break down the family or human relationship to the bare minimum and consider what its real significance was.

So did that minimalism affect his now very recognisable style, the long camera shots and little dialogue?

Well, he jokes, in reality when you are alone there aren’t many voices around you anyway!

But seriously Ming-liang has a good point about film going audiences now, we’re so used to being ‘told’ the plot, of listening to the story, that we don’t actually see anymore. He tries to go beyond that, as he feels the medium of film has so much more to offer. His focus is on the visual, using his characters movements and expressions, or surrounding environments and themes to express certain things. That ‘visual character’ is the most important part of each movie he makes, taking most of his time on each project studying it and deciding just what it should be before he starts filming.

More recently, no matter what the theme of the movie or subject is of his movie, he’s made sure there’s always a part that forces the audience to have their own ‘dialogue’ with his films. Using pace, lighting and sound, all aesthetic considerations, he forces them to decide in their own minds exactly what the film is about. The pleasure isn’t in the story itself, but the viewing.

He recalls how a British Journalist at the Vienna festival screening of Goodbye Dragon Inn asked him, ‘What does this film mean to you?’ His reply was to turn the question back on the journalist. He wants to force people to make up their own mind individually on the meaning of his work, not tell them what they should think or feel about it.

When I’m politely asked to wrap up my interview it comes as no surprise. I’ve watched the translator cover several backsides of A4 printouts, and then desperately try to find room on those same printout faces. (I think I’ve even caught a glint of envy in her eye for my notebook – hardly used save for my questions for that day!) I know I’ve overrun my interview slot, later finding out that I’ve had twice as much time as I was meant to, but the mention of Goodbye Dragon Inn gives me the opportunity to ask one last cheeky small question (though by this time I should have guessed that doesn’t exist with Ming-liang!): just why did he pick a King Hu film to base the film around?

‘I LOVE KING HU!’ he exclaims in English. No one can go beyond him, he was the best director of Wuxia movies.

He recounts how he saw thousands of hours watching thousands (the translator smiles, ‘maybe hundreds?’) of Wuxia films as a child in Malaysia, but when he first discovered King Hu at the age of 11, with the film Touch of Zen, he realised that director was different. It was just as exciting, but he found himself asking why did this film express something so different and special? What was the difference?

Goodbye Dragon Inn was really his homage to his relationship with old cinema, and by coincidence an actor who had appeared in many of Ming-liang’s own films including this one, the late Miao Tien, got his first starring role in Dragon Inn.

Ming-Liang sums it up rather philosophically, that no film exists in a vacuum, there are always some connections to other films along the way.

I think my time with Ming-liang is finally over as the party gets ready to move into the main restaurant area for the next interview, but he heads off to his hotel room to reappear moments later with a programme for the second film to be directed by his leading man and long-time collaborator Lee Kang-Sheng, Help Me Eros, and a CD of music by Grace Chang, the Taiwanese 50s and 60s pop whom he based The Hole around.

It seems to typify his nature: not only warm and generous to his interviewer, he’s keen to promote those individuals whose talent he has benefited from, not just himself. A kind and (very) talkative guy! Not what you might expect at all from his films – but all the better for it!
The Wayward Cloud and I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone are on release around the UK, and the Tsai Ming-Liang season continues at the BFI to the end of the month.
Kind thanks to Tsai Ming-Liang for his time, Tom Bell of Axiom Films and the Taipei Representative Office in the UK for helping to make this interview happen.

Double Vision

Andrew Heskins — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 09:01:57 +0000

It’s Seven meets Ring in a supernatural horror from Peony Pavilion director Chen Kuo-fu – starring Hong Kong’s Tony Leung Ka-fai and America’s David Morse…

Ever since Hideo Nakata’s Ringu series hit the screens at the turn of the decade, the popularity of the horror genre has really taken off in Asia. The same as what’s happened in America since Scream and Blair Witch – but thankfully without their annoying preoccupation with teenagers.No longer the domain of the hungry first-time director desperate to get noticed (even Ringu was only Nakata’s second film and his first, Joya-rei, was also a ghost story), horror has become something even established directors aspire to. Recently we’ve seen Miike Takashi (Audition), the Pang Brothers (The Eye) and Kim Ji-woon and Peter Chan (Segments in Three) all have turned their hands to scary stories. Now their ranks have been joined by the acclaimed director of the 1995 drama The Peony Pavilion, Chen Kuo-fu.

Kuo-fu’s initial premise is hardly the most original. Tony Leung Ka-fai (Zu Yu’s Train, Ashes Of Time, The Lover) plays Huang Huo-tu, a cop tortured by events that left his girl unable to speak. With family and career falling apart, he sleeps in his office the ridicule of his colleagues. But when a bizarre series of gruesome murders leave the local law enforcement baffled they call on help from a top FBI expert Kevin Richter (David Morse, The Green Mile, The Crossing Guard, Dancer in the Dark).

It’s serial killer meets supernatural horror, while our cop buddies bridge cultural divides far wider than their geographical distance. A well trodden route that, if it hadn’t been so intelligently handled by Kuo-fu, the film might have fallen at the first hurdle. In fact, the prejudices of the both sides – particularly those of the Chinese against a meddling Westerner – are so well played they show where the director strength’s really lie.

At the root of grisly goings on is an ancient cult, intent on gaining immortality. But when the police locate the cult’s hidden temple (in a very modern office building) nothing can prepare you for the ferocity of the confrontation – in the unrated version at least. The disciples calmly liberating an armed troop of police of their limbs whilst happily losing their lives in the process.

The good work, however, is undermined by a script that doesn’t quite go far enough to make the point there’s much that can’t be explained by Western science. Co-written by Kuo-fu and Su Chao-bin, who also co-wrote the Going Home segment of Three, it echoes the sentiment of that film. However, for it to work you need to at least credibly explain some of the events. There are just too many holes. For instance, the bacteria found on the victims makes them believe what happens to them. But that’s not true for all of them, and it’s never explained fully who causes them to believe or how – even when the police themselves seem quite happy to have wrapped up the case! Thankfully there are some neatly played out false endings to keep you on your toes.

Like so many Asian films at the moment – particularly those bankrolled by Columbia Pictures Asia – this is so obviously aimed at the international market. Perhaps too much so, as the film looks thoroughly American in style (unlike those other Asian horrors already mentioned). It was even partly filmed in Australia – like most American films now!. Its slick work by Hong Kong cinematographer Anthony Wong Ngok Tai, whose long and impressive filmography includes 2000AD, Purple Storm, Iron Monkey, Crime Story and New Dragon Inn.

The leads are excellent. Leung proves his calibre on a global scale, whilst Morse is as solid as every – an excellent C-list actor who happens to have been in some very big films (The Rock, Contact, The Negotiator). And if that doesn’t get this film noticed in the states and beyond, then that’s a real shame. The rest of the cast, including Rene Liu and Dai Li-zen, give exemplary support in their roles. There’s also a guest appearance by Ang Lee favourite Lung Sihung (Eat Drink Man Woman, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Touch) in one of his last roles.

This is a solid horror that makes up for scares with gore. Well acted – but that only highlights how much more it could have been. Still worth checking out, particularly if you can get the unrated version.

easternkicks.com » Taiwan

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