Film & TV

The Brutal, Beautiful Cinema of Johnny To

What did Van Gogh intend when he cut off his ear? A grim MFA discussion question, perhaps. But, I think it’s answered nicely by the actor Lau Ching Wan who plays the clairvoyant cop, Bun, in the new Hong Kong crime thriller, Mad Detective. The film opens with Bun’s superior retiring, and his subordinates all wishing him farewell. It is at this moment Bun takes a knife, and with a gleam in his eye slices off his own ear, dropping it in front of his departing superior, proudly, like a cat leaving a mouse for its owner.

Yikes, that’s devotion.

It’s also a display of his own severe imbalance. It’s like saying: from now on, the demons run things.

Directed by Hong Kong maven Johnny To, in collaboration with longtime film making partner Ka-Fai Wai, Mad Detective is a Noir thriller in the grandest Hollywood tradition, which is endangered here and akin to finding a California Condor being fed breadcrumbs from a park bench in the Orient. Johnny To, less an auteur, more a symbol of collaboration, is known for films like The Mission (1999), Exiled (2006), Election (2005), and a really strange movie with a immensely jacked-up stripper ex-Buddhist monk called Running on Karma (2003).

In Mad Detective, Bun’s ear-cutting episode gets him tossed from the force, and we pick him up again years later when a good cop, Ho, played by Andy On, calls Bun back to help with an unsolvable case. Bun’s M.O. fuels the rest of the movie. To get within the psyche of criminals, Bun must subject himself to their actions, or the torments they inflict. Including everything from going to the same restaurant as a criminal and eating exactly the same meal, being zipped up in a suitcase and shoved down a flight of stairs, being buried alive, and in the very first scene in the movie stabbing a dead pig. A high level of job commitment. The idea is as lovely as the Akutagawa story “Hell Screen,” where a master painter must actually see horrors in life before he grandiosely depicts them (a story not to be missed).

Everything in this movie is noir perfect pitch: the pacing, which is slow and measured, the music which is scant, the smoky cinematography (thank god the digital look has not yet conquered Hong Kong). The whole movie seems to take place at night, even in the day the screen is darkened. And, in an almost direct homage to 1940’s noir, the final set piece of the movie is a house-of-mirrors-like shooting gallery scene. A scene choreographed by slow movements and rhythmic gun shots: slowed down like the real noir should be, strong like a ten count pour of gin in a gimlet.

Enough can not be said of Ching Wan as Bun, the film hangs on his madness like a heavy door on one hinge. Watch the way he tosses himself into an open grave with abandon, the way he rides a motorcycle or pisses on the trouser leg of the man adjacent to him at a urinal - this man is wild. With every action he pulls a Van Gogh: he displays to the world that the inner demons are at the wheel.

God of Hong Kong, Johnny To’s next project to watch is The Red Circle (2009), a remake of Le Cercle Rouge, (1970) Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic. What To will do with such fertile source material, I’m giddy at the very prospect.

© 2008 Obsolete Vernacular.