d+kaz

Director: Cheang Pou-soi. Country: Hong Kong/China. Year: 2006.
This film was seen at the New York Asian Film Festival, July 2007.

I probably would have not even noticed Cheang Pou-soi’s Dog Bite Dog if it weren’t for Olaf Möller’s invaluably encouraging column in the May/June issue of Film Comment about Cheang’s rapid rise from video-cinema experiments to a low budget cinema of desperation (he’s made nine movies in seven years). And thankful am I, for desperate it is, rabidly desperate, as the film opens with thrillingly ominous montage of a stormy frigate at sea and the late-night preparation of some sludgy porridge dropped down to a shadow-clinging miscreant in the ship’s hold—our film’s errant Cambodian hitman, Pang (Edison Chen). He disembarks in the starry glare of Hong Kong’s street lamps—which throughout the film flare at the lens like sparkly beacons of hope amongst the garbage and detritus Pang roves through—and is picked up by a cabbie and given the picture and location of a man to kill. The camera is rugged and hangs between the wide-angle impressionism of Pang’s disoriented and hungry mission and a more positing position of stylized distance, jumping in and out of the scene to capture its many visual dimensions, dynamically framing the character first dwarfed by the city and then cutting to a distorting close-up where Chen’s avid and determined face commands the space. The sound design is equally forceful, with foley sound effects clear like any normal drama but something going on in the background, static or distortion or throbbing mixing together as if it were half music and half the distraction of a fevered mindstate, and later voices are molded into dog growls and punches into fireworks. The first hit, from the boat trip to the execution, is a brilliant, snarling opening and it perfectly sets the tone for Dog Bite Dog’s grim game of survival.

The rest of the film, admittedly, has a hard time keeping up such aesthetic energy so closely attuned to the funneled physical and mental experience of a single character. Instead, the script oscillates between Pang’s rogue’s progress of surviving Hong Kong to the experience of the young cop chasing him, Sam Lee’s Wai, whose detective father is in a coma and who takes out his youth and frustration with an extreme violence that is so criminal that as he trails Pang, IED is trailing him. And that is par for the course in Cheang’s circular, blood soaked world of people desperately fighting for survival, and rotating around from sympathetic and upright to demonic and contemptible and back again. In a world like this sympathy seems innately siding with the brutal hitman because Cheang’s cinema dramatically favors Pang’s primal, physical desperation as he (in flashback) boxed in Cambodian death matches for money as a child and now crawls through Hong Kong garbage dumps and back alleys looking to survive the city. Comparatively, Wai’s psychological, melodramatic turmoil over his father’s status and heroism and his own fight against members of the force comes off as conventional, even if Cheang invests his journey with as much disjointed anxiety as Pang’s, as a scene where, as Wai beats an informer up in the foreground, an extremely wide-angled shot catches an IED man lurking around way across the street deep in the background, or more dramatically in the sheer extent of the violence Wai brings down on people who may lead him to Pang.

It is as each character becomes more and more encumbered by their gathering injuries and more and more determined to get to their goal that Dog Bite Dog achieves a unstoppable, desolate energy. Pang becomes an unlikely hero not because of the inevitable but fittingly over-the-top relationship he forms with a girl, another outcast who he finds being raped by her father in a garbage dump, but rather because Pang is struggling to survive whereas Wai is struggling for vengeance. Cheang’s cinema intuitively breaks the scenario down so that even though the film should morally side against Pang, it cannot but help admire his stalwart ability and urgent fever to survive, and indeed his very mission to stay alive, whereas Wai’s more deplorable resilience is all for the ultimate payback. Throughout, the film is an audio and visual marvel that matches the violent exhaustion, physical hysteria, and unrelenting movement of the two adversaries with gritty, unforgivingly broken streets and haunting audio cues. It all culminates in one of the longest and most extreme epilogues in cinema, as the men’s grim fighting natures finally face off in the blinding sun at a Cambodian temple, where birth and death erupt at the same moment and someone has the audacity to put “You Are My Sunshine” on the soundtrack, as if there could be any hope in such a vicious, gut-driven world of survival of the most desperate.

Director: Cheang Pou-soi. Screenplay: Matt Chow, Melvin Li & Szeto Kam-yen. Cast: Edison Chen, Sam Lee, Pei Pei. Country: Japan. Year: 2006.