d+kaz

Director: Cheang Pou-soi. Country: Hong Kong/China. Year: 2004. Format: DVD.

This starts off troublesome with what is now appearing to be Cheang’s weakness, namely in the dramatic direction of actors: the relationship between the film’s central couple, as well as their subsequent break-up, is completely glib and unbelievable. Structurally this is a problem because their relationship is supposed to ground a plot that would be generous to call outrageously implausible. But it is this outrageous plot that becomes the movie’s center, even if the desperation driving it is ostensibly linked to the original romance. The hero, an inadequate and quite banal middle class ER nurse, gets kidnapped by a roving band of Mainland thieves, who themselves include a married couple that mirrors our hero and heroine, and both of whom, probably unintentionally, turn in stronger performances than their “good” counterparts. (An IMDB user comment makes the interesting assertion that the Mainland characters are played by Mainland actors whose acting style noticeably differs from the central HK lovers; also of interest is that the central couple are ineffectively playing out conventions of romantic melodrama whereas the criminal couple are effectively playing out conventions of action/thriller genres.) The gang is introduced by killing eight HK cops and the body count only jumps from there, as member after member becomes incapacitated during their violent flight and our hero must tend to them all even as they continue their rampage which, like the recent Dog Bite Dog, is only supposed to be a brief, criminal incursion into HK and will supposedly end with the Mainlanders leaving (like the Cambodian hitman) for home by boat. As such, the majority of film is a frantic push to survive, the gangsters with their lives and honor intact (generic subplots about making sure the deal goes right and that their fellow brothers don’t die are included) and the hero so as to get back to his girl and reunite after a recent break-up. As with Dog Bite Dog, the generic conventions and plot mechanics are taken to an extreme that cares little for dramatic plausibility and instead invests the narrative with a ravenous drive significantly based on the likelihood that any given on-screen situation will likely be turned on its head in a matter of minutes. But again, Cheang’s considerable skill for compelling, violent appreciation of human desire for redemption not in the realm of morality but in a continuation of life and ceasing of oppression (in the more visceral form of generic violence, outsider status, and institutional pursuit) that makes his anti-heroes so watchable even without much psychology exists along with the awkward melodrama of the good heroes whose desire to survive and relieve oppression are linked to self-doubt, mistakes in the past, and passionate feeling–none of which Cheang has been able to successfully evoke in these two films.