New York Asian Film Festival 2024 (July 12-22 FLC) REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

LEADING LEE: THE TIME OF HUAN NAN (2023)

TRAILER

This is a woozy, beautiful Taiwan film full of "BL" content, meaning soft core gayness, and focusing on three homoerotically filmed handsome young men and a vibrant young woman who bond as eternal "brothers" (even though one is a sister) in the vicinity of the eponymous Huan Nan Taipei food market, a traditional landmark whose rooftops, some in the film say, provide the best panoramic nighttime views of the whole of Taipei. The film is both epic, and intimate. And intensely colored, perhaps a little too much so. Above all it is replete with young male eye candy.

There isn't really that much about the market. There are a lot of swoony closeups of smooth male faces, torsos and butts, and intimate sexy closeups of a rugby game and more than one sequence of nude male bathing in all of which the homoerotic aspect is more than hinted at, though there is no male kissing - not any kissing, in fact - or sex. The emphasis is on longing and sadness. There is a heartbreaking, as well as slightly confusing, sequence of the three young men plunging riskily into a dangerous surf, with a teasing suggestion that a tragedy might be averted, though it's only a tease. The young woman stands by.

Did I say this is a time travel movie? It is, and reminded me of the equally woozy and soft-core erotic 2022 French Netflix time-travel series "Les 7 Vies de Léa," "The 7 Lives of Lea," which involves teenagers and also goes back 30 years to 1991. Something like that, only not as complicated, happens here. One of the young men, Chen Yao-hua (Hsia Teng Hung), the protagonist, if you like, is Back from the Future, visiting for a lengthy stay from 2022, a time of masks and Covid. At the present time, as the film begins, he works in the butcher stall of his father Chen Bao Ding (Edison Song) in the market. When he's up on the roof trying to persuade his father to stop dancing up there with a sword, he's suddenly transported to 1991 when his father was young, 30 years earlier.

In most of the film we see Chen Yao-hua, who becomes known as Liu Hung-hui, being taken for a highschooler who had gone missing, at a time when his father is young and handsome. And he's also in love with another man, something that wasn't at all okay - as it is, relatively, in Yao-hua's time, since in 2019 same sex marriage was legalized in Taiwan. Gay desire existed back then too, of course, but met with serious obstacles. Yao-hua encounters his young father and there are intimate, homoerotic moments even, perhaps oddly, between them. Yao-hua also sees his older father when he gets back back to 2022 and gives him a bath, also intimate.

Yu Kang Min (Wang Yu Ping), the young woman, plays an important role in the bonding of the Four Brothers of Yuan Nan. Yao-hua falls for her, while realizing that his younger father-to-be is gay and in love with another of what becomes the foursome, Chang An-jian (Chu Meng-hsuan).

Yao-hua becomes concerned with a developing tragedy, the disappearance of Chang An-jian. But this is not a world in which the visitor from today is able to alter events. Things get tricky for Yao-hua (and for us) when he returns to the present. It turns out he is now seen to have been gone for thirty years. It's complicated, and unclear. The film doesn't wind itself up well.

A review of the film by Brian Hioe in The Cinema Escapist confirms this about the weakness of the ending. Hioe is more knowledgeable about gay-themed Taiwanese films and lists and compares them. Though he finds faults in this one, notably a too didactic and explanatory section toward the end, a too obvious effort to highlight the famous market, and the failure to "stick the ending," yet he believes The Time of Huan Nan to be one of the best recent wave of Taiwanese LGBT-themed films. He feels that it is "well shot and excels at pacing"; that the acting "carries the movie," with all the principals "having excellent chemistry" and "oozing charisma." Some would argue that there are a tad too many intimate closeups, but we are invited to admire the handsome young men, and we do. Much though this may, by US or Western standards, seem somewhat timid about the sexual side of homosexuality - the step back to a more restricted time may be meant to justify that - still the film is full of warmth, sensuality, and one might almost say love. It may be considered audacious in combining gay themes with a traditional food market.

The Time of Huan Nan 環南時候,139 min., debuted in the Kaohsiung Film Festival Oct. 8, 2023, and opened in Taiwan May 31, 2024. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 13, 6:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57

[Chris Knipp]

ZU FENG IN A LONG SHOT

GAO PENG: A LONG SHOT (2023)

Impressive debut about China in chaos on the brink

The early scenes of this film, which are dark, desperate, and violent, grabbed me immediately. However "grimy" or gritty, rain-drenched and in multiple shades of grey it is, Gao Peng's directorial debut is a wonderful film, transferring the searching moral intensity of Krzysztof Kieślowski with the action showdown of a great Western to a period Chinese setting and with an intense human drama at the center of it all. Based on a real event, A Long Shot focuses on northeastern China and the huge, festering Fenglin Ferroalloy Factory, an old iron and steel foundry which isn't functioning productively and hasn't paid its 8,000 employees for months. It's the winter of 1990, before the economic miracle, when the changeovers of the economy were struggling to happen. Violence and disorder prevail and there are frequent thefts, culminating in a shootout toward the film's end. Amid the schemes and robberies and violence what's happening is a human struggle to live one's life.

A Long Shot is brilliant enough to have gotten complimentary festival reviews in Hollywood Reporter (Jordan Mintzer) and Screen Daily (Wendy Ide). Mintzer is basically right in his concluding assessment that what's "ultimately most memorable" here isn't the finale "gunplay" but the film's overall "setting itself," which has the air of "a small city" that's become the victim of "a major dystopian catastrophe." The gunplay, the action, is good too, and so are the intense human bonding and coming of age stories and the portrait of a struggling society. There are a lot of characters, a lot going on, wrangled by the three writers plus the director who penned the screenplay. Apart from the workers, who figure, as well as their disaffected, aimless or delinquent young offspring, there are the managers, who tilt into criminality in the desperate situation too, and a rough gang of security guards who function as local police, when they're doing what they're supposed to, settling trouble often violently, often without turning it over to the police.

Though the opening depicts violence among youths and the security crew's aggressive handling of it, and these youths will flow in and out of the scene, riskily stealing parts and scrap from the factory's interior, playfully throwing firecrackers at each other and on the windshield of the factory manager's car, in the foreground of the film is its struggling moral center, the former champion sharpshooter Gu Xuebing (Zu Feng), who once was a local celebrity, but became deaf in one ear and had to quit. Now he is one of the security guards, but unlike the others, he refuses to take bribes from thieves. There is also his female friend Jin Yu Jia (Qin Hailu), whom Wendy Ide assumes is his former lover; she thinks her son Xiao Jun (Zhou Zhengjie) is also his. Jin Yu Jia urges him to mentor the boy, who gets caught in a robbery of the factory in the opening sequence, though boy and man have a love-hate relationship. Zhou Zhengjie's intense expectant gaze and Zu Feng's world-weary gloom are the contrasting emotional and visual hearts of the film. When Zhou discovers the sleazy bar his mother has been forced to moonlight at, it's a classic scene of disillusionment. Everyone struggles with each other - and with the pushes and pulls of the environment, with its social volatility and economic stress.

The action thriller finale is as clear and compelling, transported to this chaotic setting, as a John Ford Western. It comes at a time of an ill-starred 40th factory anniversary celebration when the 8,000 employees are going to finally get some back salary payoffs. The sound of firecrackers mingles with machine gun fire. Gu Xuebing and Xiao Jun both put their hands on a certain illicit homemade weapon - changes in arms access regulations are another theme underlined in opening and closing onscreen texts. But when the smoke clears and the film's over one has lots more to ponder than that, guided by the youth Xiao Jun's intensity and moral confusion and Gu Xuebing's courage and sense of loss. This film is a thrilling picture of a country full of energy, a "smoldering crucible" just on the brink of betterment. It may also refer (as Mintzer notes) to the country's "current economic slump," or to all the twisting and breaking of law that's always gone on.

A Long Shot老枪 ("Old Gun," also "Old Timer"), 117 mins., debuted at Tokyo (Best Artistic Contribution winner: see coverage of the Tokyo Q&A); it was also presented at Mykolaichuk (Ukraine) Jun. 16, 2924. Screened for this review as part of the2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Friday July 19, 9:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro and Q&A with director Gao Peng


TEEN REBELS INA LONG SHOT

[Chris Knipp]

CHAYANIT CHASANGAVEJ IN SUPPOSED

THANKORN PONIGSWAN: SUPPOSED (2023)

Wild for to hold

Supposed is a sort of dating app rom com involving a successful executive who meets a beautiful, younger woman via Tinder, is entranced, but can never hold her. This begins to be a telling, touching study of the attractions and dangers of such relationships. It seems to fade away a bit into little more than a music video at the end. But we must cut it some slack, since the director, Thankorn Ponigswan, died of lymphoma, at the age of 46, shortly after the film's completion and he may hot have been able to put the finishing touches on it.

The encounters of "Non" (Ananda Everingham), the Tinder-cruising businessman, and "Dear" (Chayanit Chansangavej) start via social media. She says she has been away for five months. He never gets a clear answer from her about what this means. But her teasing, wild, playful ways are entrancing. When the Korean restaurant where she wants to eat is closed, she breaks in and makes "Non" cook for her.

There is some of the life of Laotian-Australian actor Everingham in "Non," because the actor's father was an Australian photojournalist who scuba-dived to save his lover, and aa "Non" he is always taking pictures and wants to be a writer, and talks about scuba diving. "Dear" won't say what she does away from "Non." They have a sex life and things seem great except she is distant, keeps disappearing, and seems to have another involvement, while "Non" falls more and more in love with her.

"Dear" and "Non" made me think of the 16th-century English poet Sir Thomas Wyatt's famous poem "Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind," which imagines his lady love as a wild deer that he chases in vain, and concludes she is "wild for to hold, though she seem tame." He imagines a necklace around her "fair neck," "graven with diamonds in letters plain" saying "noli mi tangere," touch me not. "Dear" escapes "Non." He cannot trap her. At the end he sorts through her cancelled web page's many images and pursues her at the places she has seen and photographed.

She has said revealingly that whenever she is involved with someone she enters his world and imitates him, but so she does not know who she really is herself. With "Non," she also has begun taking a lot of pictures, as he like to do. But early in the film, we see him posing, and describing that he wears blue because he's been told it's a friendly color, and he photographs himself. He's a narcissistic male and, like so many before him, pursues an image, "Dear" with her unspoiled young face, her tempting eyes, instead of being attracted by the other woman he sleeps with briefly, who is communicative, and available: not interesting, too easy, too practical.

Supposed is a study of modern dating app romance, but winds up being such a classic love story it can be epitimized in a 16th-century poem. Chayanit Chansangavej is certainly entrancing in the role of the elusive young woman, and Ananda Everingham is a suave, able dupe, the eternal male chasing a women who is too young and too mysterious to remain in his clutches for very long. Too bad the film does't find a less pretty, less ambiguous solution, but most of the way it depicts the eternal chase beautifully. The cinematography of Vardhana Wanchuplao has a dark, distinctive look; the score by Wittawin Amornrattanasak, however obtrusive, is essential to the online, pop-culture mood.

Supposed, 100 mins., opened in Thailand Dec. 5, 2023, debuting at the Osaka Asian Film Festival Mar. 4, 2024. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 14, 3:30pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro with cast members Ananda Everingham & Chayanit Chansangavej

[Chris Knipp]

LIN JIANJIE: BRIEF HISTORY OF A FAMILY (2023)

New York Premiere
Brief History of a Family
家庭简史
Lin Jianjie's gut-punch of a debut rips the Band-Aid off the wounds of post one-child policy China and exposes the scars and anxieties beneath. When Wei, an outgoing only son from a middle-class milieu, and Shuo, his taciturn but scarily sharp-eyed classmate, get tangled up in each other's lives after a mysterious incident at school, it sets off a chain reaction that turns Wei's picture-perfect existence inside out. As Shuo worms his way deeper into Wei's family and becomes the unofficial new member of the household, the cracks in the foundation start to show, and what was once a mutually beneficial friendship turns into a pressure cooker ready to blow. Lin's filmmaking style foregoes hand-holding in favor of pure, raw emotion, turning a simple family drama into a seductive, unsettling psycho-thriller that holds up a mirror to the absurdities and contradictions of modern life and makes you want to call the therapist.

Director: Lin Jianjie
Cast: Sun Xilun, Lin Muran, Zu Feng, Guo Keyu
Languages: Mandarin with English subtitles
2024; 99 min.

SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 20, 4:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center

[Chris Knipp]

PEMA TSEDEN: SNOW LEOPARD (2023)

Everyday problems and the eternal in Tibet

It's hard to know sometimes what is going on in Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden's posthumous film Snow Leopard. It awakens vivid feelings of place and presence, the beautiful, remote, snowy landscape and the eponymous snow leopard (or snow leopards) who are calmer, smarter, and infinitely more powerful, lithe and dangerous than humans. Tseden captures both ordinariness and magic here in a simple tale of a wild animal mauling livestock that resolves into something both messy and transcendent, with arguments and threats and an intervention by the law in between. I would say this is about mediation and transcendence. John Berra in his Venice SCreen Daily review says it's about "the tension between tradition and modernity," and there's that too. Director Tseden's mastery is in using simple elements to convey levels of meaning, bringing in multiple subjects without losing focus. He is the founder of Tibetan cinema, and his death at 53 of heart failure is a tragic, too early loss.

Between the trapped leopard who has come in the night and killed nine rams and their furious herder Kimba)(Jinpa), who, saying each ram is worth a thousand yuan and he wants both compensation and revenge, has trapped the great beast in his pen, is the young "snow leopard monk" or lama (Tseten Tashi) into whose gentleness and fantasy life the film compellingly escapes.

The most memorable sequence in the film is (spoiler alert) a dream filmed in chilly monochrome in which the monk, in extremis, lost and exhausted at the end of a pilgrimage, is rescued by the snow leopard he met as a cub. Metaphor morphs into personality in the character of the young monk, a quiet, gentle, mysterious, playful young man who becomes a magnet for the film's sympathy and affection, its desire to bond with nature and the Other. He promises that he recites sutras too, but capturing snow leopards on his cell phone camera months ago, a clip that went viral, has led to his being given a camera with a long lens. He carries it about with him to pursue his obsession. While the snow leopard is a predator for the rancher, a great subject for the TV crew, and a "a first-class protected animal" for the local official, for the monk it's something ineffable and essential, the goal he pursues.

Meanwhile this film is also more broadly about itself: the first, foreground, characters we meet are a TV team traveling out to this remote place like naturalists and ethnographers to film a show. The lead journalist, Wang-xu (Ziqi Xiong), is a friend of the young monk from junior high, and they rendez-vous on the road. The angry ram owner and the beautiful trapped beast are perfect subjects for the film crew. The ram owner seems like director Tseden laughing at reality TV with his mugging for the camera. But he also represents humans acting beastly and, from another angle, a local who rejects outsiders coming to lecture him about protected species. The police are called in by the furious local official, also on the scene, and even then things keep getting worse, but finally, with a lot of translating back and forth, an understanding and acceptance are reached. But what matters is the unexpected manner in which the snow leopard behaves when released.

Exactly how the snow leopard action sequences were shot may puzzle you, but the beasts themselves, in the awesome snowy landscape and mountain lake, linger in the mind as complex presences, wild, inexplicable, massive but featherlight, lumbering on tiptoe but lightening quick, sweet and deadly, friendly but wholly other. It's for the snow leopard that this film exists, and if it works for you, nothing else gets in the way. The closing credits music is wholly fresh, a remnant of a location that was strange yet real.

Snow Leopard. 雪豹 | གངས་གཟིག 109 min., debuted out of competition at Venice, presented as an official selection at Toronto and won the Grand Prix in Nov. 2023 at Tokyo; also shown at Warsaw, Paris, Lyon and Moscow. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 21, 6:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center

[Chris Knipp]

AUDREY LIN, TERRENCE LAU CHUN-HIN IN TROUBLE GIRL

CHIN CHUA-HUA: TROUBLE GIRL (2023)

A disjointed movie about irresponsible adults and a neurodivergent 12-year-old

Despite festival blurb raves about this as being "a disquieting head-trip" and "a prickly, paradoxical but ultimately transcendent work," this study of a 12-year-old schoolgirl with ADHD, an absentee father, and a teacher and mother who are having an affair fails to jell beyond the "prickly" and "paradoxical." An interesting Chinese Letterboxd comment by Jay Wei about its surprising of expectations, its score that goes against the moods of scenes commends a lack of "melodrama." But one winds up longing for that, for tension, suspense, for the strong emotional payoffs of conventional drama that never come.

The opening sequence, returned to later, is of the lithe young Hong Kong-born teacher Mr. Chen, aka Paul (Terrance Lau Chun-him) giving the girl Xiao Xiao (the actual title of the film, Audrey Lin) a swimming lessen. The lessen goes well and it's the tenderest, happiest moment of the film. Another big moment, pulled through much of the film, is a typhoon. It causes school to be hastily dismissed: the excitement is in sympathy with Xiao Xiao's disruptive nature. Her neurodivergence is seen as a cause both of disruptiveness and bullying by her classmates that leads to further anger and acting out. Positive aspects of the disorder - creativity, intense focus - are not on view, though the girl has warm moments, as in her brief contacts with her father (Ming-Shuai Shih).

But the central drama, what there is of it, is in the triangle of mother, daughter, and overzealous teacher, along with the unruly class. Mr. Chen has set up a system of rewards to classmates for being kind to the girl, but they corrupt the system by provoking her so as to get points for interceding. A trouble here is that the class begins to seem too much like the "trouble girl" and the mother, though approaching forty while Chen is younger, is too girlish looking and acting.

One thing that's clear is the mutual jealousies. Xiao Xiao, in a rare grownup moment, jumps in a taxi follow her mother and her teacher in the rain to see where they are going. Her mother shows annoyance at the teacher when, in intimate moments, he starts talking about the girl's problems or progress. Understandably, she wants the affair to be about her. She used to be a piano teacher. There's a big piano in the living room to show it. And this is some kind of symbol, perhaps of lost potential, missed creativity, a better life.

There is no shortage of varied scenes. An episode is the unexpected return of the father, who has playful moments with the girl and quarrels with her mother. (What is it about all the binoculars?) There is a trip to a park of Mr. Chen, Xiao Xiao, and her mother. There is a surprising full-on bureaucratic conference of school officials and teachers and the mother about the girl, which the mother, inadvisably, brings the girl herself to. But these disjointed sequences of scenes are like the girls's jumpy, staccato behavior. It's hard to see where they are going. The viewer is continually jolted. What it all adds up to is hard to say.

It feels as if a lack here is in giving the complexity, even the maturity, that's needed to the affair. Its most memorable moment may be the childlike one where Paul jumps on top of the mother, playing like kids, and it becomes sensuous and sexy. But in her grumpiness she seems to be becoming like her daughter.

It would also have been nice to delve more into the neurodivergence of the girl, what ADHD is and what variety of it the girl has, and its potential positive aspects as well as the disruptive ones. One wishes the idea had come up not just of helping Xiao Xiao to conform but of finding ways for her to be different in positive, creative ways. Positive values of ADHD for example can be: hyperfocus, an ability to commit deeply to projects and tasks that interest them and be super efficient; and creativity, an imaginative and busy mind that can create original ideas and novel solutions to problems. We don't glimpse those potentials here.

This film lacks the complexity of recent French films like Mia Hansen-Løve's One Fine Morning/Un beau matin, which deals with similar themes. However, in fairness, Hansen-Løve is a mature artist in her prime, while Chin Chia-hua is just starting out, as is the obviously very promising young actress who played the lead, and won a Golden Horse acting award at an unprecedentedly early age for this performance. We can look with interest for what they do in future. Terrance Lau Chun-him, the fresh and appealing Hong Kong actor who plays the teacher-lover, who has won his own best actor award for Beyond the Dream, may also be one to watch.

Trouble Girl 小曉 ("Xiao Xiao"), 103 mins., Debuted at Taipei Golden Horse Festival Nov. 2023, opened theatrically in Taiwan and Hong Kong Dec. and Jan.; showed at Udine and Taipei Apr. and Jun. 2024. It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (July. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 27, 3:30pm
SVA Theatre
Intro and Q&A with director Chin Chia-Hua

[Chris Knipp]

YANG SHUPENG: PATTAYA HEAT (2023

Pattaya Heat
ปิดเมืองล่า
A glorious ensemble of Thai stars Ananda Everingham (Shutter), Thaneth Warakulnukroh (Bad Genius, among others) bring their A-game to this bodacious postmodern crime-action opus set in the country's notorious "sin city" destination. At the center of the madness is an ex-con-assassin-turned-drug-dealing pizza maker, a corrupt cop with a twinkle in his eye and a rumble in his belly, a tarot card-dealing femme fatale, and a megalomaniacal crime king who makes Scarface look like a choir boy. These ne'er-do-wells cross and double-cross paths in an elaborate quest for riches in gold, leaving in their wake a trail of ultra-violence, rampant sexuality, with a sprinkle of Thai-flavored dark humor into the bargain. With a little help from movie friends Yang Kil-Yong, action director from the legendary Oldboy and producer Shang Na, of Detective Chinatown 3, and Sheep Without a Shepherd fame, seasoned Chinese director Yang Shupeng, a NYAFF 2017 guest, has whipped up a plethora of pulpy influences into a furious cinematic cocktail that's equal parts Tarantino, Woo, and something entirely its own.

Director: Yang Shupeng
Cast: Ananda Everingham, Jirayu Tantrakul, Krissada Sukosol, Laila Boonyasak, Thaneth Warakulnukroh, Gulasatree Michalsky, Gigi Velicitat
Languages: Thai with English subtitles
2024; 117 min.

SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 14, 1:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro with actor Ananda Everingham


Ananda Everingham
Working primarily in Thai films, Ananda Everingham broke through internationally with his lead role in the 2004 hit Shutter, and began working not only in Thailand, but in Singapore and Laos. After anchoring Me... Myself (2007) and having a featured role in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's 2007 Cannes film Ploy, he starred in the Singaporean romance The Leap Years (2008). He went on to the fantasy Queen of Langkasuka, then starred in Sabaidee Luang Prabang, the first commercial film produced since Laos adopted communism in 1975. In 2017, he starred as Maj. Gen. Khun Pantharak Ratchadet in the first episode of the ongoing Khun Pan series. As the NYAFF 2024 Actor in Focus, Ananda is presenting three dazzlingly diverse films: Supposed, Pattaya Heat, and The Cursed Land.

[Chris Knipp]

LOUIS KOO IN TWILIGHT OF THE WARRIORS:WALLED IN

SOI CHEANG: TWILIGHT OF THE WARRIORS: WALLED IN (2024)

Artfully cluttered everyman epic in a long-gone Hong Kong gangster enclave

Kowloon Walled City was an incredibly dense, decrepit, and busy, rickety, multitiered and dark underworld until it was demolished in the nineties with the takeover of Hong Kong by China. It is at once the incredibly rich reconstructed setting and the real star of this enjoyable, if self-undermining film, whose reconstructed location is better than its somewhat slow and perfunctory plot line, which probably works better in its source comic book. As the Variety review's title says, here, "Blazing Action Delights Get Marred by Languid Soap Opera." One of two Guardian reviews summarizes: "The choreography is impressive as people are hurled through walls, thrown off rooftops and otherwise beaten to a pulp, but the editing is frenetic and the characters cartoonish." These are unkind, and mislead if they suggest this won't be at all a pleasant experience, but are correct in suggesting there are flaws.

Things begin with a prolonged street fight, straight wuxia stuff except almost invisible because staged in very dark surroundings, with many wince-inducing, bone-crushing encounters, designed to show that the underdog protagonist, Chan Lok-kwan (Raymond Lam) is tough and invincible. But he's an illegal from the Mainland, and his struggle to buy an ID card from the local triad bosses is doomed. And still he refuses to join them, and winds up escaping from the remorseless triad leader Mr. Big (legendary actor-director Sammo Hung) and retaliating by grabbing a bag stuffed with drugs and making a run for it through long dark streets, onto a bus, and into - the Kowloon Walled City, where he's safe because it's ruled by another boss, a different jurisdiction.

Gone is the realm of the odious Mr. Big, to be replaced by "enigmatic crime boss Cyclone (an aged-up Louis Koo), an effortlessly cool [and chain-smoking] barbershop owner," (quoting again from the Variety review ). This world is decrepit, but in its scuzzy way rich, familial, and cozy. That Guardian reviewer calls it "a Piranesian labyrinth" - I like that - "of squalid high rises and dark, cramped alleys, teeming with crooks, lowlifes, addicts and impoverished families running small businesses, legit and otherwise." It's some time in the eighties. People dance to disco. Karaoke seems to be a new thing. Welcome to Kowloon Walled City, in glorious decline (and gloriously recreated by the production crew of this movie). And to what all acknowledge to be the true star of this teeming, dark, somewhat lumbering movie: what the festival blurb calls "the true star, the "delirious production design," "a ramshackle metropolis fused into one fetid super-organism of exposed wires, makeshift shanties, and human desperation–teeming with triads, refugees, and wuxia-powered henchmen sporting rat-tail hair." Very much a throwback to certain glory days of Hong Kong cinema; a kind of hypertrophied version of the movies Wong Kar-wai was making before he became Wong Kar-wai.

Here begins an even more intense and prolonged struggle by our undocumented but tireless hero (a kind of parody of the over-motivated immigrant), who sleeps on eaves to save up cash and becomes known to the local, shall we say, 'administration.' By a third of the way through the two-hour film, Chan starts to smile sometimes. He starts to play Mahjong (or some tile game) with pals, and tells the boss of it all, Cyclone, that he wants to stay here. He was orphaned as a child, he says, brought up in foster care, never had a real home. Now he can sleep all night, he says. But remember, says Cyclone, you sleep well because of the people, not the place. Around Cyclone is a klatch of attractive young men, each with his own shtick.

Like a traditional epic poem, Soi Cheang's movie digresses when a detail of background becomes interesting and jumps into a flashback history. Eventually people tell Chan the story of how the Walled City became the way it is now ruled by who rules it now and what fell by the wayside on the way. This includes the "ruthless goon, the King of Killers, Jim," one of the chorus of youngsters recounts. "Sooner or later this place will be torn down," Cyclone warns, and in fact there are glimmers on a TV broadcast of the tentative plan to do so when the Mainland assumes administration of Hong Kong. But will this genre of movie ever go out of style?

Featured here (an all-male cast): Raymond Lam, Terrance Lau, Philip Ng, Richie Jen. For fans of Chinese fight genre and traditional Hong Kong gangster films, despite the warned-of soap-opera languor of the hero's trajectory, this is potentially a delight, depending on individual tastes, of course.

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In 九龍城寨·圍城 ("Kowloon Walled City Beseiged City"), 125 mins., opened in China and Hong Kong May 1, 2024; other releases, and inclded at Cannes, Buncheon, Montreal. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF.
Sunday July 28, 7:00pm
SVA Theatre
Q&A with producer John Chong and actor Philip Ng
(SOLD OUT)