Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
`A chinese box doesn’t really exist,” said director Wayne Wang in an interview with Hollywood Online. “I tried to find one … I looked everywhere, but it doesn’t exist. It’s a metaphor for a box which, when you open it, leads to another box, then you open that box which leads to another box. It’s like you have an answer, but it’s really more questions.”
Wang was born in Hong Kong in 1949 and named after the legendary cowboy star, John Wayne. He studied in the United States before returning to Hong Kong to work as a second unit director on B-grade kung-fu epics.
Wang made a name in the movie industry with Chan is Missing, a low-budget film made in 1981. He later directed Dim Sum, Eat a Bowl of Tea and The Joy Luck Club, as well as the recent Smoke and Blue in The Face.
Ranging from documentary to well-staged melodrama, Wang’s latest film Chinese Box has some resonances with his 1989 documentary Life is Cheap … But Toilet Paper is Expensive. The latter film took a bizarre and scatological look at Hong Kong, and included a seven-minute hand-held shot that turned into a virtual painting with ducks being killed and people defecating while talking to camera. The movie was never released in South Africa, but Chinese Box has many of its flaws and virtues, and is definitely worth a watch.
Set on the eve of the political change-over in Hong Kong, the film stars Jeremy Irons as a terminally ill British photojournalist living his last days in Hong Kong.
He is in love – albeit unrequitedly – with Vivian (Gong Li), a refugee from the mainland. He is also drawn to a mysterious woman of the street (played by Maggie Cheung), who is scarred both in body and mind.
I am getting a trifle bored with Irons playing the morose, obsessed man lucky enough to bed beautiful women. However, he is perfectly cast here as the doomed journalist who quits his job and, armed with his video camera, tries to explore the meaning of Hong Kong.
As he makes a last desperate grab for Vivian, secrets from their pasts emerge to thwart him.
Playing alongside Irons’s romantic obsession, is the life story of the street urchin. Cheung delivers the strongest performance in the film and the scene where she meets her former British boyfriend who once again abandons her is riveting.
The film was co-written by Wang, novelist Paul Theroux, veteran screenwriter Jean- Claude Carriere (Belle de Jour, Cyrano de Bergerac and The Tin Drum) and Larry Gross (48 Hours). It works as a metaphor for the hand-over of Hong Kong from British to Chinese rule.
Is Hong Kong like Vivian, the Chinese woman who holds on to John knowing he will die? Is it like the street waif Jean, rejected by a lover and determined to survive? Or is it like a whore, servicing all and sundry for the right price?
Is it merely a business undergoing a change of management or is it a brazen animal fighting the market place? Is the stigma of prostitution (one of Vivian’s secrets) the same as that of colonialism?
The film never draws any firm conclusions but does liken the tumultuous changes that occurred on July 1 1997 to time spent with a dying lover. In fact, the enigmatic title of the movie indicates that there is no predicting what kind of beast Hong Kong will become, just many questions.
Not a whole lot happens in the movie, but it is in the textures and backgrounds that Wang really scores his cinematic coup.
He mixes crazy documentary-like video footage with statuesque visuals – long takes contrast with shots of life on the street which are scooped up by Irons with his video camera. Wang uses the video footage to capture the breezy charm of the city.
“Every film I make, I try to make it depending on the subject matter and what I’m dealing with,” says Wang. “Hong Kong is a very direct, very visceral, very physical city. In order to capture that feeling, I felt that I should use a hand-held camera rather than make pretty, still pictures. So it’s the camera style that’s most appropriate to the city itself.”
Images such as bloodied hands, a man beheading a chicken, the recurring close-up of a heart still beating on a faceless chopped fish in the marketplace, as well as the complex soundtrack which contrasts voluminous traffic sounds with eerie silences, create an impressionistic mood perfectly representative of the fragmented society.
The personal narratives mirror the larger social and political events and although the film is very compulsive, the narrative at times tends to be too metaphorical.
However, Wang has mounted a fascinating essay – fashioning fiction around real- events – about colonialism, patriotism and the individual’s relationship with the state, whether he’s a citizen or not.
As the Irons’s character says to Vivian (and it could as well be about the city): “Maybe I wasn’t supposed to figure you out.”
It’s an open-ended and intriguing film that might play like melodrama on first viewing but will leave you with many thoughts about the historical backdrop against which it takes place.