Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Wai’s first written and directed by credit comes in the shape of this 1988 film, which is very much located in 1988, and also, of course, Hong Kong. Andy Lau plays Wah, a low level triad enforcer, and nominal boss / big brother to Jacky Cheung’s Fly, who is, and let’s be fair to him, a god-dammed liability. His crazy stunts and needling of fellow triad members most often sees Wah having to clean up the mess, normally by doing something even crazier. This, naturally, starts to cause some friction between Wah and Fly, and them and the rest of the mob, particularly Alex Man’s Tony.
Into all this allegedly organised crime shenanigans enters Wah’s distant cousin, Maggie Cheung’s Ngor, coming to the big city from the sticks, relatively speaking, in order to see a medical consultant for a somewhat vague respiratory malady. Initially they get off to a rocky meeting, in large part due to Wah’s unusual schedule and getting over a recent break-up, but they soon warm to each other.
You can perhaps see where that’s going, but a clock is put on it after yet another escalation of the situation between Fly and Tony and his goons, with Wah again having to bail Fly out and take a thorough beating for his efforts. It’s this latest humiliation that no doubt sees Fly, after recovering, keen to take up a job for the mob that Tony chickened out of, an almost certain suicide mission to kill an informant in police custody before a trial, which Wah would of course rather not see Fly throw his life away for.
This is one of Wai’s most successful films in his native land, however exactly why this would be the case eludes me. I didn’t dislike it, to be clear, and there’s a lot in here to like, especially on what I assume is a relatively restrained budget. In particular there’s some really nice, if highly stylised use of lighting from Wai and cinematographer Andrew Lau, the blues and reds giving a lot of atmosphere to locations that otherwise would rather betray their cut-price roots. It’s also an early outing for the way Wai handles action sequences, with that weird blurred slow-motion technique that’s also pretty effective at smoothing over and rough points.
What I’m struggling with, which will again be a bit of a recurring theme, is that these characters are not overly well explored and that makes quite a few of their actions and motivations a little baffling. Well, in this instance a lot baffling, as how anyone would countenance talking to Fly, let alone letting his dumb ass put you in mortal danger multiple times for little to no reason befuddles me. He’s just not someone you’d go to bat for. Hit with a bat, perhaps.
With that plot thread snipped, there’s not enough in the otherwise mostly unobjectionable Wah / Ngor relationship thread for support the weight of the film, leaving this flopping around rather unevenly. That said, the decent performances from Lau and Cheung, Wai’s mainstays of the period, the visual style and the snappy pacing are more than enough to keep things bustling along without it becoming a drag.
I’ve seen much worse directorial debuts, although I’d not be putting this near the top of anyone’s watchlists.