The Wicked City

Peter Mak's The Wicked City (produced for Tsui Hark's Film Workshop and, allegedly, partially directed by the man himself) is gorgeous, a feature film that adopts the visual language of a vivid, 1980s fashion editorial as a way to translate the bubbling aesthetics of anime. Mak and Cinematographer Joe Chan arrange lithe, but buttoned-up, men and women in smoky business premises and overripe industrial landscapes, their violence accentuated by humming, hand-drawn, affectation. Released in 1992, Wicked City is pre-handover Hong Kong as a high-density psychic space, home to several competing factions; an environment on the verge of boiling over, facing an uncertain, likely transformative, future. 

As an adaptation of the supernatural body-popping of Yoshiaki Kawajiri's OVA - itself based on Hideyuki Kikuchi's Black Guard book - Mak's Wicked City subordinates the invasive, sexual horror of Kawajiri's piece, reconfiguring the foreignness of that film's shapeless demon rapists into an encroaching (mainland?) business entity. These Rapters are often discussed in a cultural or ethnical sense, indeed this Wicked City's most pronounced arc belongs to Jacky Cheung's Ken, a mixed race (Rapter and human) secret service agent who is repeatedly, and pointedly, passed over for promotion. Stranded in a supporting role, Cheung's dilemma eventually fizzles out in the midst of unconvincing prosthetics, another victim of the film's chaotic plotting. 

Wicked City is a collage; a beautiful, but disengaged (and disengaging), successions of events, underpinned by a fading sense of anxiety. The film proceeds with a nagging disconnect between why characters do things and what we understand their motivations to be. Despite this pretty substantial stumbling block, Mak's film is enlivened by regular injections of the phantasmagorical: excitable sludge demons pose as lifts, eager to digest the agents who have carelessly wandered inside and a bioluminescent heavy dry-humps a sentient pinball table. In this sense Wicked City functions as counterbalance for Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo series. Where Tsukamoto built his films around a man sinking into the detritus of a city - eventually becoming a human battle platform synchronised to circuitry and concrete - Mak's film has the environment twisting around its biological residents - heavy industrial cabling is warped by the emotions of the magical mainlanders, becoming support structures for the high-wire tumbles of trysting super-beings.