The Butterfly Murders

The Butterfly Murders, director Tsui Hark's dreamy feature debut, takes place in the aftermath of a martial arts apocalypse that has, quite apparently, wiped out scores of the tight-knit, chivalrous adventurers who usually find themselves battling across similar, Shawscope frames. Hark and cinematographer Fan Gam-yuk's picturesque depiction of rural China is, therefore, one littered with the remains of these doomed warriors and the carrion insects that feast upon their rotting bodies. This viewing, done so under the less than ideal conditions of an ancient Laserdisc rip with perfunctory, burned-in English subtitles, had the unintended effect of adding a layer of analogue obliqueness to a film already plotted around incomprehensible deceptions and strange, ulterior motives. What is clear though, despite the smudgy delivery system, is that Hark came out of the gate with an obvious gift for staging and shot design: the deserted fort, where a great deal of the non-underground action takes place, is wrapped in butterfly nets to keep the poisonous lepidopterans out. The billowing, diffused photography of high-end advertisement is gifted not just an organic but an axial purchase within the piece. Dotted with nature doc close-ups of massing moths, it does eventually become apparent that Hark views his disturbed, distrusting heroes with a similar sort of detached fascination. Motivation is rarely parsed and accords are fleeting; instead these costumed heroes strike and claw at each other, to no clear advantage, until their fragile arenas collapse in on them. 

The Battle at Lake Changjin II: Water Gate Bridge

The Battle at Lake Changjin II: Water Gate Bridge hurtles straight into pitched battle, dispensing with the first film's magic hour propriety and the gleaming computer generated landscapes that awed their bumpkin witnesses. The absence of these obviously falsified vistas, and the one-note nationalism they were designed to inspire, is an immediate boon in this sequel. Although positioned to evoke an expansive cinemascope awe, The Battle at Lake Changjin's adoring gander at The Great Wall of China was so golden and artificial that it actually more closely resembled those animated multi-channel audio trailers that would cue up before the main feature on certain region 3 DVDs. The nostalgic affection that pulsed through the previous episode has been almost completely hacked away then, leaving something rugged and monolithic in its place. 

Our sole glimpse of China in this episode is across snow-capped mountaintops; a distant and unreachable summit spotted by men whose bodies have already begun to rot. The sumptuous agitprop bent of the previous piece has been chiselled away - Changjin I's chivalrous affectations replaced with a two hour ode to gnarled noses and fingertips shattering by gunfire. The direction of this instalment is credited solely to Tsui Hark - Dante Lam and Chen Kaige are relegated to Executive Producer posts - this change in billing reflected in a film that, unlike its predecessor, does not feel like it is subject to umpteen clashing tones. Changjin II's focus is despairing combat, the film using furious montage and time-slice photography (emphasis on slice) to detail the pyrrhic bloody-mindedness required to push a human body past its breaking point. 

Water Gate Bridge's plot revolves around an enormous concrete complex that houses a mountain pass that will allow the American armed forces to flee the war in Korea, and the desperate efforts by People's Volunteer Army's 7th Company to detonate it. Frost-bitten Chinese soldiers, dressed in rags and wielding confiscated grease guns, hurl their bodies into hopeless, repetitive, conflict. This hair-raising martyrdom is backed by diegetic bugles and non-diegetic orchestra; a sweeping and anthemic chorus to match the film's euphoric expression of (fatalistic) patriotism. No-one escapes the meat grinder: matinee idols are penetrated and pulverised; teeth chip on flash-frozen rations; and a slumming boy bander (Jackson Yee) wears gashes all over his T-Zone, the marks burned into his face by the metal googles he has worn to protect his eyes. This deliriously photographed body horror peaks with a Chinese soldier being slowly crushed by an American tank. His flesh and bones gumming up the caterpillar tracks, rendering it still and, more importantly, vulnerable. This apparently dauntless machine of imperialist might is trapped in place by the literal body of the people. 

The Battle at Lake Changjin

Commissioned by the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party to celebrate the 100th anniversary of their founding, The Battle at Lake Changjin is a bloody affirmation of Chinese identity that uses a real-life rout during the Korean War to describe a political ideology so strong (not to mention romanticised) that it can completely repel the creeping forces of imperialism. The film presents brotherhood, both literal and fraternal, as a strength so potent and unbeatable that it can cross class and national boundaries, uniting thousands in one clear objective. Changjin proposes all this whilst also deleting any extraneous elements - such as the Koreans themselves - to arrive at a conflict between small groups of highly motivated Chinese, lead by the Wolf Warrior Wu Jing, and an oblivious mass of chundering Americans who would rather be back in their own country. 

In this sense then Changjin is closer to a fantasy epic than a war film that might flatter itself as a historical document. Directed by Palme d'Or winner Chen Kaige (for Farewell My Concubine), New Wave movie brat Tsui Hark (given all the sharp implements and nationalism on display here, The Blade and the Once Upon a Time in China series seem the most relevant to cite) and Beast Cops director Dante Lam, The Battle at Lake Changjin is also unapologetic in how it mangles the visual language of the American war film. Massing, computer generated, might and the idiosyncratic asides typically deployed to evoke a feeling of homesickness are turned in against their originators. Triumphant saturation bombing is contextualised from a ground level, becoming pitiless war crimes perpetrated against defenceless civilians; the greasy comforts of home are held up as repulsive excess when contrasted with frozen troops politely nibbling on their own, dwindling, potato ration. 

Changjin depicts its Americans in much the same way that Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy did its orcs: they are aimless biomechanoids who drive pulverising industry while protected by their fantastical air superiority. They huddle in meat walls and complain about how this war inconveniences their plans for the holiday season. Christmas and the God it celebrates are treated with a certain amount of bemusement by the film too - the power the latter represents is evoked constantly by the American high command when referring to the righteousness of their mission. This higher authority is even recognised by the Chinese, but only in the adverse weather conditions that are all forced to endure, the acknowledgment functioning more as a way to measure the sheer scale of the (eventual) Chinese victory. Above all though, these Americans are bullies who are completely incapable of the selfless heroics and physical ingenuity displayed by their Chinese opponents. This atypical alignment is massaged by a suite of exceptional action scenes that, again, mutate prestige beats from American cinema. The excruciating horror of Saving Private Ryan's knife sequence is exploded to include multiple participants, huge spurts of blackened gore, and a greenhorn who is actually gutsy enough to pick up a pistol and fire back. 

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. 

A Better Tomorrow III: Love & Death in Saigon

Following their problems shepherding A Better Tomorrow's tumultuous sequel to the screen, Tsui Hark and John Woo went their separate ways. Despite this inability to cooperate on further entries in their debonair gangster series, both filmmakers remained committed to scrutinising the events that forged their heroes. Woo had pitched a prequel episode that used the Vietnam War as a testing ground that would allow the director to re-examine these characters away from their own, conquered, urban arenas, while simultaneously using a besieged city to illustrate the stresses of the then-impending Hong Kong handover. After the split Woo kept his script but lost his usual gunslingers, landing at the Golden Princess studio before turning in the incredible but financially unsuccessful Bullet in the Head.

Hark raced ahead with his own prelude, beating Woo to a cinema release. The former producer retaining, not only the big ticket branding, but the films' breakout star as well. Rather than stick with New York hardman Ken as a way to keep Chow Yun-Fat in the franchise, inheritor director Hark rewinds the clock for an instalment that takes place before Mark has even had the chance to pall up with Ti Lung's solemn hood. Set in 1974, A Better Tomorrow III: Love & Death in Saigon follows Mark as he jets back and forth between Hong Kong and Vietnam, attempting to uproot his nearest and dearest before Saigon falls. Since Mark is still wet behind the ears, the role of ice cold badass falls to Anita Mui's Kit, a pleasant twist in a series where women typically get very little to do other than fret.

Kit, a gunrunner with shady government connections, acts as both a love interest and a teacher for Mark, slowly helping him build the persona that will one-day allow him to unite the Sung brothers and vanquish dozens of henchmen. Hazy, idealised interludes depict Kit instructing Mark how to dead-eye glass bottles; she even gifts him his trademark duster. Piece by piece, the Mark Gor we know takes shape. Although the film never explicitly comments on it, it's clear that Kit is building herself a perfect partner - an equal she can have further adventures with. As the film rolls on it is eventually revealed that Kit isn't pulling these traits out of thin air, she is extrapolating and adjusting Mark's new super identity based on her memories of a former lover, and present-day threat, played by Saburo Tokito.

For a brief moment hints of Vertigo start to creep into A Better Tomorrow III. Anita Mui as a two-fisted Scottie Ferguson, needling and cajoling a handsome prospect until he fits a pre-established idea of a boyfriend. Unfortunately Hark isn't particularly interested in this note. Mark never confronts Kit about the similarity and Tokito's Tanaka never gloats. The ex is simply an obstacle for our hero to overcome. Hark's film also suffers following the chopped-up, elegiac chaos of Woo's duo. In both of his A Better Tomorrow films, John Woo used slow motion as a way to accentuate the moments in which his characters made decisions or took decisive action. Slow, dreamy movements, often followed by a whiplash snap back to harsh, mutilated reality. By comparison, Hark over-cranks simply to show us how cool it is when the barrel of a gun is swept from one side of the frame to the other.

A Better Tomorrow II

A Better Tomorrow II is a film being pulled in two different directions. The sequel suffered through a notoriously difficult post-production process with producer Tsui Hark and director John Woo at loggerheads, battling over final cut. In the end the film was drastically reshaped by an indifferent editing team whose only objective was to get the running time down to the kind of length that would facilitate the maximum amount of screenings to be jammed into a business day. Thus this thwarted epic barrels along at an ungainly pace, shedding characters and plot points as quickly as it introduces them. This discombobulation is compounded by the scenes and sequences used to reintroduce Chow Yun-Fat to the series.

Given the cultural impact of Chow Yun-Fat's debonair gangster Mark - Hong Kong teens took to wearing duster coats in tribute to the character, even though the island enjoys a sub-tropical climate - his death at the climax of the first film presented a problem for the production. Hark and Woo's solution was a long-lost identical twin brother named Ken. Despite the conceptually cheekiness, a lot of screen time is dedicated to establishing Ken as something more than a gratuitous lap of honour for Chow. So much so that Ken's adventures in America play like a distinct, emotionally hysterical sub-film. When not admonishing Italian mafiosi for not appreciating Chinese cuisine, Ken functions as supernaturally violent therapist for Dean Shek's catatonic Lung Sei.

Lung has lost both his business and his beloved daughter. Forced to flee to America after being framed for multiple murders, Lung finds himself an albatross around the neck of everyone he comes into contact with. Naturally, Ken is able to shoulder this burden, drawing his old friend out of a drooling stupor by relentlessly placing him in incredible danger. Eventually Lung snaps to, snatching up a pistol to protect his injured friend. This sense of tonal separation extends to the film's magnificent finale too. While a grim-faced Shek and the criminally underused Ti Lung pace around a colonial mansion blasting goons, Chow floats about, mugging to the camera like Bugs Bunny and standing worryingly close to several absolutely tremendous explosions.