Log

To’s cinematic Hong Kong can be strangely ordered, simplified, reduced,

as though the spaces in which events unfold — especially pivotal events — are untouched by a larger social world beyond the delimited environments of the plot and its participants.

And it’s within these strangely controlled, sealed-off settings that To likes to conduct his research into bodily motions and postures,

in particular as they occur within the all-male groups that reappear throughout his films, frequently with the same cast.

This research is informed by Western as well as Eastern influences, themselves already commingled: Leone, Peckinpah, Kurosawa, and to a lesser degree Ford, Hawks, Melville . . .

For instance, in The Mission, the group of bodyguards in the emptied-out shopping center, working together like a collective organism, responding in coordinated fashion, without verbal commands or instructions, each movement precise, and each round of gunfire a percussive element: unlike the gunfights in Woo etc., the dominant tropes are poise, stasis.

Acknowledging his debt to Kurosawa’s samurai films (standoff, pause, pause, pause, pause, eruption of blows with unclear if not illegible results, pause, pause, pause, gush of blood, then, finally, a body drops), To has said he wanted to capture and convey a sense of motion within stillness, with the figures emitting energy just by holding a pose.

With the more lighthearted Sparrow, To surprisingly adds Bresson to the experiment, both in form (images keyed to mysterious sleight of hand) and in content (a group of musically coordinated pickpockets).

In the culminating scene of the film — another piece of laboratory work — we encounter a busy but remarkably un-hectic crosswalk where a gunless “duel” between two thieves and their cronies plays out in a dance-like, slow-motion choreography of rain and umbrellas, of bodies brushing past and bumping into each other, the outcome decided by a tell-tale droplet of blood that barely survives the drizzle, on the edge of a razor blade.