JFL

Viewers who expect solid Euro-horror from Die Weibchen will inevitably be disappointed, as the film offers none of the desired genre attractions. However, those who approach the film as a formalistic extravaganza will be delighted. The story, which is highly reminiscent of The Twilight Zone, could potentially lend itself to an exploitation treatment – after all, in American trash productions of the same era we can find a number of films that scandalise the feminist movement of the time. Though there is a scene involving bra burning, the central characters peculiarly do not take part in it. Rather, the development that the main female protagonist undergoes is characteristic of the age. Despite her initial efforts to restore the traditional order, said protagonist accepts her position in the mantis sisterhood, not because she hates men, but because she comes to terms with the fact that men will not take advice from women and that they are thus beyond help. The film’s main strength consists in the symbiosis of Brynych’s direction and Charly Steinberger's expressive, detached camerawork. The avant-garde experimental style, consisting of impressive camera compositions ranging from wild movement to framing the face of the ethereal Uschi Glas, creates a uniquely psychedelic work of pop art that in many aspects evokes the highlights of Kája Saudek’s comics.

Undergods is a deliberately stultifying nightmare of human misery framed by two guys in a post-apocalyptic future telling each other about their dreams, which gradually build up and then fall apart. As a concept, the film is remarkable in a number of ways, e.g. in its ability to evoke the grotesqueness of dreams, in which things that defy logic take place in seemingly everyday settings and bring the rottenness of our subconscious to the surface. Chino Moya presents to viewers a narrative in which absolutely anything can happen, but nothing happens at all, which further enhances the overall frustration.

Romain Quirot has created the perfect cinematic equivalent of French comic books, which are also fascinating due to their diverse worlds and are packed with captivating visions with panels depicting characters in tense poses while at the same time exuding pathos, fatefulness and bombast in which logic takes a back seat. The Last Journey of Paul W.R. thus enchants with its visual imagery of a post-apocalyptic, futuristic Earth. Here the tradition of Métal hurlant comic books is combined with the heritage of cinéma-du-look, thus creating a style based on comic-book characterisation and exaggeration. The narrative is composed of fragmentary episodes that do little to develop the overall story, or rather only delay its denouement at the cost of presenting viewers with another eye-pleasing and, in its details, imaginative slice of the movie’s world. There are few elements that make sense here, from the self-serving casting and complete underuse of Jean Reno to the fact that we find ourselves in a world where it doesn’t rain and the oceans have dried up, yet no one is thirsty, sweats or drinks in any of the scenes. The Last Journey of Paul W.R. thus has the potential to evoke both anger and enchantment, which in the end depends mainly on whether viewers disdain the lack of logic and blatantly formulaic nature of the film or, conversely, accept those aspects as camp and enjoy their striking guilelessness and grandiose theatricality.

The Stunt Woman begins as a Hong Kong variation on Truffaut's Day for Night, but later abandons the ode to stuntmen who put their bodies and lives on the line for the amazement of viewers. Ann Hui did not intend to celebrate movie magic, but rather to tell the story of the title character and the two men in her life (as indicated by the two intertitles with their names embedded in a film bearing the name of its female protagonist). Through this film with a touch of melodrama, she offers an eloquent depiction of the status of women not only in the film industry, but also in Hong Kong society as a whole. The crucial elements for the portrayal of the stuntwoman Ah Kam are not only her physical abilities on set, but also all of the other female characters, from her promiscuous roommate to the call girls at the bar that she runs for a while to the various wives, mothers and widows who are briefly glimpsed or only mentioned in the narrative. Ah Kam always remains different, refusing to conform to any formulaically predefined role, because of which her life may sometimes seem unfulfilled from a traditional perspective, but she always remains unrestrained and her own person. As such, however, she can never escape from being forced into and perceived through the lens of a standard pigeonhole due to her circumstances. After all, this becomes apparent in the shift in meaning of the distribution titles – while the original title is simply the Shakespearean Ah Kam, foreign distributors came up with the restrictive title The Stunt Woman, which expresses only a small part of what the heroine and the film itself are all about.

Caught in Time is a possible portent of the direction that Hong Kong cinema will take in the coming years. Though, this means the preservation and continuation of cinema in the sense of it being an industry, it is a very sad prospect in the cultural sense. Since its establishment, Emperor Film Production has had its sights set on the Chinese market, while at the same time looking for new talent in the domestic market. This is how it once managed to engage Dante Lam and take him through locally oriented movies to films made solely for the Chinese audience. Now screenwriter Lau Ho-Leung is being dragged along the same career trajectory, but at a greatly accelerated pace. After financing his directorial debut, the magnificent Hong Kong farce Two Thumbs Up, which is based exclusively on domestic motifs, Lau’s second feature film was conceived purely for the Chinese market. Caught in Time exhibits all of the shortcomings of contemporary Chinese genre movies, from fake-looking CGI effects to pomposity, literalness and, of course, the mandatory conformity to the regime and the blatant propaganda function. At first glance, this duel between cops and a gang of thieves, which is based on actual events that occurred in the first half of the 1990s, comes across as a ridiculously literal paraphrase of Heat, but instead of two fascinating characters, it uses generic characters serving to glorify Chinese cops and seemingly unwittingly legitimises the permanent surveillance of the public space and the proliferation of security cameras in Chinese cities. On closer inspection, however, we find several thought-provoking motifs that, in the spirit of Lau’s previous films, especially the excellent short Killer & Undercover, show that there is perhaps a slightly self-reflective core lying below the surface of the superficially ostentatious formalistic exhibition. If we accept the formulaic characters as the intention, we can see the screenplay as a conceptually constructed conflict between a Chinese detective from a propaganda flick and a thug from a Hong Kong action movie. If we further develop this thought, Caught in Time is a genre commentary on the overlapping influences between Hong Kong and China at the level of crime and its depiction in films. Lau seems to reflect the motif of thugs coming from China to Hong Kong to carry out armed robberies, which was established by the milestone Long Arm of the Law. Johnny Mak’s iconic film treated this theme as a complex social-critical drama wrapped in an action thriller and reflected the plight of Chinese immigrants in the then British colony and the illusion of freedom and high living associated with it. Based in reality, this motif subsequently became a classic formula of Hong Kong cinema that still persists in the new millennium. Caught in Time creates its inverted power dynamic by stylising its villain based on Hong Kong movie thugs and the glorified antiheroes of the heroic bloodshed subgenre. These are directly referenced in the scene from the “video cinema”, in which a goon watches John Woo’s classic The Killer.

This great short etude was made to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Hong Kong Baptist University, from which established screenwriter and now fledgling director Lau Ho-Leung graduated with a degree in film directing. Like the other entries in the HKBU 60th Anniversary Celebrations 6x10 Short Films project (a compilation of all of the anniversary shorts can be found here), his short contains the motifs of nostalgia and reminiscing about his student years. But instead of the literal pathos and retrospective sentimentality of the other filmmakers, he manages to mould these motifs into an entertaining narrative that inventively reflects the director’s own love of cinema. In just ten minutes, Killer & Undercover pays homage not only to specific films and names of Hong Kong cinema (including the casting of director Patrick Tam in one of the two roles), but also to its iconic genres, characters and specific narrative formulas. As a result, the encounter between the killer and the undercover cop in the iconic red taxi unfolds according to the rules of unpredictable coincidence and plays with nostalgia like the best Hong Kong films of the new millennium. In the context of Lau’s upcoming feature film Caught in Time, in which we find many echoes of the motifs from Killer & Undercover, albeit buried under the silt of submission to the Chinese market, this short is distinctly bittersweet as a reminder of the original and creative exuberance of Hong Kong cinema, which unfortunately is now a thing of the past.

The narrative of The Thieves is essentially an encyclopaedia of popular genres – one genre flows seamlessly into the next and each is gnawed to the bone. Passages characteristic of the overarching genre are interspersed with comedic scenes, deeply felt melodrama, generational squabbling and a touch of romance, and the style of the film switches to action thriller only in its final third. The climax is a long final confrontation between several interested parties, which results in a lengthy shootout with breath-taking choreography played out in seemingly ordinary interior and exterior settings.

The miracle workers of 87North Productions have brought out another wonder of the mid-budget action genre. They repeat the tried-and-true formula of building the entire film on the foundation of casting and placing the lead actors at the core of the action sequences. But it simply works splendidly again. The trademark of 87Eleven choreographers and stuntmen is to incorporate pain and fatigue into the choreography of action sequences, but here they multiply the wear and tear of the material seen in Atomic Blonde. Whereas Charlize Theron was still a perfect killing machine in that film despite all of the bruises, Mary Elizabeth Winstead was brilliantly cast as the assassin with a short half-life in Kate. Her character thus fittingly makes far more mistakes in the fight scenes, catching one blow for every second one that she delivers, but she pursues her target with ever greater lethality. Every bruise, open wound, black eye and trace of blood on her exterior becomes a unit on the barometer of her “I'm going to die anyway” attitude. The individual action sequences put all of this to good use, thus bringing about an original effectiveness. At the same time, they take the best and most stylish aspects from the tradition of the Thai and Japanese schools of action movies and set design and combine them with the playful formalism of the western tradition. This female version of Crank is essentially completed with visual stylisation, where cinematographer Lyle Vincent and director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan create a form that, in its climactic moments, gives the impression of anime drawn with digital neon (with certain passages evoking Redline and Ghost in the Shell). All of this together makes Kate not only a magnificently captivating and infectiously exciting action flick with a damn cool action heroine, but also one of the highlights of the action genre in recent years.

Today Yuen Wo-Ping is celebrated as the highly respected genius behind the graceful choreography of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix, and Donnie Yen as the embodiment of the poised master Ip Man. But both have a wacky side, which is on full display in the ultra-cheesy gem Mismatched Couples. This rollicking, crude mix of silly romantic comedy, shallow humour, exceedingly absurd breakdancing and every possible 1980s fashion and kung-fu excess recalls Yuen’s comedic roots. With the pair of films Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978) and Drunken Master (1978), he established a revolutionary mix of kung-fu slapstick and launched Jackie Chan’s stellar career as the clown of martial arts. Together with his brothers under the Yuen Clan banner, he was present at the inception of the Miracle Fighters series of fantastically bonkers kung-fu farces at the beginning of the 1980s. Mismatched Couples was Yuen’s penultimate comedy project before he made the jump to serious and tough action movies like Tiger Cage. In Mismatched Couples, he takes full advantage of the talent and flexibility of his then new discovery, Donnie Yen, and also gets involved in the action himself in front of the camera as the central comedic character. The way in which he and his brother Brandy Yuen, who handled the choreography, combine breakdancing with kung-fu moves, insipid gags and physical expressiveness is equal parts tremendously goofy and seriously brilliant. The whole film mixes awkwardness, kitsch and affect with remarkable inventiveness and grandiosely flawless choreography. The disjointed breakdance moves make it even more apparent that Yuen bases his comedies on turning human actors into action figures capable of performing exceedingly surreal feats, while also preserving their realistic physical dimension, thanks to which every such feat is simultaneously amusing and amazing. In the notional battle of breakdancing movies, the silly Breakin’: Electric Boogaloo (1984) has a clear advantage in terms of campy wardrobe and settings, but Mismatched Couples comes out ahead with its fantastically absurd moves, obnoxious humour and all manner of physical escapades, such as a tennis match on BMX bikes.

Naughty Boys is one of the most bonkers examples of the aesthetic and vulgar folksiness of Hong Kong movies. The circumstances of the making of this Jackie Chan-produced flop, wedged between Police Story and Armour of God, are unclear. However, I suggest that it may have been made during Chan’s recovery from an injury he suffered when making the latter film so that members of his Stuntmen Association would not be idle. The evident speed and cheapness of the production correspond to that theory, but then so would the fact that in Naughty Boys Jackie Chan, for the first and last time, gave deserving members of his team, with Mars at the fore, the chance to shine in central roles. The futile and basically non-existent screenplay brings together five central characters and builds around them the crudest, most insipid humour, though it fortunately also offers better action sequences. The era of girls-with-guns action flicks with emancipated female protagonists who didn’t merely tolerate things was just getting started at the time (though it built on an older tradition of martial-arts movies with female characters), so here the female characters can hold their own, but at the same time, the screenplay has them behaving like bimbos and enduring double-entendres – Carina Lau has a running joke based on everyone ogling and commenting on her breasts. For those who can survive the lewd scenes, awkward pseudo-humour and frantic mugging, a series of spectacular action sequences await in the last third, culminating in the final scene in a warehouse, which ranks among the best that Jackie Chan’s Stuntmen Association has been involved in. It is interesting to compare the formalistic treatment of the action here to films with Jackie Chan. On the one hand, we have here Chan’s typical brilliant handling of the scenes, where everything is well thought out and subordinated to clarity, from the costumes that clearly distinguish the bad guys from the heroes and the individual heroes from each other, to the staging and composition. The acrobatics in Naughty Boys and the overall construction of the final scene, in which the five central characters struggle with dozens of henchmen over a briefcase full of money, are also apparently inspired by Chan’s popular early grotesques, the individual pieces of which are enhanced by the setting of the vertically and horizontally layered warehouse space. On the other hand, there is a preponderance of significantly larger shots, which make the individual stunts stand out even more, but also put the individual actors in the background, unlike Chan’s face, which dominates his films and constantly highlights his direct involvement in the breakneck sequences. As a whole, Naughty Boys is a terribly unbalanced spectacle, where most of the film is absolutely intolerable, but the final part, in which action prevails, it is utterly breath-taking.