Two Days! Four Films! Michael Wells Checks In From The New York Asian Film Festival With Looks at The Banquet, Retribution, Exiled and Dog Bite Dog!

That sense that you’re at a party where a movie screening just happens to break out is less evident in this year’s sixth annual edition, which started Friday the 22nd, although it’s cerrtainly not absent. Publicity frontman Grady Hendrix, author of the slash-and-burn prose on the fliers and the website, still gives each movie a high-volume carnival barker’s introduction while raffling off prizes and usually wearing one of his gaudy suits (the tiger stripe one being only the most notorious). His four more subdued colleagues, Brian Naas, Goran Topalavic, Paul Kazee and Daniel Craft, are still on hand with him, tearing tickets, schmoozing casually with patrons and sharing frank personal opinions about the merits of this or that movie, each one of them still more a fan than an administrator. The audience is still vocally appreciative.

But it’s all dialed down a couple notches, to my perception, at least. Maybe the boys are tired – the preparation was more draining this year than usual, with one of the main sponsors, Midway Games, temporarily jumping ship at the eleventh hour and then coming back in a short while later. Maybe it’s the new venue – Greenwich Village’s chic new IFC Center has replaced the previous main site, the East Village’s charmingly run-down, somewhat grindhouse-ish institution, the Anthology Film Archives. The ambience is unavoidably different, and the IFC Center management also seemingly laid down the law about staying on schedule, a change from Subway’s previous highly casual approach, which allowed lots of room for play but also meant screenings often started a half-hour late or more.

Whatever – the seats are a lot more comfortable, the bathrooms are cleaner, and, finally, the play is still the thing. I hit four of them in the first twenty-four hours, settling into the routine as into a comfy old sweater, despite the altered surroundings. Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet (China, 2006), a loose Hamlet riff set amid a venomously feuding10th-century Chinese imperial family, was itself almost too comfy and familiar. It feels like the umpteenth pan-Chinese, big-budget wire-fu costume piece since Crouching Tiger, although it’s not. It’s an incestuous little genre, and Feng borrows from Crouching Tiger the same action choreographer (Yuen Wo-ping), composer (Tan Dun, who may as well have just e-mailed over some MP3s from a stock music library) and designer (Tim Yip). Still and all, this is the most entertaining example I’ve seen since Hero, in spite of its substantial number of banal elements. The lush visuals are breath-catchingly beautiful without quite tipping into garishness (they made me feel like running up to the screen and rubbing my face against it – I didn’t) and the flying fights can be poetic and thrilling. Both of these virtues contrasted with last year’s highly similar but pretty butt-numbing Curse of the Golden Flower.

No later moments ever top the early couple of sequences where the story’s melancholy/vengeful prince (Daniel Wu) sojourns with a group of silent, white-robed, masked dancer-actors in a green forest, a utopian retreat interrupted by assassins in black, clanking armor in a truly astonishing dream/nightmare vision. These haunting scenes point to where the movie actually needs to go, if only the filmmakers would notice – much further into the realm of abstraction and hallucination, instread of getting tied up in self-conscious knots of middlebrow tragic melodrama and less-than-Shakespearean speechmaking.

I followed it up right away with Retribution (Japan, 2006) from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a director who’s never been shy about abstraction. This is KK in his more audience-friendly mode, meaning he’s more or less making a horror movie. I was surprised to find it as much of a greatest hits compilation as Banquet – it’s a virtual mashup of Kurosawa’s Cure (depressive detective with relationship trouble; mysterious contagion of interpersonal violence) and Pulse (ghost woman in crimson; otherworldly malice that spreads with pitiless amoral randomness and a hint of apocalypse). Even without these plot repetitions, Retribution would be consistent with his previous chillers in its disheartening vision of contemporary Japan as a dehumanized landscape becoming covered over in cruddy concrete and metal, its people wandering in increasingly isolated little circles.

Favorite leading man Koji Yakusho, who’s struck maybe three false notes in his entire career, is the tightly-wound, hangdog cop haunted by a phantom with an ear-splitting wail, who seems to accuse him of being the serial killer who did her in – and he might well be, though he can’t quite remember. Kurosawa’s fuzzy, leave-the-dots-disconnected approach to narrative and character remains alternately fascinating and frustrating, as ever. Any reservations feel pointless, though, in those several scenes where he gets down to just plain freaking you out – the guy in the seat behind me yelped aloud in terror at two different points, and I couldn’t blame him.

Saturday was my occasion for a double feature of the New Hong Kong Action Cinema (capitalization makes it look like I’ve come up with some groundbreaking new critical concept, no?). The officially anointed heir to the genre’s throne, director Johnnie To, was back again with Exiled (2006), in which mob footsoldiers voyage reluctantly to Macau to take out a former buddy who betrayed their boss, and naturally find gangland politics and their own divided loyalties complicating the assignment. To’s got this stuff down to a science, for better and for worse. He uses onscreen space, and the perfectly weighted blending of silence and noise, stillness and movement, like a conductor uses his baton. Everything from a muted conversation to a theater-rattling, dozen-gun shootout has the elegance and crackling, controlled energy of a tango.

As yummy as it all is, with every supercool crime movie To makes, I more and more suspect he’s going through the motions. Exiled is hollow at its core, especially if you’ve had your fill of this macho-sentimental, alternate moral universe where a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, a woman’s gotta stand on the sidelines looking teary-eyed and forlorn, and killers are redeemed by grand, romantic gestures. I can’t overestimate what the stars do to make it more humanly credible – To stalwarts all, Francis Ng, Roy Cheung, Lam Suet, Simon Yam, Nick Cheung and above all the incomparable Anthony Wong, can make a raised eyebrow or world-weary shoulder slump worth a thousand words. Watching them play off each other is bliss.

For a short while in the second half, To lets the story wander off in some promisingly off-the-beaten-path directions, even briefly letting the couple of female characters behave with some agency and realism. But I’m still waiting for him to turn out another crowd-pleasing genre flick as subversive of its own cliches and as heartfelt and odd as 2003’s action-comedy-kung fu-romance-thriller-Buddhist allegory Running on Karma (co-directed with Wai Ka-fai, admittedly).

Soi Cheang’s chaotic and gory Dog Bite Dog (2006) makes a somewhat more ambitious stab at revising the HK action film, but comes up shorter in the end. Edison Chen, member of Hong Kong’s crowded teenie-bopper heartthrob parade, is surprisingly credible as a near-feral young killer, raised as a child cage fighter in Cambodia, who arrives in HK to carry out a hit. He ends up stranded there and on the run from a nearly-as-barbaric young cop (the intriguingly seedy-faced Sam Lee) who tears his way across the city after his quarry, the pair leaving battered and bloody bodies in their wake.

Dog Bite Dog strains to be cynical, edgy and philosophically profound, but this is really cotton candy with a coating of gravel and broken glass. It’s the old-fashioned exploitation blend of viciousness and sentimentality, complete with an insipid, childlike heroine who’s employed as a punching bag to elicit the easy audience sympathy that’s otherwise lacking. All the same, there’s no denying Cheang’s technical skill and bravado, and he generates a fair amount of tension and excitement for a while, although the movie exhausts itself (and me) well before it ends. I can’t deny I’me looking forward to a change of pace on Sunday with Wong Kar-wai mentor Patrick Tam’s much-heralded comeback movie, the family drama After This Our Exile.

By Michael Wells