Michael Wells VS The NYAFF Round Two! After This Our Exile! City of Violence!

So it’s true that the image is largely self-chosen – that’s “branding,” and that’s what you have to do these days to get even the modest attention the NYAFF does. But it’s also true that if you actually pay attention to what they’re doing, these guys are broader in their tastes than the image suggests. And they’re justifiably proud of showcasing that with their screenings of Patrick Tam’s “After This Our Exile” (Hong Kong, 2006). Here’s one of the best examples yet of their long-standing soft spot for stylistically and emotionally rigorous, but still heartwrenching, small-scale slices of life.

This would be a superb movie under any circumstances. What makes it an event is that it’s the return to directing, after seventeen years, of one of the standard bearers of the Hong Kong New Wave. That late ‘70s and ‘80s generation of iconoclastic young filmmakers carved out a small but stubborn space for personal and political cinema (sometimes you might even call it art cinema) in the ravenously commercial HK industry. Tam’s distinctive, odd films like “Nomad” and “Final Victory,” his long absence from the director’s chair, and his record as a mentor and occasional editor for current HK art cinema poster boy Wong Kar-wai, make him an especially legendary exemplar. (Incidentally, NYC’s Asian-American International Film Festival will also run a Tam mini-retrospective from July 20-22.)

Small-scale in this case certainly doesn’t mean short – this is the full, nearly three hour, cut of the film (which also exists in a two-hour version). It earns every minute of its epic length, despite a seemingly modest premise: a matter-of-fact portrait of the ambivalent relationship between a young boy and his neglectful and narcissistic father, a compulsive gambler and petty crook, in Malaysia’s Chinese expatriate community. Tam is far more naturalistic and less nostalgic than Wong, despite using “In the Mood for Love”’s co-cinematographer, the great Mark Lee Ping-bin, who creates a humid, paradisical atmosphere that contrasts poignantly with the blighted lives under examination. It’s harder to be swooningly romantic about a decimated childhood than about an impossible love between adults.
If this makes the movie sound bleak and tough to watch, that impression is belied by its capacious kindness and empathy. Not to mention the appealing, doe-eyed features of nine-year-old lead Gouw Ian Iskander, who presents a remarkably mature presence, as well as the ability to cry on cue like nobody’s business. The biggest attention-getter among the cast, though, has deservedly been Aaron Kwok, as the bad dad. I’d never seen enough of Kwok to have an opinion on him, although I was well aware of his longtime rep as a pop music idol pretty boy with a sideline in lightweight acting. Now 41, he seems ready to shake off that stigma for good. He inhabits the role so completely that if he weren’t a superstar already, it might barely occur to me to think about his acting. Although the character is a black hole of ego, there’s none in the performance – Kwok doesn’t showboat, neither by sentimentalizing his character, nor by turning him into a cartoon monster. With no unnecessary fuss, he goes about portraying a perfectly ordinary guy who happens to be a worthless son of a bitch.

It would hardly be fair to leave off without a mention of Charlie Young, another almost-not-young-anymore HK screen veteran, in the potentially thankless supporting role of the long-suffering mother who drifts in and out. It’s an especially difficult part in that the audience’s feelings towards her are likely to be more ambivalent than towards any other character onscreen. Like Kwok, she deals with it by simply being her character, straight, no chaser, no apologies. The wordless, single-shot scene where she is re-seduced (probably for the thousandth time) by her mate right after a particularly awful confrontation is astounding – sexy, delicate yet disturbing, and utterly convincing. It’s one of the boldest moves in a movie that’s bold in its modesty, and that rewards your close attention and time by making you feel part of a family – for better and for worse.

At first glance, it’s tough to draw any comparison between “After This Our Exile” and “The City of Violence” (South Korea, 2006). But here’s my shot at it: both are about loss, regret, and the curdling of relationships that should be strong enough to endure a lifetime. Mostly, though, “City of Violence” just wants to kick ass. It does. Directed, co-written and co-produced by, and co-starring, Ryu Seung-wan, an already experienced action movie auteur who’s 33 and looks like he’s about 22, it’s a meat and potatoes tough-guy revenge flick as straightforward as its title. The heroes never hesitate, never doubt and refuse to give it a rest no matter how many gallons of glistening red they shed. The villains are irredeemable and like to sneer, but are given just enough humanity that you really, really hate them and relish the thought of their eventual comeuppance, rather than regarding them as disposable obstacles. The story goes from point A to point Z pretty simply in barely over 90 minutes. The wa-wa rock guitar… wa-was.

For the record, the story has the Rule-Breaking Big City Cop (top stuntman Jung Doo-hong, quietly charismatic and confident in a lead acting role) returning to the town of his upbringing for the funeral of a murdered childhood pal. He teams with Ryu, a hotheaded member of their former clique, to smoke out the culprits, who, unsurprisingly to anyone in the theater seats, turn out to be bigger fish in this small pond than initially assumed. Proving no movie is too simple to be interpreted, I detected in the plot machinations around real estate and local politics, a faint but clear strain of resentment about the rapid modernization and urbanization of the Korean landscape and daily life.

“Whatever. How’s the fighting?” Pretty damn good, and nary a wire or computer pixel in evidence as the players leap, flip, kick, punch and slash. (Guns? Who needs ‘em when you’ve got swords, pipes and bats, all variety of knives, kerosene and lighters, lethal breakdancing teenagers and four perfectly good limbs?) This is old-school hurtin’, of the kind that’s dishearteningly rare even on Asia’s screens in our benighted era. On the other hand, the choreography is often shot and edited with the choppy quality too common nowadays, draining some of its power and clarity. So it doesn’t quite rise to the level of cheaper and cruder old kung fu chestnuts, where the legibility and force of the action can provoke involuntary marionette-like movements in a viewer. Still, Ryu and company give us the real deal, the finely honed human body pushed to its limits, with plenty of occasion to “ooooh” and “whoa” and “OUCH!” Short of unflinching psychological acuity and cathartic heartbreak, what more can you ask for?

By Michael Wells