TIME AND TIDE

Tsui Hark's Hong Kong Action Thriller
by Art Black

It's wholly appropriate that the theme song of Tsui Hark's thriller TIME AND TIDE is titled "Makes No Sense." Act one is implausible but understandable. Ne'er-do-well street punk Nicholas Tse meets rebounding lesbian Cathy Tsui and the pair wake up in bed together. Surprise one: she's a cop. Surprise two: Nic just knocked her up. Suddenly sprouting a conscience, he quickly joins a bodyguard agency in order to raise the bucks to raise his buckaroo.

Act two is where things go haywire. Nic foils an assassination attempt, causing Anthony Wong to fall out of the movie. Wu Bai takes his place, as an assassin who has fallen out with his former cohorts. Wu wants to lead the simple life with his pregnant gal, played by Candy Lo. His ex-buddies want him dead, and if they have to go through Candy to get to him, then so be it.

Act three, well, act three is pure action, pure mayhem, pure bliss. Many of the very best Hong Kong films of the past decades have tossed rationality out the window, and one of their most appealing aspects is the unapologetic disrespect for Hollywood storytelling rules and regulations. Anything can happen in a Hong Kong movie. Heroes die, villains win, children are not only threatened, they're burned alive or dangled by their hair out the windows of speeding cars. And the plots careen from comedy to tragedy to musical to melodrama without blinking an eye.

TIME AND TIDE can't seem to decide if it's an art film or a balls-to-the-wall actioner, but in the hands of a craftsman like Tsui, there's no reason it can't be both. While a great many of his films as both director and producer have been matinee classics magnified by virtue of pure imagination to the level of eye-popping spectacles, he's also the visionary who gave John Woo enough rein to invent himself. It's worth noting that Tsui is both a creator of trends and an avid follower/popularizer. Many of his films, including GREEN SNAKE (1993), THE LOVERS (1994), and the CHINESE GHOST STORY (1987-91) and ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA series (1991-97), are based in popular Chinese iconography. His strength is in updating familiar concepts, adding new twists, new technology, and making the old seem new, fresh, and genuinely postmodern.

Hong Kong New Wave
Tsui first saw fame as a key member of Hong Kong's New Wave of the late 1970s/early 1980s, with films such as the deliriously cynical and still disturbing DANGEROUS ENCOUNTER - 1 KIND (1980). His career exploded in the mid-1980s when every one of the dozens of films to bear his name or that of his production company, Film Workshop, seemed to be a trendsetting hit or at the very least a cult classic. Making the move to Hollywood in the late 1990s slowed his momentum, resulting in a pair of much-maligned Van Damme flicks, but for every brainless popcorn flick like KNOCK OFF (1998) there's a deeper, richer, more meticulously crafted piece of art like THE BLADE (1995).>BR> And personally, I love the popcorn just as much as the art. THE BLADE, based on the 1967 Chang Cheh/Wang Yu classic THE ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN, is a dazzling cinematic tour de force that was clearly inspired by Wong Kar Wai's gorgeous and ponderous swordplay epic ASHES OF TIME (1994). Tsui borrowed Wong's visual opulence and metaphorical resonance and married it to the gutbucket simplicity of chopsocky vengeance and kickass fight scenes to deliver a modern classic. KNOCK OFF on the other hand is pure brainless action, and perhaps the finest example extant of a director simply having fun with his medium. Accepting that the plot is absurd to the point of idiocy, Tsui simply runs with it, playing tricks, amusing himself, employing wacky camera angles, adding ridiculous shots simply because he can, zooming his camera to follow the path of a phone call or shooting inside a cheap sneaker as it falls apart during a foot race.

TIME AND TIDE, written by Tsui and Koan Hui (who previously collaborated on the screenplays of THE BLADE and BLACK MASK), plays both sides of the fence. Wong Kar Wai's influence is again evident in the early scenes, in the colorful, crowded compositions, the gimmicky lenses, the toying with film speed, and in the jagged human interactions. The film is also reminiscent of the quiet wave of recent HK films built of rich, quirky character studies and resonant detail, with a sideways slide into action territory. Wilson Yip's superb JULIET IN LOVE (2000) and BULLETS OVER SUMMER (1999) are the best examples, or Riley Yip's somewhat less successful METADE FUMACA (1999).

In TIME AND TIDE, a female bodyguard is introduced as a background character, without dialogue. She's overweight and plain looking, and the hero ponders in voiceover not only how she got into the business but what her boyfriend is like. It's a throwaway moment, of no consequence, and she immediately disappears from the narrative. But the sense of detail, of place, of humanity enriches the film immeasurably.

Also clearly echoed in TIME AND TIDE is director Johnny To's marvelous, award-winning bodyguard flick, THE MISSION (1999). A vaguely detached, vaguely Japanese-influenced examination of male bonding and the moments behind the macho, THE MISSION focuses largely on the down time of the protagonists, as they struggle to amuse themselves while waiting for something to happen. The violence, the action occur almost as sidebars to the real story. Anthony Wong, the leader of the bodyguards in THE MISSION, basically reprises his role for TIME AND TIDE.

Although here his character's nonsensical reactions signal the moment when the film loses its grip on reality and spins off into pure fasten-yr-seatbelt, action rollercoaster territory. Certain scenes and motivations have clearly been deleted, although the dialogue occasionally refers back to the missing footage. ("Damn, what about the champagne?") In fact, TIME AND TIDE was radically altered in post-production. The original cut ran to over three hours, and was considered by Tsui to be far too slow moving. In the process of tightening it up and trimming it down, he reorganized the entire script. The original story began with the attempted suicide of a fat woman who is saved by Nic and his uncle (Anthony), the leader of a highly professional group of bodyguards for whom Nic works from the very beginning. In the final film, Tsui has trimmed many of Nic and Anthony's scenes, while leaving Wu's sequences more or less intact. The bodyguards are now depicted as a motley, unprofessional crew, Anthony as a shady loanshark and grifter; the relationship between Anthony and Nic is nebulous and ill-defined; and the suicidal woman appears about halfway through the film as a client being cheated by Anthony.

The duality of the pregnant women is an undeniably heavyhanded way of drawing parallels between the two protagonists, and frankly, the character played by model/TV actress Cathy Tsui is little more than a plot device, a reason for Nic to take a bodyguard job. Candy Lo's role is more pivotal, and although equally insubstantial as a character, the brief performance by pop singer Candy Lo was striking enough to garner her one of two well-deserved nominations for Best Supporting Actress at this year's Hong Kong Film Awards. (The other was for her role as the long-suffering best friend of Cecilia Cheung in Aubrey Lam's entertaining relationship drama TWELVE NIGHTS. The award ultimately went to Qin Hai Lu for her performance in DURIAN DURIAN.)

Nicholas Tse, son of 1960s matinee idol Patrick Tse Yin and actress/beauty contestant Deborah, burst on to the scene in 1997 with the first in a series of hit CDs and films. He took home the 1998 HK Film Award as Best New Performer for his leading role in YOUNG AND DANGEROUS: THE PREQUEL. After featuring in the 1999 international hit GEN-X COPS, he (wisely) opted not to star in the sequel and subsequently announced that TIME AND TIDE would be his last action film. Instead he plans to concentrate on his music career; he has also co-directed a portion of the omnibus film HEROES IN LOVE (2001), along with GEN-X co-star Stephen Fung. Currently linked romantically with superstar Faye Wong (to the delight of the Chinese tabloids), Nic is a born star, an idol, an icon, an epitome of casual cool. In a nifty inversion of expectations, director Tsui has made him the wannabe, while cinematic sophomore Wu Bai plays the seasoned professional, the heroic centerpiece.

Pop and Politics
Wu Bai is among Taiwan's best and certainly best-known rock stars. Following his 1992 debut CD, he has released somewhere in the vicinity of 100 CDs - legit and bootleg, solo and with his multi-ethnic band China Blue - although in established Chinese tradition, the same songs turn up time and again on multiple records. As songwriter and producer he has contributed to countless records by Chinese artists, most recently the avant-techno CD by genre rebel Karen Mok. Wu's songs have turned up in numerous Chinese films, including ISLAND OF GREED (1997), about political scandals in Taiwan, garnering him a best song nomination at the HK Film Awards.

In the political arena, Wu has long been a supporter of recently elected Taiwanese president Chen Shui Bian, a promoter of Taiwanese independence, and Wu performed a song at Chen's inauguration party. This led to quiet repercussions on the mainland as Wu was summarily stripped of his title as Best Taiwanese Male Singer at an MTV/CCTV music awards ceremony. (Popular Taiwanese singer and Sprite spokesperson A-Mei also sang at the inauguration; her ads for Sprite were immediately yanked on the mainland.) In 1999, Wu made several commercials for Taiwan beer, a top brand that had slipped in popularity. Following his commercials, Taiwan Beer rose to an 80 percent share of the market. In the martial arts arena, Wu has made no secret of his love for Japanese pro wrestling and sometimes climbs into the ring with his buddy Muto Kenshi.

Wu's first acting gig was a walk-through role as an itinerant street musician in the 1998 mainland drama BEAUTIFUL NEW WORLD, followed by a critically lauded performance in the 1999 Taiwanese film THE PERSONALS. After seeing THE PERSONALS, Tsui offered Wu the role in TIME AND TIDE. Admittedly, Wu is far from a thespian - at least at this stage of his career - but he carries himself with requisite rock 'n roll aplomb, which is more than perfect for his role in TIME AND TIDE. The character was rewritten with Wu in mind, making him more of a sad loner to match Wu's dark, somber music.

Not content with three pop singers in the film, Tsui cast Joventino Couto Remotigue (aka Jun) as the leader of the villains. A popular and respected musician, Jun is rumored to have hated this particular cinematic experience so much that he intentionally put on weight to make himself unappealing to other filmmakers. It may be apocryphal, but it's a good story - although in all honesty I can't imagine anybody wanting to cast Jun after seeing his performance in TIME AND TIDE. As in far too many HK productions, the non-Chinese speaking actors are appallingly bad, their dialogue embarrassing, their delivery cartoonish.

If Tsui Hark has learned anything from Hollywood, well then frankly I don't know what it is. TIME AND TIDE is more nonsensical, more non-linear, more non-sequiter than anything he's created to date. But the cinematography by Herman Yau and Ko Chiu Lam slips so effortlessly from self-conscious artistry to documentary realism to staggering action set-pieces that it easily surmounts the narrative flaws. Just wait'll you see the three-way blowout in the tenement. "We shot that action scene around Jack's apartment," Tsui has said. "We got screaming, yelling everyday because we were jumping from roof to roof, and we broke so many structures! We had to pay a lot in compensation. But everything is real. Except Jack's apartment, which blows to pieces. That's a set." It's a truly amazing sequence, a model of suspense and action, unfortunately capped by a poorly-executed computer-generated explosion. And it's not even the film's climax.

TIME AND TIDE, Tsui Hark's first Hong Kong movie in nearly five years, received its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and is the first contemporary HK action film to play regular US theaters outside the art-house or specialty circuit. But it's not a mall movie. Middle America is going to walk out of the theater scratching its collective balding head. TIME AND TIDE is tailored for action fans. It's got a smattering of hand-to-hand action scenes and a plethora of imaginative gunplay extravaganzas. TIME AND TIDE is a mini masterpiece, a delightful encapsulization of everything that put HK on the cinematic map to begin with. Next up from Tsui: sequels to BLACK MASK and his trendsetting 1983 classic ZU WARRIORS FROM THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN.

Written by Art Black for KUNGFUMAGAZINE.COM

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