Beyond the Blood, It’s All About the Bonding
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
Published: September 10, 2009
UNTHINKABLY, no bullets fly in John Woo’s “Red Cliff,” this Hong Kong action master’s first new movie in six years. It’s as hard to imagine a Woo film without firearms as it is to contemplate a Fellini movie without fat people. But “Red Cliff” is set at the beginning of the third century, in the contentious waning days of China’s Han Dynasty, so Mr. Woo, though not by nature a stickler for realism, has to forego the solace of his customary ordnance — automatic, semiautomatic, even the quaint revolver — in favor of quieter instruments of death, like bows and arrows and long, sharp spears.
He’s not entirely outside his comfort zone: things did, fortunately, catch fire every now and then in the third century, and sometimes exploded (though not, perhaps, quite as often or as spectacularly as they do in “Red Cliff”). There were doves. And in the heat of battle men bonded, which is all John Woo needs to make even this ancient, gun-free tale his own.
When the smoke clears (which tends to take a while), Mr. Woo’s movies almost invariably turn out to be about the mysteries and the sorrows of male camaraderie, as revealed, then heightened, by the threat of violent, untimely demise. “Red Cliff” (Nov. 20) is a grand-scale war movie — it tells the story of a famous battle in the year 208, in which the forces of two of China’s kingdoms combined to defeat the army and navy of a far more powerful third — but practically all Mr. Woo’s films are war movies at heart.
The Hong Kong gangster pictures that made his reputation, “A Better Tomorrow” (1986), “The Killer” (1989) and “Hard-Boiled” (1992), are notable for the sheer numbers of lethal gunmen they deploy on screen. In the big action scenes sharkskin-suited triad killers surge toward the camera in wave upon wave upon wave like an angry sea. Mid mayhem, the action often stops to allow the bloodied, valiant heroes to exchange a soulful look — a moment Mr. Woo sometimes even freeze-frames for maximum virile significance.
Constrained a little by history, Mr. Woo indulges his taste for macho lyricism in “Red Cliff” somewhat less flamboyantly than he has in the past, but it’s still present in measurable quantities, notably in the relationship between the Viceroy of the Kingdom of East Wu, named Zhou Yu (Tony Leung), and the cunning, quasi-mystical military strategist Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro). Both are legendary figures in Chinese history, celebrated in fiction and poetry, and Mr. Woo, as is his custom, imagines them as larger-than-life brothers in arms, united in their deep understanding of the arts and rigors of war. They even play a duet on the Chinese zither called the guqin, harmonizing perfectly. (Zhuge Liang was well known for his proficiency on the instrument.) In Mr. Woo’s films the heroes, one way or another, always make beautiful music together.
It’s easy to ridicule these male-bonding fantasies, and the impossible forms they take in Mr. Woo’s elaborately choreographed gunfights and battle sequences: the beleaguered protagonists, always heavily outnumbered, will often stand back to back, firing with both hands to repel the hordes of bad guys descending upon them; they’ll toss guns to one another, with unerring accuracy, at critical moments; they’ll dive and roll and leap in the air to save their buddies’ skins; they’ll trade quick glances to tip off a particularly daring move, and these looks, however apparently imperceptible, are always instantly understood.
Mr. Woo is so profoundly immersed in his heroic visions that he seems, winningly, kind of oblivious to the possibility of derision: the brazen nuttiness of scenes like the climactic hospital shootout in “Hard-Boiled” — which goes on forever, piling improbabilities as high as corpses — is evidence of something more than the desire to show off cinematic technique. (Though there’s plenty of that on display.) It speaks of pure obsession.
Without that slightly demented singleness of purpose Mr. Woo would be just another action-movie virtuoso, blowing the audience through the back wall of the theater simply to prove that he can. (He would be, that is, Michael Bay.) And in the six Hollywood movies he directed between 1993 and 2003 — “Hard Target” (1993), “Broken Arrow” (1996), “Face/Off” (1997), “Mission: Impossible 2” (2000), “Windtalkers” (2002) and “Paycheck” (2005) — he never seemed fully himself, enjoyable though those pictures frequently were.
With the exception of the World War II combat extravaganza “Windtalkers,” Mr. Woo was compelled to jettison the romanticized male-friendship motifs that energized his Hong Kong films and to supply his action-figure heroes with female sidekicks in the effort, no doubt, to mute the ****erotic implications of his usual narrative style. The interactions of men and women in Mr. Woo’s American movies are stubbornly perfunctory, and in the absence of close compadres the true heat in these pictures is generated by the symbiotic relationship between the (male) hero and the (male) villain: a twisted bond, but something, at least, for him to hold on to.
It’s not about sex, really — though when Chow-Yun Fat and Leslie Cheung gaze into each other’s eyes in “A Better Tomorrow,” or when Tony Leung and Jacky Cheung act out a tearful death scene in “Bullet in the Head” (1990), you might be tempted to think so. The key to Mr. Woo’s work, in a way, is in the opening scenes of “Bullet in the Head,” in which three Hong Kong teenagers race their bikes, fight boys from other gangs, play practical jokes on one another and dream of a more prosperous future. (It’s 1967, and all Southeast Asia, not just Vietnam, feels like a combat zone.)
In the course of this melodramatic, passionate, insanely eventful movie, the childhood pals drift, together, into some pretty harrowing situations: fleeing murder charges in Hong Kong, they land in the nasty underworld of wartime Saigon then light out for the even more perilous countryside and wind up, in the film’s most disturbing scenes, in a Vietcong prisoner-of-war camp.
And as they endure these serial ordeals, Mr. Woo periodically flashes back to images of their boyhood on the Hong Kong streets, as if those were the events that had most decisively affected their lives, the scenes they’ve been playing out over and over again as grownups, with increasingly tragic results.
Mr. Woo’s sense of tragedy may be cartoonish at times, but its intensity and its sincerity are unmistakable, whether in goofy, borderline self-parodic films like “Hard-Boiled,” in florid action operas like “Bullet in the Head” and its American cousin “Windtalkers,” or in the somewhat more dignified costume-epic setting of “Red Cliff.” It’s the vision of life of an imaginative, movie-mad boy, dreaming of John Wayne while he plays soldiers or cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians in the streets, shouting, “Bang! Bang!” as he rolls on the ground and comes up firing.
This is the secret, I think, of the strange sweetness that pervades his movies, even when the blood is spurting, the body count is mounting, and the bullets (or arrows) are pelting down like typhoon rain. Maybe you have to have been a boy yourself to appreciate fully the weird thrill of imagining yourself a legendary hero, ridding the world of evil in the simplest, most direct way possible: shooting it to ribbons.
And it’s that visionary boyishness — sustained, improbably, over the 62 years of Mr. Woo’s life — that makes his action-movie style so distinctive. There’s no sadism in his cinematic bloodbaths and, often, not a great deal of clarity either: the violence comes at the viewer in a sensuous blur, headlong and immersive, exciting in some bizarrely pre-sexual way.
In “Red Cliff,” which was released in Asia as two movies, each two and a half hours long, Mr. Woo is back on home ground; it’s his first Cantonese-language film in 17 years, and despite the unaccustomed historical setting and the whisper-silent weaponry, his work here seems surer, happier than it did during his Hollywood sojourn, as if he were remembering something lost. (In the United States “Red Cliff” is being shown as a single, speedy two-and-a-half-hour film, cut by Mr. Woo himself.) He gives in to his most poetic side, listening to the wind, as Zhuge Liang does, and letting it take him where it will.
The beauty of John Woo’s best filmmaking is not in its sense of tragedy but in its sense of play, which is startlingly, and sometimes comically, unadulterated by the demands of physical reality. Bullets, arrows, spears and people all seem to fly, without obvious encumbrance, across the screen, as if in a boy’s dream. Your comrades in arms are your friends forever; and your enemies, as a Song Dynasty poet wrote in a meditation on Zhou Yu, turn to ashes — “gone like smoke.”
It’s mostly fake smoke in Mr. Woo’s movies, but it’s always in plentiful supply, and if you see it, as he does, with a child’s eye, it looks better than the real thing. Mr. Woo, at one time the coolest director in the world, has usually been thought of as a guilty pleasure, but that now seems wrong. If you put a gun to my head, I’d say that he’s a very, very innocent one.
prime rib rocks hard!
Originally Posted by Psycho Mantis
Red cliff II
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