Another brilliant Johnny To film: The Mission. This one is less extravagant than the others I’ve seen; but it has the same fragmented narrative, and the same gorgeously oblique nighttime cinematography. Only this one is more about things that don’t quite happen, about waiting for things to happen. A team of bodyguards is assembled to protect a crime boss from assassination. They succeed; the boss remains safe, and the rival responsible for the assassination attempts is found. But then, the group has other problems to face….
The memorable parts of this film are those poised on the brink of action. It’s all about waiting. The bodyguards frozen in posture, waiting for the next assault; or bored, since nothing is happening, they idly kick around a wadded-up ball of paper as if it were a soccer ball.
The assassins may come from anywhere; gunfire breaks out suddenly, with no chance of preparation. A sniper shoots from the top of a tall office building. Or shots ring out, seemingly from nowhere, in a largely deserted shopping mall. Or an ambush is launched from a seemingly deserted warehouse.
Johnny To sets up these scenes, their angles of vision and of shooting, with all the precision of John Woo (and before him, of Peckinpah, of Fuller, of classical action cinema); but the spaces in which these sightlines and shotlines are so precisely articulated, are the topologically twisted, non-Cartesian spaces of postmodernity.
Time is contorted as well as space; the moments of action are almost evanescent, you can’t keep them in mind, as they are surrounded and engulfed by the motionless stretches of before and after.
This is not the modernist waiting for a future that never arrives (as was the case in Waiting for Godot, in Blanchot’s novels, and for that matter in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo); it’s more that the action itself forms part of the waiting, the future is already enveloped in the present time of waiting, so that you are not waiting for something to happen that never does, but rather waiting precisely because it already is happening, it is here, it is now, and you have to wait in order to play your appointed part in it.
The Mission
Another brilliant Johnny To film: The Mission. This one is less extravagant than the others I’ve seen; but it has the same fragmented narrative, and the same gorgeously oblique nighttime cinematography. Only this one is more about things that don’t quite happen, about waiting for things to happen. A team of bodyguards is assembled to protect a crime boss from assassination. They succeed; the boss remains safe, and the rival responsible for the assassination attempts is found. But then, the group has other problems to face….
The memorable parts of this film are those poised on the brink of action. It’s all about waiting. The bodyguards frozen in posture, waiting for the next assault; or bored, since nothing is happening, they idly kick around a wadded-up ball of paper as if it were a soccer ball.
The assassins may come from anywhere; gunfire breaks out suddenly, with no chance of preparation. A sniper shoots from the top of a tall office building. Or shots ring out, seemingly from nowhere, in a largely deserted shopping mall. Or an ambush is launched from a seemingly deserted warehouse.
Johnny To sets up these scenes, their angles of vision and of shooting, with all the precision of John Woo (and before him, of Peckinpah, of Fuller, of classical action cinema); but the spaces in which these sightlines and shotlines are so precisely articulated, are the topologically twisted, non-Cartesian spaces of postmodernity.
Time is contorted as well as space; the moments of action are almost evanescent, you can’t keep them in mind, as they are surrounded and engulfed by the motionless stretches of before and after.
This is not the modernist waiting for a future that never arrives (as was the case in Waiting for Godot, in Blanchot’s novels, and for that matter in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo); it’s more that the action itself forms part of the waiting, the future is already enveloped in the present time of waiting, so that you are not waiting for something to happen that never does, but rather waiting precisely because it already is happening, it is here, it is now, and you have to wait in order to play your appointed part in it.