Jiang Hu–The Triad Zone
With Tony Leung Ka-fai, Sandra Ng, Roy Cheung, Chan Fai-hung, Eason Chan, Anthony Wong, Lee San-san, and Eric Tsang.
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John Woo’s Hong Kong films are a good example. Americans frequently interpreted their sentiment and over-the-top violence as facetious, yet as film theorist David Bordwell wrote, “Hardcore Hong Kong fans do not come to mock. Rather than reveling in the irony that postmodernists claim is our universal fate, [these fans recognize] a naive, nonconformist honesty missing from the mass-marketed product.” The genre-bending of Hong Kong cinema has since been absorbed into smirky American films like Neil LaBute’s Nurse Betty, but Jiang Hu–The Triad Zone, a 2000 gangster saga by relative newcomer Dante Lam, reminds us how dramatically effective the formula can be. Its tone shifts wildly from goofy comedy to honest reflection, but somehow the two never cancel each other out–in fact, the jarring juxtapositions make the film’s emotion all the more moving.
The film reflects a number of developments in Hong Kong cinema: the rise of romance (Wilson Yip’s Juliet in Love, screening at the Film Center in mid-March), the gangster film’s turn toward youth (Young and Dangerous, which has spawned numerous sequels, prequels, and offshoots), and most important, a more self-conscious attitude toward genre. American directors like LaBute and the Coen brothers often use genre references to mock their characters and assert their own cultural superiority, but the humor in Jiang Hu is more gentle and affectionate, and in synthesizing the romance and the gangster film, Lam creates a genre film that speaks to mortality and the disillusionment of middle age. As Jim hunts for the assassin, he’s revealed as someone trapped between an older generation of men now succumbing to natural causes (one of his rivals is dying of lung cancer, a scene Lam deftly introduces with an extreme close-up of curling cigarette smoke) and a younger generation of gangster wannabes who are even less concerned with ethics than he is.
