Simon Thompson delves into the career of Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To…
Intensely prolific (with a back-catalogue dating all the way back to 1980) and defiant, Johnnie To is a Hong Kong filmmaking giant who, despite approaching the age of 70 this year, has shown no sign of slowing down or falling out of love with making movies. To contextualise To’s place within domestic Hong Kong cinema I’d liken him to all the members of The Wild Bunch at once in the sense that he’s seen both Hong Kong as a nation as well as the Hong Kong film industry change so rapidly around him (post the 1997 handover), yet he has refused to abandon his artistic principles no matter what.
Within his country’s film industry To is a kind of half Jean Pierre Melville half Daryl Zanuck figure, with his studio Milkyway Image, co-founded with his partner Wai Ka-fai (an esteemed writer/director in his own right) allowing him to exclusively pick projects to his liking.
Although To has directed movies in various genres, his work within the crime/gangster genres is what he is best known for at home and overseas, with masterpieces such as both Election movies, Exiled, Mad Detective, All About Ah Long, PTU, and Vengeance all being standouts in the genre.
Born in April 1955 within the notorious Kowloon Walled City, a densely populated slum of Hong Kong, recognised for its triad activity, To, in stark contrast to the characters he depicts in his work, seemingly avoided the temptation to slip into criminality through focusing on filmmaking. Influenced by the likes of King Hu, Akira Kurosawa, Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, and Jean Pierre Melville, To began his career at the age of 17 working as a messenger for the Hong Kong tv station TVB.
By the early 1970s, through sheer determination, To had risen to the positions of both executive producer and director for TVB, but a filmmaker of To’s talent and vision wasn’t going to work solely as a television director hired gun for long. He took his first steps towards prominence in 1978 when he worked as an assistant director on an action-comedy entitled The Good, the Bad and the Beauties.
In 1980, however, To’s career as a feature film director got well and truly started with his debut The Enigmatic Case, a wuxia (martial arts and chivalry) action movie, made in the style of his hero King Hu. Although you can see the little quirks which would define To’s later style, The Enigmatic Case was largely treated with indifference by audiences, forcing To back into working in TV – something which would turn out to be a blessing in disguise.
Keeping within the wuxia sub-genre that he loved so much, To helmed a big-budget TV adaptation of Louis Cha’s martial arts epic novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes. This is the first in a series of books known as The Condor Trilogy, which, since their publication in the late 1950s-early 1960s, have become a pop culture mainstay in Hong Kong.
Faithfully rendering Cha’s work on the big screen, Legend of the Condor Heroes was a smash hit both in Hong Kong as well as mainland China, with viewing figures in the latter reaching 90%- which in a country with that big a population is staggering. With a smash hit on the small screen in his hands, To returned to film in the mid-1980s, yet, despite his television success still found himself stuck as a journeyman assistant director up until the end of the decade when he made the critically acclaimed All About Ah Long.
While To’s fortunes as a director were changing with his previous two movies The Eighth Happiness and The Big Heat, two completely contrasting works (the former a romantic comedy and the other a heroic bloodshed action movie in line with the works of John Woo, Ringo Lam, and Tsui Hark) All About Ah Long was To’s first truly critically acclaimed film as a director.
All About Ah Long tells the story of an ex-convict struggling builder/single father named Ah Long (played by Chow Yun Fat), taking care of his son Porky (Huang Kun-Hsuen). Ah Long and Porky’s lives are completely turned upside down through the re-emergence of Ah Long’s ex and Porky’s mother Por-Por ( Sylvia Chang) who, previously believing her son to be dead but discovering that he is very much alive, wants to take Porky back to her new home in the United States.
Hong Kong cinema and the Hong Kong film industry in the mid-1980s to the early 1990s was dominated by heroic bloodshed action epics and fast-paced action comedies by directors such as Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Corey Yeun, and Wong Jing. This is why the critical and commercial success (the latter of which largely came from Chow Yun Fat’s involvement as he was easily the biggest box office draw in Hong Kong at that point) of All About Ah Long, a Kramer vs Kramer style family drama, was such a noticeable departure from the established consensus that governed Hong Kong cinema in that era.
But in the early 1990s, in spite of the positive reception to All About Ah Long, To mainly found himself directing by the numbers action movies and comedies which lacked any kind of identity or auteur ownership at all. During this period of To’s career he came to realise that if he wanted to make movies that weren’t strictly driven by chasing box office trends he was going to need to do something truly drastic to make that happen.
In 1996 To and fellow director Wai Ka-fai, founded their own studio Milkyway Image, a completely independent studio which allowed To the creative autonomy he had been clamouring for. Through the formation of Milkyway Image, To began his foray into the crime and noir dramas which have truly made his name both at home and abroad.
Due to Milkyway being an independent outlet, To and Ka-fai made a defiant push to resist the rampant commercialism that had overtaken the Hong Kong film industry after the 1997 handover to the Chinese government from Britain through making hardboiled crime movies which pulled no punches when it came to their subject matter and violence. It would be three years into the studio’s existence, however, when it would start to gain attention, thanks to the release of two key movies, Running Out of Time and The Mission (not to be confused with the Roland Joffe film of the same name).
The importance of these two films to the establishment of Milkyway’s style and ethos cannot possibly be overstated, as, with the benefit of hindsight, you can see the beginning of the visual and thematic motifs that have come to define To’s career over the last two decades.
Both released in 1999, Running Out of Time and The Mission are two sides of the same coin ideologically and visually. Running Out of Time is a classic cat and mouse thriller in every sense of the term, focusing on a maverick cop, Inspector Ho Sheung-Sang (Sean Lau), trying to catch a master jewel thief named Cheung (Andy Lau). The twist however is that Cheung has terminal cancer, and realising there is a possibility of him being dead at any moment he decides to challenge Ho Sheung-Sang to a 72 hour chase.
While Running Out of Time has some elements that are reminiscent of the John Woo and Ringo Lam style of action filmmaking that had dominated the Hong Kong crime/thriller genre for well over a decade by this point, what differentiated Running Out of Time from its contemporaries was To’s naturalistic style of filmmaking. If John Woo were to make a movie like this in his heyday, you could bet your bottom dollar that there would be white doves, explosions, and shootouts before the first tea break. But what To did with this movie that was so interesting is to make everything so slow. Of course there are action set pieces and a tensely paced story, but To’s adoption of a more Michael Mann style approach to a thriller mean the best scenes are mainly the verbal/psychological battles between Andy Lau and Sean Lau.
Critically and commercially, Running Out of Time was a big hit in Hong Kong, making $14,651,824 at the box office and being nominated for a best film and a best director award for To at the Hong Kong film awards. In one fell swoop To had given Milkyway Image a signature film to build upon and also had begun to establish himself as one of Hong Kong cinema’s most exciting auteurs.
To’s follow up to Running Out of Time, The Mission, went on to be an ever bigger critical hit than its predecessor, being nominated for and winning multiple awards at various ceremonies such as The Golden Horse Awards and The Hong Kong Critics Society Awards.
Taking inspiration from his hero Sam Peckinpah, The Mission is an intimate crime-thriller about a group of the toughest triads around, who have been hired by a boss named Lung (Eddy Ko) after an attempt on his life. Trouble rears its ugly head, however, when Lung discovers that one of the men that he hired has been sleeping with his wife, placing the other members into the position of being forced to kill a sworn brother.
Like Kubrick’s The Killing and Kurosawa’s High and Low, The Mission is a movie which traffics in paranoia from the very start. To spends his time meticulously introducing the audience to each triad in a remarkably exposition-free style, so when the plot does darken and all these guys are forced to turn on one another it hits that extra bit harder.
To’s continued use of washed blue filters, mainly diegetic sound, and natural lighting ,a practice largely carried over from Running Out of Time, is on full display in The Mission, creating a documentarian look in the vein of Friedkin and Costa-Gavras that To has sought to establish in many of the movies he has made with his own production company.
In the 2000s, To’s international reputation and Milkyway Image continued to grow and grow thanks to the release of four crime movies spanning the years 2003-06 PTU, Election, Election 2, and Exiled.
To’s mid 2000s flurry would begin with PTU (short for Police Tactical Unit) in 2003, a more stripped back effort when compared to The Mission, for instance. PTU is a homage to Kurosawa’s Stray Dog that focuses upon an anti-Triad tactical unit commander named Lo Sa (Lam Suet) trying to find his missing service weapon after losing it in an ambush by a group of Triads. Eager not to have to deal with a bundle of paperwork the rest of the unit scramble to help Lo Sa navigate the complex Hong Kong underworld.
What makes PTU stand out from other movies of its kind is that it’s not a simple goodies vs baddies caper. Both the eponymous tactical unit and the triads are rendered with many shades of grey, as each of the organisations, through Yau Nai-Hoi’s and Au Kin-Yee’s script, are shown to have far more in common with each other structurally than they would care to admit.
To’s decision to shoot the movie on location as much as humanly possible (the final shootout sequence is meant to take place in an area called Canton Road, but To couldn’t get police permission to shoot there so shot it in an adjacent area) and entirely at night, allows the viewer a window into the sealed world of Hong Kong’s seedy underbelly that very few films can provide.
When you contrast a movie like PTU with the 2002 masterpiece Infernal Affairs for example, which also focuses on the Triads, as great as Infernal Affairs is it uses the language of Hollywood stylisation and you’re never under the impression that what you’re seeing isn’t a fictional story- where as in PTU To’s intimate camerawork and sparse visuals make you feel like you’re really on a stakeout with the characters.
While PTU netted To his customary acclaim in Hong Kong, winning big at various award ceremonies, PTU was also the beginning of To growing his reputation in the West, as PTU won the Asia Trades Wind award at the Seattle International Film Festival. But the international attention for PTU would pale in comparison to the exposure his next two films would receive.
To’s masterpiece duology Election and Election II would prove to be his calling card internationally. An epic duology in the vein of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, the Election series is a comprehensive look at the inner workings of Triad society, which, although foreign viewers may be superficially familiar with it through pop culture, has roots and ceremonies going back all the way to the 14th and 15th centuries and has been a part of many significant events in Chinese history from the shadows, for example the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 20th century and the Taiping Civil War of the mid 1860s-early 1870s.
Unlike other criminal enterprises Triad society has a strong internal democracy, which forms the narrative backdrop of To’s Election. The plot of Election follows two warring Triad factions, one led by a gangster named Big D (Tony Leung-Ka Fai), and the other by Lok (Simon Yam) as they both tussle to take over the vacant position of chairman. What follows is an hour and forty minutes of deceit, intrigue, and bloodshed which constantly keeps you guessing until the climax.
Although the film explores traditions and nuances of aspects of Hong Kong culture that foreigners/western audiences might not be readily familiar with, the imagery, the characterisation and themes of Election are so vivid and richly realised that an audience can simply enjoy it on the strength of its merits as a piece of filmmaking.
Like The Sopranos or Goodfellas before it, the most interesting thing about Election is how To humanises the film’s two main characters Big D and Lok. While neither character is likeable in the slightest, as To shows us the daily grind of Triad political manoeuvring we come to understand them as three dimensional human beings who eat, breathe, and sleep like everybody else.
This circles back to the notion that the most tense scenes in the movie aren’t necessarily the action sequences, but rather the sections where characters are sitting around plotting and scheming with the fear of what might happen next skilfully planted into the audience by To.
Through its screening at the Cannes Film Festival and Palme d’Or nomination, Election attracted considerable international attention and acclaim, with Optimum giving the DVD a heavy marketing push in European territories and leading filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, who called the movie his favourite of 2005, helping not just to bring attention to Election but to Johnnie To’s back catalogue as a whole.
A year on, To decided to take the risky gamble of following up Election with a sequel, which, given how most movie sequels usually turn out, is usually awaited by fans of the previous entry about as eagerly as a Brendan Schaub stand-up special. Thankfully, however, Election II turned out to be more Aliens/The Empire Strikes Back and less Exorcist II and Highlander The Quickening.
If the original Election represents the rising of Lok than Election II unquestionably represents his fall. Picking up right from where the first movie left off, Election II follows Lok (Simon Yam), who is struggling to be re-elected as Triad chairman after the conclusion of his two year term. Hot on Lok’s heels is an ambitious businessman from the Chinese mainland named Jimmy (Louis Koo), who, although reluctant to enter into the election in the first place, finds himself drawn in anyway through circumstances beyond his control.
To is a filmmaker that clearly understands what makes a sequel work, namely taking what worked about the original in the first place and keeping that same spirit alive, but adding something new that the original didn’t have. With Election II, To takes the internal conflict from the first movie and expands it onto an even wider canvas through the examination of how the triads continue to operate after the 1997 Chinese handover, which has brought increasing Mainland interference into every aspect of Hong Kong life, legitimate or illegitimate.
As a result the movie was conveniently not granted a Mainland Chinese release unlike its predecessor. Fortunately for To ,however, the film did excellent box office in Hong Kong despite its 18 rating and was a critical hit overseas, being screened at the Cannes Film Festival which led to a multiple festival distribution run spanning everywhere from Canada to Switzerland.
Election II showed that To was both a filmmaker at the height of his powers but also a bonafide international star, which wasn’t exactly bad going for a director whose independent studio had only been founded ten years before.
Since 2006 To has gone from strength to strength. In an increasingly muzzled Hong Kong film industry, alongside Wong Kar Wai, he is one of the few directors unafraid to make movies that don’t just bark the CCP party line. He continues to be a festival mainstay with his 2009 film Vengeance receiving a Palme d’Or nomination and his 2012 effort Drug War winning a San Diego Film Critics Society Award for best foreign language film.
If Johnnie To’s career proves anything, it is the fact that visions are worth fighting for above all else and that in a filmmaking culture that is as rigid as the Hong Kong mainstream studio system, the independent underdog who had to go as far as founding his own studio to achieve success has come out on top without having to compromise any of his integrity.
What are your favourite Johnnie To films? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Simon Thompson
