Chen Kuo-Fu’s Double Vision, a Taiwanese/American co-production, mixes genres to brilliant effect: it’s a combination of serial killer/police thriller, supernatural horror, and family melodrama, with a bit of cross-cultural-misunderstanding comedy thrown in for good measure. A Taipei cop with a traumatic past, whose life and career are a mess (veteran Hong Kong actor Tony Leung) tries to solve a series of murders with both high-tech and mystical Taoist overtones, with the help of an American FBI man (David Morse). The cinematography is fluid and elegant, and the plot is genuinely shocking as well as creepy, as it continually shifts its ground (and the genre expectations it arouses), moving from police procedural to splatterfest to subdued melancholy to an absolutely hallucinatory and delirious conclusion. The overall affective tone of the film is pessimistic and anguished, though it also manages to project a balance between spiritual yearning and extreme skepticism in a way that I’ve neve felt or seen before. (This is tied in as well with the film’s theme of inevitable misunderstandings between American and Chinese culture; my own cultural preconceptions obviously limit my understanding of the film, but this is something that the film explicitly addresses with Morse’s character). All in all, this is a rather grim film that nonetheless gives a great deal of pleasure through its continual inventiveness and surprise. It fuses art and pulp to provide continual astonishment. Double Vision is sufficiently original that I have trouble describing it any less abstractly that I have here. All I can say, really, is that it provides both intensity and wonder; what more could I ever ask from a film?
Double Vision
Chen Kuo-Fu’s Double Vision, a Taiwanese/American co-production, mixes genres to brilliant effect: it’s a combination of serial killer/police thriller, supernatural horror, and family melodrama, with a bit of cross-cultural-misunderstanding comedy thrown in for good measure. A Taipei cop with a traumatic past, whose life and career are a mess (veteran Hong Kong actor Tony Leung) tries to solve a series of murders with both high-tech and mystical Taoist overtones, with the help of an American FBI man (David Morse). The cinematography is fluid and elegant, and the plot is genuinely shocking as well as creepy, as it continually shifts its ground (and the genre expectations it arouses), moving from police procedural to splatterfest to subdued melancholy to an absolutely hallucinatory and delirious conclusion. The overall affective tone of the film is pessimistic and anguished, though it also manages to project a balance between spiritual yearning and extreme skepticism in a way that I’ve neve felt or seen before. (This is tied in as well with the film’s theme of inevitable misunderstandings between American and Chinese culture; my own cultural preconceptions obviously limit my understanding of the film, but this is something that the film explicitly addresses with Morse’s character). All in all, this is a rather grim film that nonetheless gives a great deal of pleasure through its continual inventiveness and surprise. It fuses art and pulp to provide continual astonishment. Double Vision is sufficiently original that I have trouble describing it any less abstractly that I have here. All I can say, really, is that it provides both intensity and wonder; what more could I ever ask from a film?