Running on Karma is the latest Johnny To film I’ve seen, thanks to SIFF. Like the other To films I’ve seen, it twists genre in intriguing and unexpected ways.
Here’s the premise. A female cop (Cecilia Cheung) encounters a muscleman with supernatural powers (Andy Lau, prosthetically enhanced with a Mr Universe-esque torso) who helps her catch brutal serial killers. A relationship develops between them…
Only what I just wrote doesn’t really tell you anything about the film. It takes too many unexpected turns. What starts out as a martial-arts action film turns into something else entirely.
Before I go on, I’d like to praise the film’s visuals. Instead of the gunplay in the other To films I’ve seen, here we have cartoonish special effects for the action sequences. Everything is bigger than life, and lively in ways that recent American superhero films (Spiderman or the Batman franchise, for instance — I haven’t seen Hellboy — are utterly unable to match). But To doesn’t dwell on the special effects, or make them the spectacular center of the film — they are just there, alongside the usual naturalistic views of Hong Kong streets and Buddhist monasteries, and (towards the end of the film) the mountains of Shanxi. As in other To films, there’s an obliqueness of presentation, a fragmenting of the visual field, and a temporal scrambling due to a fluid use of flashbacks. I’m tempted to say that, while this is an extravagant film, the extravagance is understated. And this is a large part of the affective pull of the film, the way it sublimates both melodrama/tragedy and behaviorist comedy into its cool but unironic mood.
Lau’s character is a former martial arts monk, who left the monastery after facing personal trauma. Now he mostly performs in male strip clubs and at bodybuilding competitions (when he isn’t dodging the Hong Kong police, who keep on deporting him back to the mainland as an illegal immigrant). But besides his skills of strength, he has a gift which is also a curse: he is able to see other people’s karma. When he looks at them he sees images of their past lives, which appear as transparent flickers on the movie screen. He knows when they are going to suffer or die as payback for past sins. The initial reason he helps Cheung’s cop is because she is so obviously a good person, yet she is threatened with imminent death because in a past life she was a murderous (male) Japanese soldier.
The romantic relationship between these characters is never fully expressed. She adores him, but he refuses all her advances. He feels for her, too, but he’s unwilling to let the feeling out. So they never do more in the course of the film than hold hands for a minute. This unfulfilled desire creates a tension: not a swooning, over-the-top melodramatic one, but more like a muted vibration, an unease that is distantly felt, or a distance that itself turns into the film’s subject.
The major serial killer is caught halfway through the film. After that, the linear plot more or less dissolves. Instead we have just the characters’ relationship, something which cannot “develop” dramatically. A deadlock, which the film expresses and expands by forgoing action for long stretches, in favor of inconclusive meetings between the protagonists.
Cheung’s cop ultimately sacrifices herself for Lau’s redemption — after he has been saving her for most of the film. Her death is disturbing, and is repeated several times in the course of the film’s final sequence: but always obliquely, through distance and odd angles, through grainy video footage, as well as through flashbacks that explain what led up to it. To at one point uses what might be called the inverse of a shock cut, as he cuts from a brief image of her impaled head to the pastoral images of one of these flashbacks.
The result is that the cartoony action flick has metamorphosed into a poetic meditation on life, death, and karma. I don’t know enough about Buddhism or Chinese culture to know if the sentiments expressed are anything more than cliche — Yomi says they are total crap — but the concluding sequences worked affectively for me. Whatever sense of peace Lau’s character comes to, this sense remains haunted by Cheung’s absence. Is this just the old story of the woman being sacrificed in order to redeem the man? If so, then it’s one in which the cost of that sacrifice is insistently dwelt upon, instead of being relegated to the background. The entire film is haunted by a sense of missed encounters, as well as by the determination not to accept what nevertheless cannot be averted. So the film is anti-fatalistic in mood (it expresses a determination) at the same time that it depicts a fate which will have its way regardless. How strange and beautiful for this sort of paralysis, this deadlock of will and understanding, to become the overriding mood of an action film.
Running on Karma
Running on Karma is the latest Johnny To film I’ve seen, thanks to SIFF. Like the other To films I’ve seen, it twists genre in intriguing and unexpected ways.
Here’s the premise. A female cop (Cecilia Cheung) encounters a muscleman with supernatural powers (Andy Lau, prosthetically enhanced with a Mr Universe-esque torso) who helps her catch brutal serial killers. A relationship develops between them…
Only what I just wrote doesn’t really tell you anything about the film. It takes too many unexpected turns. What starts out as a martial-arts action film turns into something else entirely.
Before I go on, I’d like to praise the film’s visuals. Instead of the gunplay in the other To films I’ve seen, here we have cartoonish special effects for the action sequences. Everything is bigger than life, and lively in ways that recent American superhero films (Spiderman or the Batman franchise, for instance — I haven’t seen Hellboy — are utterly unable to match). But To doesn’t dwell on the special effects, or make them the spectacular center of the film — they are just there, alongside the usual naturalistic views of Hong Kong streets and Buddhist monasteries, and (towards the end of the film) the mountains of Shanxi. As in other To films, there’s an obliqueness of presentation, a fragmenting of the visual field, and a temporal scrambling due to a fluid use of flashbacks. I’m tempted to say that, while this is an extravagant film, the extravagance is understated. And this is a large part of the affective pull of the film, the way it sublimates both melodrama/tragedy and behaviorist comedy into its cool but unironic mood.
Lau’s character is a former martial arts monk, who left the monastery after facing personal trauma. Now he mostly performs in male strip clubs and at bodybuilding competitions (when he isn’t dodging the Hong Kong police, who keep on deporting him back to the mainland as an illegal immigrant). But besides his skills of strength, he has a gift which is also a curse: he is able to see other people’s karma. When he looks at them he sees images of their past lives, which appear as transparent flickers on the movie screen. He knows when they are going to suffer or die as payback for past sins. The initial reason he helps Cheung’s cop is because she is so obviously a good person, yet she is threatened with imminent death because in a past life she was a murderous (male) Japanese soldier.
The romantic relationship between these characters is never fully expressed. She adores him, but he refuses all her advances. He feels for her, too, but he’s unwilling to let the feeling out. So they never do more in the course of the film than hold hands for a minute. This unfulfilled desire creates a tension: not a swooning, over-the-top melodramatic one, but more like a muted vibration, an unease that is distantly felt, or a distance that itself turns into the film’s subject.
The major serial killer is caught halfway through the film. After that, the linear plot more or less dissolves. Instead we have just the characters’ relationship, something which cannot “develop” dramatically. A deadlock, which the film expresses and expands by forgoing action for long stretches, in favor of inconclusive meetings between the protagonists.
Cheung’s cop ultimately sacrifices herself for Lau’s redemption — after he has been saving her for most of the film. Her death is disturbing, and is repeated several times in the course of the film’s final sequence: but always obliquely, through distance and odd angles, through grainy video footage, as well as through flashbacks that explain what led up to it. To at one point uses what might be called the inverse of a shock cut, as he cuts from a brief image of her impaled head to the pastoral images of one of these flashbacks.
The result is that the cartoony action flick has metamorphosed into a poetic meditation on life, death, and karma. I don’t know enough about Buddhism or Chinese culture to know if the sentiments expressed are anything more than cliche — Yomi says they are total crap — but the concluding sequences worked affectively for me. Whatever sense of peace Lau’s character comes to, this sense remains haunted by Cheung’s absence. Is this just the old story of the woman being sacrificed in order to redeem the man? If so, then it’s one in which the cost of that sacrifice is insistently dwelt upon, instead of being relegated to the background. The entire film is haunted by a sense of missed encounters, as well as by the determination not to accept what nevertheless cannot be averted. So the film is anti-fatalistic in mood (it expresses a determination) at the same time that it depicts a fate which will have its way regardless. How strange and beautiful for this sort of paralysis, this deadlock of will and understanding, to become the overriding mood of an action film.