Johnnie To Kei-Fung's PTU

2: ‘Into the Perilous Night’ — Police and Gangsters in the Hong Kong Mean Streets

‘It [the cinema] is not the same as the other arts, which aim rather at something unreal through the world, but makes the world itself something unreal or a tale. With the cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world.’ — Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 — The Movement Image, 59 ‘Even the dark, gloomy and ordinary places can be infiltrated with emotions, which, under the transformation of the camera, the imagination fuses with the real. You may still recognise these locations at a glance, but they are no longer the reality.’ — Lawrence Pun, The Emotional Map of Hong Kong Cinema in Hong Kong Film Archive, @LOCATION, 75 ‘To look at Hong Kong cinema within a spectrum of diverse representations of urban space, we find different efforts from one extreme of allegorical space to the other of realist space, and in between the search for identity in nostalgic, hyper-real and simulated space. In recent years directors have also tried to return ‘Into the Perilous Night’ — Police and Gangsters in the Hong Kong Mean Streets L 2 L 36 JOHNNIE TO KEI-FUNG’S PTU to a sense of place with a renewed awareness of the relationship between cinema and the city, making particular references to the issue of cultural identity.’ — Leung Ping-kwan, ‘Urban Cinema and the Cultural Identity of Hong Kong’ in Between Home and World — A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema, 394 Cinema and the city: Tsim Sha Tsui noir Respected local critic, academic and creative writer Leung Pingkwan has astutely identified the inter-space between accurate and realistic representations of a recognisable Hong Kong milieu and the Baudrillard-esque hyper-real spaces that are evoked in many Hong Kong films, including such classics as Rouge, In the Mood for Love and Infernal Affairs. Such simulated reality in the depiction of place is typical of a virtual reality culture and technology, and we should acknowledge the huge shift in the modern film industry wheredigitaltechniquescanblurtheboundariesbetweenfantastical and putatively realistic narrative genres. That said, famous predigital age Hong Kong films, such as The World of Suzie Wong and Love Is a Many-Splendoured Thing, brazenly and cheerfully misrepresented specific Hong Kong places, unambiguously referred to in the source novels, in their choice of shooting location. All in all, experience tells us not to believe the evidence of our eyes when we watch any Hong Kong film set in Hong Kong. Jackie Chan’s Police Story IV would have us believe that the young criminals can abseil down buildings in Tsim Sha Tsui and land on terra firma in Central in time for a shoot-out in front of the Legislative Council Building. Gulliver could have done it in Lilliput, crossing the harbour with a mere bound, but not normal-sized human beings, however fiendishly villainous. Nevertheless, we willingly suspend our disbelief because we recognise the conventions of the Jackie Chan yarn. L ‘INTO THE PERILOUS NIGHT’ 37 By contrast we can expect a more authentic depiction of Hong Kong (or indeed Macao) from Johnnie To. The question then must be, just how much more authentic is he? Why does a real sense of place matter in To’s films? As Ackbar Abbas has pointed out, ‘the new Hong Kong cinema deserves attention because it has finally found a worthy subject — it has found Hong Kong itself as a subject’.1 To’s major films of the last ten years succeed in framing the actions of groups and individuals within a clearly recognisable Hong Kong or Macao which is much more than a playground for enacting dramatic fantasy, and in many ways a secondary subject, as Abbas suggests. At the same time, how can such an elusive and disappearing subject (to refer to Abbas’s proposition) be captured in fiction cinema in a way that relates to some sort of acknowledged reality without essentialising or trivialising it? An equally pertinent question in the context of this chapter is this: why is it important to consider location and locale seriously, and is there anything to be gained by applying apparently spurious notions of authenticity in relation to location and locale? What is the difference between using location as playground, as discussed in the opening paragraph, and employing suggestive montage to create a bogus but aesthetically convincing sense of locale? After all, it could be argued that Hong Kong’s art-house...