Mr Sausage wrote: Fri Apr 12, 2024 1:43 am
Patrick Tam
Wow, Tam is a major Hong Kong director, a seriously overlooked one. Most of his films are almost impossible to see, and yet they're so singular and vibrant. Tam is constantly surprising you. You can never predict what his next film will be, from slasher films, to romantic comedies, to gangster flicks, to wuxia pian, each film is has a new subject. Yet under everything he does, there's this sense of loneliness and disconnection, of fleeting romance and quick burning passion. Each film is undeniably his, yet very different in subject and form. Tam is also the most experimental HK stylist I've ever seen. His formalist sense of colour coordination, his personal engagement in set design, his baroque camera movements, his inch perfect editing. He's a master, and yet he goes largley unrecognized amongst his new wave peers.
Love Massacre (1981)
An odd, uncomfortable, formally rigid movie. Tam abandons the elegance and emotional immediacy of his first film, the brilliant
The Sword, for starkness, geometry, and distance. This movie organizes its visual style around static shots and blocks of primary colour. Indeed, one early scene in a museum has the characters standing in front of Rothko paintings, announcing the film’s visual motif. The bare plot description sounds like your average thriller: a young Brigitte Lin plays a woman whose friend tries to commit suicide. When the friend’s brother arrives to help, he and Lin begin a relationship that turns dark and possessive as his secret past comes out. The film lurches between genres, beginning as a serious romantic drama before suddenly becoming a suspense thriller and then ending as a full on slasher. This shouldn’t work, but the discomfort of Tam’s formal strategies becomes the bonding agent between the different narrative types. Tam also shifts formal strategies slightly with each section: he doesn’t violate the primary aesthetic set in the opening, but as the Hitchcockian thriller section starts, he inserts orchestral music reminiscent of a Hollywood thriller where the first section was mostly soundtrack free, and uses more controlled, deliberately paced camera movements to create suspense (or at least suggest the filmic idea of it). The final section uses all the strategies of a gore-filled grindhouse slasher, with shock music, stalking sequences, and sudden intrusions into the frame. The film is garish, melodramatic, and contrived, but not meant to be taken at face value. There’s a knowing, self aware quality here, a mood of formal play and reflexive comment where genre styles are both indulged in and held up for examination. The slasher section does this in particular, starting out as ugly and brutal, but moving quickly into the ludicrous both by having the same basic kill scenario play out five times in a row to the point of absurdity, and by progressively upping the gore until it becomes cartoonish and comical. Tam doesn’t parody his chosen genres, he burlesques them, playing them up in knowing and artificial ways for a self-aware audience. The movie calls endless attention to its own devices. With its formal audacity, narrative mutability, flattened characters and psychologies, and the way it pushes itself constantly to extremes, even ludicrous ones, this is a difficult film to come to grips with. It ends up almost as a phantasmagoria on filmic themes—an energetic, formalist riff. Tam leaves a clue to what he’s up to in a glimpse of a book by Antonin Artaud, as his movie is extravagant and theatrical, rife with intense and violent imagery, in ways meant to jolt and purge. I’ve seen a million movies like this without ever seeing something quite like this. A provoking experience.
Nomad (1982)
What a frustrating, mesmerizing, inexplicable film. The way it mixes tones like the frothy and the sexy, the romantic and the melancholic, the insular and the cosmopolitan, in ever more extravagant ways, and done with an energy and visual elegance notable even in Hong Kong filmmaking—I hardly know what to say, except that it overwhelms and provokes. A mix of high and low art that’s unabashed. Lost, heady youths, trapped in themselves and their utopic ideals, flinging themselves headlong into love and sex, who nevertheless dream of some kind of escape to who knows where, someplace exotic and half real. It’s impossible to predict how intense and erotic the movie becomes given how frivolous and bouncy it starts, and in a transition so smooth you only realize once you’ve transitioned back. Aching eroticism sits back to back with sex comedy scenarios, and political motifs crash into action cliches. Trashy and contrived, beautiful and genuinely felt, wild and unpredictable, and gorgeous to look at. One of the characters is described as “coarse and tender”, and that’s a good description of the movie, too. It’s a contradiction. This was a strange, sometimes frustrating experience, but one I loved. I never knew where this movie was going to go, even up to the end. It risked so much, pushed itself to such odd narrative extremes, and was so set in its aim to mix high art with popular entertainment to the point of creative lunacy, that I came to love the experience. This is weird, original cinema, and as good an example of the wild creativity of the Hong Kong New Wave as I can think of. Wonderful.
Cherie (1984)
Tam doing a straightforward rom com. Aerobics instructor Cherie Chung is romanced by two idiots, an old rich guy played by prolific kung fu director Chor Yuen, and a young fashion photographer played by Tony Leung Ka-Fei. Both men lie, cheat, and deceive to get what they want from her, while trying to avoid upsetting her fierce temper. Tam reigns in his taste for formalism and experimentation: there is still a striking use of colour, composition, and meticulous set design unusual in a broad romantic comedy, but it’s subdued compared to his previous three films. Tam’s visual skills and energy carry the movie, tho’, especially in several abstract romantic sequences with Leung’s photographer, because otherwise the plot and characters are generic, and the comedy is antic and crass in the usual Hong Kong way. Once again, Tam uses a book to suggest his meaning, here one titled Laughable Loves (couldn’t make out the author), which could be the title of the movie. Tam does sneak in a low key sense of melancholy and loneliness that’s easy to miss, one you sometimes glimpse in Cherie Chung’s eyes and expression; but Tam limits it, even undercuts it at times, such as a scene of Chung looking mournfully out at the water that’s made slightly ludicrous by the huge number ducks that paddle around, quacking away. Tam was far more comfortable with heady eroticism and sexual passion than most Hong Kong directors. Both
Cherie and
Nomad sexualize their stars, and indeed show the women characters eagerly pursuing adult sexual relationships without judgment or moralizing, in stark constrast to the discomfort most HK directors felt towards female sexuality.
Cherie even has Cherie Chung show juuuust enough to count as nudity, including one artful tableaux done entirely for the audience (while fitting the voyeur theme), which’ll shock any HK fan. Big HK actresses never did nudity. For the most part, nudity only came from softcore or Japanese actresses (eg.
Naked Killer, where the only naked person was the Japanese actress playing a minor character). Tam’s open embrace of sexuality is refreshing in an industry that could be so prudish. Overall, Tam’s film is visually interesting
enough to be watchable, without transcending the bad comedic taste like, say, Tsui managed in
A Chinese Feast. Still, Cherie Chung is gorgeous and expressive, the romantic scenes are wonderfully sexy, and the production design is marvelous. I’m torn on whether I liked this or not. It’s the weakest Tam movie I’ve seen so far, more annoying than funny, but plainly the work of a confident auteur, and that confidence in form and technique inspires a lot of goodwill. I haven’t seen a lot of Hong Kong comedies, but there’s more here than in most.
Final Victory (1987)
Tam experimenting with his style, moving away from the geometric formalism, pictorial emphasis on isolated moments and incidents, and the cool sophisticated camera moves, in favour of a breathless, charging, mobile filmmaking that still allows for his interest in colour design and expressive camera movement. This is more freewheeling and less designed than his first three films without losing the visual opulence and outrageous style. Things feel freer and less controlled, which suits Wong Kar-Wai’s aimless script of people moving about the various dim bars and rundown teahouses of nighttime Hong Kong, unsure of themselves and their futures. But Tam’s film is broad, farcical, and loud, rarely stopping to let us feel the well of loneliness and disconnection that bubbles under the surface. Tam keeps all that emotion in check until the end, when it bursts out in a mixture of loss, sadness, and doomed romance that is so perfect you wish the rest of the movie were a masterpiece to justify its perfection. But this one doesn’t quite hit you like Tam’s best. For starters, Eric Tsang plays his character as so pathetic and snivelling that it’s impossible either to invest in him or buy his romance with the wonderful Loletta Lee. There needed to be a balance that Tsang’s one-note performance doesn’t provide. Another problem is that the movie is basically running in place as fast as it can, a narrative style that can be effective, but here grows wearying since Tam declines to settle down. I think Tam would do a more effective version of this style and set of themes in his penultimate movie, the masterful
My Heart is that Eternal Rose. But there’s so much in
Final Victory that’s astonishing and masterful (the editing in particular is so finely-tuned and lends such dynamic energy that you see why Tam became an editor on other people’s films, including Wong’s). Very much worth seeing, even if it feels like minor Tam.
Burning Snow (1988)
Begins as a grim exploitation thriller before changing into a lugubrious melodrama. Tam piles on the misery, a series of sexual assaults, beatings, degradations, and everything else suffered by the main character, a young woman sold to a family to be the middle-aged son’s wife in an empty rural area. Her husband assaults her every night and verbally berates her during the day. Rowdy teenagers stop by their store late at night and assault her too, causing her husband to start physically abusing her on top of everything else. This is all in the first half hour, and shown in graphic detail. There are some moments of tenderness and psychological insight here and there, especially in one sad conversation between the girl and the houseboy; but mostly it’s a series of abuses. Enter Simon Yam, a convict on the run whom the girl hides, falls for, and begins a torrid affair with. The film picks up after that, exchanging the exploitation for a slow, sad story about thwarted lives, loneliness, and imprisonment. If Tam had shown more sensitivity and restraint, if he hadn’t lain it on so thick, this could’ve been a triumph given his skills. The film certainly looks terrific, all cold blues and whites courtesy of Christopher Doyle. But it's offputting more than transcendent, and its unvarying sadness and misery weighs it down rather than invigorates it. I’d put this with
Cherie as Tam’s weakest effort.
