Advance units of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) began crossing the border into Hong Kong several months prior to the 1 July 1997 return. Arriving amidst little fanfare and almost unnoticed, Chinese personnel began a transition to replace the British military garrison with upwards of ten thousand Mainland troops. A far cry from thirty years earlier when, during the heady days of the Cultural Revolution, British soldiers were placed on full alert in expectation of a Red Guard assault on the colony that never came. Of course, the present 'invasion' would be marked by the pomp and pageantry of handover ceremonies bringing old and new colonials together in their designer attire to sip on Meursault and sup on Beijing duck in 'surroundings that looked like Ralph Lauren had done Shanghai, circa 1920.' The handover itself embodied spectacle. Costing more than US $130 million, events ranged from gala balls held at various swank hotels for local and foreign elites to street parades for the vast majority of Hong Kong residents to a fireworks and laser-light show over Victoria Harbor. As Britain's Prince Charles handing over keys of the city to Tung Chee-hwa made evident, simulacra permeated the proceedings throughout as the ceremonies reflected a basic reality (political sovereignty over Hong Kong was transferred from Great Britain to the People's Republic of China), masked and perverted it (attendance at the official handover was limited to an invitation-only list of about four thousand foreign dignitaries), marked its absence (formal transfer of power from Britain to China transpired as a Buddhist ritual), and actually bore no relation to reality at all (a US $30 million handover party included a sun-set sendoff of the British. All performed in front of the cameras of the international media for consumption by television viewers around the globe.

[Donnie Yen in his Ballistic Kiss, courtesy/permission of Bullet Film Productions, Ltd. and Donnie Yen]

 

Donnie Yen's Ballistic Kiss (1998) revives Hong Kong action as mood piece. A low budget production by Hong Kong standards, costing about US $475,000, this feature not only harkens back to the on-the-fly nuts and bolts approach of mid-1980s moviemaking but draws from the stylishness of Wong Kar-wai's art cinema via Japanese auteur Kitano Takeshi. Yen makes camerawork a character, using stylish artificial lighting, primarily smoky blues but also lurid greens and reds to establish and sustain tone. Experimenting with close-ups, slo-mo, flash pans, and white-outs, Yen is working towards finding his own distinctive style of storytelling and filmmaking by adding dramatic tension and strong visual contrasts. When hardcore martial arts fans complained the camerawork was too fast to see much of the action, they missed the rhythm and feel of the film.