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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.
epilogue |
