by Victor Pryor
The New York Asian Film Festival is running from June 26-July 11. For details and showtimes, please click here.
Since 2002, the fine folks at Subway Cinema have graced Manhattan with their presence in the form of the New York Asian Film Festival, an eclectic mix of movies from all over the East, and this year is no exception. For the next couple of weeks, we’ll be covering a selection of films from their lineup.
EMPIRE OF LUST
A title like Empire Of Lust is both highly accurate and a little misleading. There is, without question, an empire. And you’d better believe there’s lust. But this is not some trashy bodice ripper; it’s a period drama, a tale of tragic romance and political gamesmanship that reaches near Shakespearean levels of melodrama.
Is it basically a soap opera? Maybe. But if more soap operas had dudes getting hacked to bits, then we wouldn’t need to use such a condescending tone when we talk about them, now would we?
The film opens intercutting sex and violence in a manner that might lead viewers to think we’re in for some kind of war movie, where hard men slaughter their foes on the battlefield and then go home to slaughter their [WOMEN] in the bedroom.
(NOTE: That last line used to rhyme until I thought better of it…)
But the rest of the film defies that expectation, to a degree: though there is occasional and somewhat fleeting bloody action, most of the violence here is emotional in nature.
In that opening scene, we are introduced to the brave warrior Kim-Min Jae (Ha-Kyun Shin), hero of the Joseon Empire. Latter, we will meet figures such as Lord Sambong, Prince Jung-An, Min-Jae’s sybaritic son Jin, and Lady Jun, Jin’s sweetly unassuming wife/daughter of the king.
(If some of these details are off compared to what you might see when you watch the film, its important to note that due to a “dissatisfaction” with the provided subtitles, the Subway Cinema people actually provided their own subtitles, which they projected live as the film unspooled. Despite a few problems with the transparency levels at times, they did a commendable job of making the complexities of the relationships and machinations surprisingly easy to comprehend…)
Most importantly of all, we meet Gahee, a virginal yet strong-willed courtesan who immediately catches the eye of Min Jae. Passions flare, ambitions take root, and everything goes to hell with a dreadful inevitability.
To say much more would be a disservice to the hard work director Sang-hoon Ahn did to ensure that the characters revealed themselves slowly, one self-destructive piece at a time. Nobody is quite what they seem when we first meet them. Some are more noble, some are less; some are smarter than they look, some aren’t nearly as ruthless as they think, and some you simply don’t see coming until it’s far too late.
(Jin, however, is exactly what he seems to be from the beginning: a real piece of shit.)
Binding it all together is the love between Min-Jae and Gahee. As private armies are outlawed and Min-Jae becomes the supreme commander of the unified defense force, his desires, as well as his growing discomfort with his superiors ambitions, threaten both his new position and eventually his life.
There’s a lot going on in Empire Of Lust, which has a lot of characters to follow and about four of five conspiracies bubbling in the background at any given time. But if some of the the details get lost in the shuffle, it remains easy enough to follow thanks to the performances, which are all excellent.
In a cast of winners, the main prize, however, has to go to Jang Hyuk as Prince Jung-An (a.k.a. Bang-Won), the passed over son of the king who appears to adopt a diffident lifestyle in the wake of his rejection. Hyuk performs with a winningly Machiavellian flair that makes you root for him even though at a certain point it becomes obvious that… ooh, maybe we shouldn’t?
(For me, it’s when he kills a bunch of horses… [spoiler])
Though terms like ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’ seem more than a little disingenuous here: it’s not a world of heroes and villains, but a world of winners and losers, because that’s how wars work, even the undeclared ones.
When I say this is Shakespearean stuff, it’s not a facile comparison. Like the best works of Shakespeare, it’s dramatized view of a world lost to history, alien in its details (a lot of dramatic emphasis is placed on the gifting of a scent bag), but achingly, disastrously human in scale.
Empire Of Lust wasn’t the actual start of the festival, but it was my start, and it was a pretty damn good one. After all, it’s hard to go wrong with good, old fashioned sex and violence. Especially when the violence is swordfights.
Photo credit: mingpao.com
CITY ON FIRE + RINGO LAM LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD PRESENTATION
RESOLVED: Ringo Lam is one of the greatest directors of action cinema in the history of film. That’s not hyperbole. That’s fact. And while to the general public, his name doesn’t quite draw the recognition or get spoken of in the same hushed tones as, say, John Woo or Sam Peckinpah, sooner or later everyone who truly loves action winds up worshiping at his altar.
Which is why it made for a deeply gratifying Saturday night to see Lam get the recognition he has deserved for so long.
After a long introduction (too long, according to the name-dropping film producers sitting behind me, who seemed very impatient to actually get to actual the film), Lam was presented with a lifetime achievement award. And a two minute standing ovation, equally earned.
Describing himself as “not a talker,” he spoke on the film of the evening, City On Fire, saying he made it 30 years ago, joking that some people in the audience hadn’t even been born yet when he made it.
For someone who’s movies are so gritty and real (if Woo is the poet of action, Lam is the guy in the trenches, making sure every impact achieves maximum hurt), Lam cut a surprisingly humble, self-effacing figure. When confronted with our emcee’s deep, abiding love for Lam’s 1997’s pre-handover thriller Full Alert (which played at the festival the next day), he quietly responded “I liked it.” Then he stated that he made that one 20 years ago, and joked, “When I made it, I knew I deserved this award.” Then, right back to form, quietly requested for people to “Please take a look and give me comments.”
He closes by saying how touched he was by the gesture, and how it set his “heart on fire.” Awww.
And with that, the film began. Which was an experience in and of itself.
According to our hosts from Subway Cinema, the print we were about to watch is the only one they could find, a dirty, scratched up little thing that’s seen way better days.
And so the film starts. And all of a sudden, I’m no longer at the prestigious Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.
I’m in Times Square in 1987.
Ohhh, you wonderful bastards.
You took me to the fucking grindhouse!
But I’m not surrounded by junkies and hookers looking for their next john, I’m surrounded by people who cheer unironically for film damage.
My people.
People who don’t boo and get angry when halfway through, the film literally starts burning in the projector, but instead laugh and applaud again.
(Did our emcee say “Not only is the city on fire, so is the print?” Yes. Yes he did. And it was glorious.)
And due to the fast acting work of the staff at the Walter Reade Theater, literally two minutes later, the movie was back up and running.
And the movie itself?
Still awesome, thanks for asking.
As the years pass, the film’s status as the inspiration for Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs fades into the background, and maybe now the film can start standing on its own merits.
I mean, look: I love Tim Roth bunches and bunches. But he is not, and never could be, Chow Yun-Fat.
Only Yun-Fat is Yun-Fat.
Alternately goofy as hell and cool as ice, Yun-Fats’ Ko Chow is a undercover cop masquerading as an arms dealer who bonds with Danny Lee’s crook Fu. He gets in too deep, and… well, these sorts of thing never end well.
You’ve seen it all before, of course, but rarely with this level of intensity, because intensity is what Ringo Lam does best (the initial jewelry store robbery remains a masterwork of tension and barely controlled chaos).
City On Fire remains, as ever, a riveting cops and robbers thriller of ever shifting morals and loyalties.
If you’ve never seen it, fucking rectify that. Immediately.
