I'm in a refugee camp, transit lounge and capitalist catch-all in which pencil-thin skyscrapers soar above old ladies selling abalone and asparagus stacked in beautiful pyramids in street markets. It's called Hong Kong. I'm on my pilgrim's progress, interviewing Asia's great movie-makers.
Hong Kong's cinematic reputation is for low cost, commercially savvy production. The cinema of the migrant, perhaps. Movies made by people who understand what quickens the pulse in other countries, and who want to make money fast.
The island's only recent must-see films for thinking moviegoers have been the swoony, contemplative films of Wong Kar-wai, such as In the Mood for Love. But beyond such art cinema, what about the kung fu demi-monde of Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, the sort of movies that action nerds and Quentin Tarantino talk about? Is such cinema of any interest outside its coterie today?
Anybody who has watched HK movies of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s will recognise the shield logo of the Shaw Brothers, the largest private film studio in the world. At one point it employed 1,400 staff in 25 departments, using 12 sound stages.
I went there to find the studio still standing, haunted yet lovely. A staff member told me there was a new studio, and took me there. It's a vast complex, an architectural statement like its predecessor, apparently partly funded by one of the original Shaw brothers, Run Run, who is over 100 years old. This behemoth is built on rubber to give it extra soundproofing. In the downturn, this astonishing dream factory is almost empty.
I've long believed that there's something of the kaleidoscope about the aesthetics of the HK movies of the 1980s and 1990s. My producer and I traipsed around toy shops looking for a kid's kaleidoscope to illustrate my point. We found one for £2 and it worked perfectly; a visual corollary to the spectacular fragmentation of HK action cinema, which possesses what some call "the aesthetics of the glance." Every eye movement from a character warrants a cut and a new shot, creating a dizziness that is mercurial but exciting. The landmark 1986 movie A Better Tomorrow had this in spades.
Directed by Hollywood-bound John Woo, it set off a cycle of amoral films in which the gangsters were
Armani-clad heroes, and loyalty and brotherhood were what bonded people. As a result, and thanks mainly to the hyperactive energy of the film's producer Tsui Hark, HK cinema of the 1980s and 1990s was one of blazing passions, vengeance, sequels, cycles and fads. Production was industrious, endlessly copying and recycling box office hits, characters and styles. Few national cinemas had such momentum or turnover. Tsui Hark, who directed many of the best films, spun the wheel faster and faster.
And despite all the dash and haste, there was still time for thematic development in these movies of the last two decades. The male bonding of A Better Tomorrow become gayer in its sequels; straight director Tsui regularly played with gender and sexuality, explaining that the influence of Peking Opera, where male actors play female characters, was crucial to HK film. Likewise, scratch the surface of his smash-hit historical movies, such as Once Upon a Time in China, and you find concern about issues like the Tiananmen clampdown on the mainland or Hong Kong's imminent transfer out of the hands of Britain.
From far away, HK cinema can seem thin. But when you're here you can feel a depth to it. Recently I showed my nephews, who are both in their early teens, Iron Monkey, produced by Tsui and directed by Yuen Woo-Ping, who did the fight sequences in The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. They had never seen a foreign film before but they loved it.
Why? Because of its espresso hit, its kaleidoscope, the aesthetics of the glance, the joy it takes in the human body in flight, defying gravity.
My girlfriend loved Hong Kong too. Vigour and poetry.
Skyscraper and abalone.
