The Brooklyn Rail

In the last decades of the twentieth century, Hong Kong was home to the most outsized and hyper-productive film industry in the world, despite a total lack of structure for public funding. Filmmakers relied on intuited cinematic language and produced with a workmanlike rigor, yielding entertainment at once totally local and eccentric, yet universal: their industry could not have afforded otherwise.

But Hong Kong’s historical situation is as a place in transit, always caught between periods of drastic change: a colonial holdover of the British Empire, it was set to be returned to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, whereafter certain freedoms could be relitigated and further horizons lined. As that date approached, the industry crumbled, and by 1996 most of Hong Kong’s biggest stars made the sensible decision to take their talents elsewhere.

Johnnie To, a proven and supremely versatile filmmaker—born in Hong Kong, raised in its Kowloon Walled City, reared in its studio TV system, and hardened by its singularly high-wire production economy—stubbornly refused to follow suit. Instead, he developed a program of survival strategies with his creative partner, Wai Ka-fai, and founded Milkyway Image: a production outfit that would allow him to strike a newfound balance between commercial, “report card” obligations, and the development of a stronger personal style. To has since directed more than forty pictures under this banner and become a torchbearer for Hong Kong cinema in the process.

MoMA curators La Frances Hui and Dave Kehr, producer Olivia Priedite, and Milkyway’s To Kei-chi organized a major retrospective of To’s work, with twenty-four films from his catalogue at the museum’s film center. The breadth is remarkable—To has perhaps put his signature on a wider range of material than anyone else, ever—though his style is most purely realized in the post-handover crime films, where he assumes greater control of theme and narrative and opts to work at a much cooler and more grounded tempo.

The Mission (1999) represents an early apotheosis of this style. Following a group of unacquainted gangsters hired to bodyguard a triad leader, the film is an elegant reconstitution of the high-octane, setpiece-oriented work for which Hong Kong cinema is best known. Each moment is distilled to its most coordinated form, as To allows drama to unfold with tactical simplicity. Dialogue is sparse, and the quietude enables him to trade in gesture, teasing out only enough exposition for the story to work moment by moment, keeping his characters’ desires and motivations close to the chest. He edits with a monumental rhythm, drawing the viewer towards these characters and the desolate urban spaces they occupy, only to cut the moment a viewer might think a stage is set to reveal possible outcomes. Prolonged moments of tense consideration give the film its emotional friction, providing a constant energy that does not rely on punctuation by action, but surprises with it—perfectly tuned here to the usually interminable but stochastically violent nature of life as a bodyguard.

MoMA’s pristine print of The Mission—on loan from the American Genre Film Archive—allows for greater appreciation of how To plays with depth and layers his scenes in camera, heightening the dynamic range in his fluorescent commercial interiors, neon-drenched cityscapes, and chiaroscuro alleyways: an unfortunate privilege. The film has not been restored, and the prospect of doing so has been likened to hostage negotiation, with the rights owner confusing the existence of its negatives. Although To’s courting of festival circuits has endeared him with sufficient institutional attention to make several of his essential older works widely available in 4K—his lyrical masterpiece Throw Down (2004) fortunately included—it is still only at exhaustively produced retrospectives like this one that much of his work can best be viewed: each print I’ve seen in the series has projected with it into MoMA’s theater a vintage liveliness, testifying to To’s primary ability as a great orchestrator of crowd.

Opening night Q&As allowed the curators and audience alike to interrogate To—his Cantonese interpreted by Joanna C. Lee—and attempt to demystify his process. He did exactly that. When asked with scholarly regard how he staged the film’s most famous moment, a rigorously-composed shootout in a deserted mega mall, To laughed. “It was only in the afternoon that we found out the shopping mall would allow us to shoot overnight for free. When we got to the location, we looked around and decided how it would work out.” Pushed to explain how he is able to achieve such elegance in improvisation, To offered: “In my mind there is an entire picture … if someone is slightly off their mark, I would scold them.” Regarding the qualities of his brilliant actors that have elevated them to stock cast: “I really don’t have the time to explain my way of filmmaking to other actors.” About the film’s iconic musical motif: “That’s the only music we had. It cost money.” Finally, on how he gives his films such a strong sense of rhythm and designs order in chaos: “I can’t really speak about it, because it's about feeling.… Have someone else explain it,” he smiled. “What’s important for filmmakers is film language. These images are proof that I am who I am.”

The one subject To wished to expound upon at length is perhaps the one he could be most forgiven for avoiding, given the occasion. Directing only five films in the last decade, To has slowed to a relative halt. Even by his defiant standards, it’s become increasingly difficult to produce in Hong Kong with artistic license, and he deems some of his recent films totally compromised by their concession to government-imposed thematic restrictions (despite wide acclaim for the critical content he has presented to the contrary). He has warned about the dangers posed to the arts by totalitarianism, and been subsequently censored in China. His Fresh Wave festival—which showcases the work of aspiring Hong Kong filmmakers and provides them with grants—has been affected likewise. And yet, his focus was entirely ahead: “I talk to young directors and I want them to be strong,” he told us. “The idea is to make the impossible possible. The only thing is you have to keep trying. … As long as there is room for you to survive, there is room for you to express yourself.” To closed out the evening by announcing he aims to have a new film done within six months, and he will try to make it an optimistic one.