Johnnie To likes to keep it simple. It’s about a cop, a criminal and a doctor: three. Each lives by a code of conduct, and the film depicts how each member tries, imperfectly, to live by his/her code when forced to relate to someone who lives by different rules.

Dr. Tong, a woman, is a brain surgeon who needs to convince the criminal, Shun, to let her remove the bullet in his brain, but he refuses. He doesn’t explain why, but Inspector Ken, the cop, knows that the other members of Shun’s gang plan to storm the hospital to free him, and he doesn’t want to risk being turned into a vegetable if the surgery fails. And he has a point: she’s already bungled another surgery, leaving the patient paralyzed. The suspense starts early: someone has tried to smuggle a gun inside Shun’s take-out delivery bag.  A man in a suit is slipping “packages” into trash baskets throughout the hospital. Almost an hour and a quarter of this breathless thriller is spent setting up a final confrontation, one that can result in a bloodbath. Does that happen? Will Johnnie To give us a climax that delivers on its elaborate set-up?

Does he ever! The final gun battle, in slow motion, is one of the most gorgeously filmed screen massacres I’ve ever seen. Its blood-soaked three minutes constitute an abstract ballet worth the price of admission. But then he nearly tops it with a heart-stopping tied-bedsheet escape scene that beats any you’ve seen in the past. Moreover, as a witty aside, he slips in a nifty staircase scene that makes a heel-clicking salute to both Battleship Potemkin and Dr. Strangelove.

But there’s more than cinematic dazzle here. Sure, he competes with the other action auteurs – and with himself – but he maintains a consistent moral perspective in all of his work. The lives of his cops and criminals are defined by their relationship to each other, and nothing else. The cops will catch or kill the criminals who, for their part, live only to defy, mock and kill cops. In the seven films of his that I’ve seen – out of sixty-eight credits on IMDB! – there is little that can be learned about his characters that is not about that conflict. They have no past, no future, no political affiliation, no families, no other passions. Even sex – which, as in this film, may be totally absent from the story – seems to be an unwelcome distraction, for the characters as well as for the director himself.

While To’s cops may be brave, cunning, often heroic, it’s the crooks who get his devotion, as well as the best lines. Even with a bullet in his brain, Shun taunts Dr. Tong by quoting the Hippocratic oath, and in Greek no less. Still, To’s world-view consistently reflects the personal cost to both sides, as well as the ultimate futility of the conflict. At the film’s climax, when the titled three are literally suspended in a death-struggle, we see how a strict   adherence to the code must always result in self-destruction; survival may only be possible by betraying it.

As an aesthetic framework, however, the code has some built-in limitations. We can never particularize the characters except by seeing them “play the game”. By now we know that nobody ever wins, and the variety and suspense is in seeing just how certain defeat is satisfactorily resolved in narrative terms. But there’s limited emotional resonance in that. One of To’s major influences, of course, is Jean-Pierre Melville, the French crime master. Melville’s characters also lived by their code, and they often achieved a kind of nobility from that. But Melville also knew he’d have to stretch beyond his familiar genre when telling a story that was grounded in his personal experience as a fighter in the French underground. He chose Joseph Kessel’s French resistance novel, Army of Shadows, and made a masterpiece. His personal identification with the material, as well as its universal theme, give it an existential gravitas that makes it more than just superior entertainment.

But I’m not suggesting that Johnnie To make that stretch. I certainly don’t assume he sees any aesthetic limits to the code at all. If that’s how he can keep making films as good as Three, let him ignore me.

 

Get new filmfestsalon posts by email free here:https:www.filmfestsalon.com/subscribe