OFFICIAL SELECTION – OUT OF COMPETITION
Hong Kong cinema now has a regional status, recast in recent decades within the broader landscape of Chinese production. If it survives, it is torn, looking on one side towards its glorious past, chasing on the other more massive production standards, expansion of the market obliges.
Soi Cheang belongs to the generation of those who “came after” the handover of the former British colony to China in 1997, also after the excitement of the new wave. He shot his first feature film in 2000, gained international recognition with the excellent Accident (2009), still steeped in local action science, then quickly moves on to the Beijing-compatible digital juggernaut with the three-part saga The Monkey King (2014-2018).
City of Darkness, his latest feature film presented at Cannes out of competition, revisits Hong Kong in the 1980s, to which he pays a disguised homage. Discreet, because we can sense Chinese censorship straddling any form of nostalgia that could be expressed towards the old liberal economic regime. This is why the prologue, which places us in the Kowloon citadel, right in the heart of the triads’ lair, paints a Dantesque picture of the peninsula, that of an empire of crime, drugs and prostitution.
Clever space configurations
The story focuses on Chan Lok-kwun (Raymond Lam), a Vietnamese boat people who landed in Hong Kong in the middle of the gang war, ready to do anything to obtain papers. He slips through the maze of Kowloon, territory of the boss Cyclone (Louis Koo), who takes him under his wing and integrates him into his clan. Rival of the latter, Mr. Big (old veteran Sammo Hung, big name in martial arts cinema), eyeing this real estate destined for destruction, does not take long to come and pick trouble.
City of Darkness benefits first of all from its astonishing decor recreated with a digital palette: this fortress city with its anarchic construction, an immense scaffolding where daylight barely penetrates. The exploration of the place first coincides with the race for survival of the immigrant hero, who bounces from pillboxes to shops, hanging from tangled sheets of metal in thickets of electrical wires. The film then gets stuck in the gang war (brotherhood and betrayal, rivalry and one-upmanship), through supercharged confrontations which tend towards superheroic emphasis (the ultimate villain named “King”, equipped with invincibility Magic).
But Soi Cheang has lost none of his talents as a geometer of the action, and the best fights play with clever configurations of spaces. We have to wait until the end credits for the filmmaker to take a tender look at the small artisans, the shops, the particular customs which made Kowloon something other than a place of perdition and violence. They too disappeared with its demolition in 1993.
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