With “City of Darkness,” filmmaker Soi Cheang revisits 1980s Hong Kong as a disguised homage

The boss Cyclone (Louis Koo) in “City of Darkness” by Soi Cheang.

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Hong Kong cinema now has a regional status, recast in recent decades in the larger landscape of Chinese production. If it survives, it is torn, looking on one side to its glorious past, running on the other after more massive production standards, expansion of the market obliges.

Read the letter from Hong Kong: Article reserved for our subscribers Martial arts film stirs nostalgia for pre-handover Hong Kong

Soi Cheang belongs to the generation of those who “came after” the retrocession of the former British colony to China in 1997, after also the effervescence of the new wave. He shot his first feature film in 2000, and was noticed internationally with the excellent Accident (2009), still steeped in local action science, then quickly moves on to the Beijing-compatible digital behemoth with the three-part saga The Monkey King (2014-2018).

City of Darknesshis latest feature film presented in May at Cannes out of competition, revisits the Hong Kong of the 1980s, to which he pays a disguised homage. Discreet, because we can sense the Chinese censorship straddling any form of nostalgia that could be expressed towards the old regime of liberal economy. This is why the prologue, which installs us in the Kowloon citadel, in the heart of the triads’ lair, paints a Dantesque picture of the peninsula, that of an empire of crime, drugs and prostitution.

Staggering decor with digital palette

The story focuses on Chan Lok-kwun (Raymond Lam), a Vietnamese boat person who arrives in Hong Kong in the middle of a gang war, ready to do anything to get his papers. He sneaks into the maze of Kowloon, the territory of the bigwig Cyclone (Louis Koo), who takes him under his wing and integrates him into his clan. The latter’s rival, Mr. Big (old hand Sammo Hung, a big name in martial arts cinema), eyeing this real estate park destined for destruction, is quick to come and pick a fight with them.

City of Darkness benefits from its terrifying decor recreated with a digital palette: this fortress city with anarchic construction, an immense scaffolding where daylight barely shines through. The exploration of the place first coincides with the race for survival of the immigrant hero, who bounces from casemates to shops, hangs from tangled sheets of metal in brushwood of electrical wires. The film then gets bogged down in gang warfare (brotherhood and betrayal, rivalry and one-upmanship), through supercharged confrontations that tend towards superheroic emphasis (the ultimate villain named “King”, endowed with magical invincibility).

But Soi Cheang has lost none of his talents as a geometer of 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 that made Kowloon something other than a place of perdition and violence. They too disappeared with its demolition in 1993.

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