my recent mike-inspired johnnie to festival has spurred me to make my way more methodically through the films of other major hong kong directors. and so full contact last night. the only other films by lam that i’ve seen are prison on fire and city on fire. i think i liked both of those–though all i remember of the prison one is a rare scene of the protagonist of a film taking a noisy dump. i was expecting to like full contact a lot (i’ve heard a lot about it) but ended up mostly unmoved. yes, it has a lot of great action scenes, and chow yun-fat is as magnetic as ever (bad haircut and all) but the action and violence are of an almost decadent variety. there is a more realistic and cynical edge to it than in most of woo, and there’s something to be said for that. but the film tries in the end to have it both ways–chow is apparently a more chivalrous thief/killer than simon yam’s villain–and it just doesn’t work. i think i prefer both woo’s over-the-top, operatic explorations of codes of masculinity and to’s more off-kilter explorations of genre. and the portrayal of women in this film, and of the queer psychopathic villain are really quite deplorable.
are there other films by lam that you would recommend? or is anyone interested in defending this one?
I’ll defend Full C, having just watched it. I won’t oversell: it’s not going to supersede the five or six other Chow Yun-Fat films I like better; no dazzling reinventions of action, too many reiterations of uncomfortable genre tics (the garish cartoon homosexuality of Simon Yam), but….
There’s a really intriguing heightening of the genre’s brutality and cynicism at exactly the same time as the film exaggerates the romanticized style/thematics. In the opening heist, there’s a slick pleasurable rush to the camera-work and acting, as Yam flourishes a handkerchief (purple?) around a clerk he’s robbing, the camera rushing around at foot level as some cops walk up to the thug keeping watch outside the store. All very sugar-rush, until the handkerchief reveals a knife that Yam plunges rather brutally into the clerk, until the thug whips out a gun the size of a small tree and blows eight or nine carefully fx-ed holes into each cop, blood gouting everywhere. The film might be a failure: on the one hand, it seems to mimic the empty silly pleasures of romanticized gunplay and good-evil melodrama (all without consequence, as syrupy pop plays over the soundtrack); on the other hand, it’s brutally attentive to violence and its consequences. Its glorifications of the difference between ‘good’ thug and ‘bad’ fall flat, the tone rattles between the possibilities in ways that discomfort…. and I began to really enjoy that disruptiveness. Rather than failing, I think Lam’s film plays with the schizophrenic pleasures of the genre, grafting with a pointedly rough stitch the sadism and the mythology of action films. Again, it ain’t great–but pretty interesting.
Oh, and Lam hits on a bit of camera play–rushing along from a bullet’s (or any flying weapon) point of view–in the last fourth of the film that he likes so much that he does it about fifteen times. And I, a sucker for such silliness, loved it more each time.