Jiang Hu - The Triad Zone DVD Region 3

Directed by Gordon Chan's assistant director, Dante Lam, this movie has the kind of life to it that Chan wished his Okinawa Rendezvous had. Lantern-jawed Tony Leung Kar-fai stars as Jim Yuen, a triad leader in a loud suit who is marked for assassination. Trying to unravel the mystery of who's after his hide he winds up re-examining everything he took for granted about those around him: from his wife (Sandra Ng at her termagant best), to his bodyguard (Roy Cheung) to his lawyer (Chan Fai-hung in the role he was born to play). An experimental action-comedy that has the sad heart of a mountain-dwelling Buddhist monk, Jiang Hu uses Brother Jim's predicament to sum up the predicament of pretty much every single one of us. Flashbacks to his salad days mugging folks in London with Sandra Ng, past interactions with triad bosses, conversations about who did what to whom ten years ago, and brief interludes with ancillary characters flutter across Jim's face like shadows. The mysterious little grace notes of a lucky bastard's life pile up, but at the end of the day you've just got Tony Leung looking at his life, all piled up in broken pieces, and disco dancing in the dark on top of a table.

The movie is also a comedy. A really, really great comedy that recalls the straight-laced parodies of Hong Kong genre films that came out in the early 90's (Flirting Scholar, Last Hero in China, Cheez N' Ham). Jiang Hu: The Triad Zone is the first and last word on triad movies, managing an outrageous scatological sight gag one minute, asking for a respectful moment of silence the next. The action scenes that crop up are well-staged (as one would expect from a Gordon Chan protege) but they usually go places that Gordon Chan would never dream of (one ends with the arrival of the God Kwan, played by Anthony Wong).

The subtext to all the jokes is the gulf between appearance and reality, between what we wanted to be when we grew up and what we actually became. It's the unbridgeable gap between life and the movies: between a perfect fiction, and an imperfect world. Like a carnival huckster with a heart of gold, Jiang Hu can't help but try to sell you this bill of brilliantly cinematic goods, but in the end it comes down on the side of life, not perfectibility. It's that rare movie that subverts itself by flouting its loose ends and uncertainties rather than tying them up in a neat narrative bow.

The actors make up a who's who of smart Hong Kong movies: Ann Hui, Eason Chan, Roy Cheung, Lee Lik-chi, Eric Tsang, Lee Siu-kei, and Anthony Wong.

Reviewer : Grady Hendrix (USA)