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Urban Space in the Films of Johnnie To*

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Urban Space in the Films of Johnnie To* Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 46.1 March 2020: 59-81 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.202003_46(1).0004 The Unexpected Encounter of Two Parallel Lines: Urban Space in the Films of Johnnie To* William Carroll Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures Indiana University Bloomington, USA Abstract In this paper the author compares Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To’s (杜琪 峯) formal articulation of urban space in his internationally celebrated crime films with that in his locally popular romantic comedies. Drawing from recent scholarship on urban space in Hong Kong, Chinese, and broader East Asian cinema, he establishes that To’s films in both genres hinge on spatial relationships that are specific to rapidly forming metropolises. However, through close analyses of the crime films Expect the Unexpected (非常突然 Feichang turan, 1998) and Breaking News (大事件 Da shijian, 2004) and the romantic comedies Turn Left, Turn Right (向左走‧向右走 Xiangzuo zou, xiangyou zou, 2003) and Don't Go Breaking My Heart (單身男女 Danshen nannu, 2011), he contends that To’s crime films depict these spatial relationships within a framework of spatial continuity, while his romantic comedies do so within a framework of spatial fragmentation. These two frameworks play into the two genres’ separate dramatic needs: fatalistic confrontation for the crime films vs. delayed reconciliation in the romantic comedies. However, To uses these spatial frameworks within the two genres to explore the ways that urban design can either thwart or facilitate encounters between the inhabitants of a global city. Keywords urban space, industrial genres, film genre, romantic comedies, crime films, spatial continuity, spatial fragmentation, fate, global cities * The author wishes to thank Matt Hubbell, Yueling Ji, Gary Kafer, Katerina Korola, Mikki Kressbach, David Krolokoski, Cooper Long, Nicole Morse, Jordan Schonig, H.S. Sum Cheuk Shing, Pao-Chen Tang, Alec Wang, Yuqian Yan, and his peer reviewers for their invaluable feedback. 60 Concentric 46.1 March 2020 The 1998 Hong Kong crime film Expect the Unexpected (非常突然 Feichang turan) follows the unplanned crisscrossings of two groups of criminals (one bumbling and incompetent, the other brutal and efficient) with a special unit of Hong Kong’s police force. The film opens with the incompetent criminals executing a jewelry store robbery as their counterparts watch with amusement from a café across the street. As the police arrive, the incompetent thieves scatter before they can collect any loot. A glass window provides a frame for the efficient criminals to watch the event through, seeming to transform the event into a film or television program for them: the camera pans back and forth from inside the café as one thief tries to escape, realizes the police are closing in on one side, tries to escape in the other direction, realizes they are also closing in there, and apparently forgetting what he has just seen, again attempts to escape on the first side. From the three men in the café’s reaction shots, there is little sense that they are in any physical danger. This changes very suddenly when they see the thief run into another building across the way, and the police follow him. Suddenly, we learn that these three men have invaded one of the apartments in the same building, kidnapped and sexually assaulted the two women living there, and used the apartment as a base of operations for a more elaborate heist scheme. Panicked, one calls the member of their group who’s still in the apartment, telling him to escape before the police arrive. In pursuit of the bumbling criminal, the police accidentally encounter the brutal one. This kind of confused, unexpected encounter facilitated by space is a common feature of Milkyway crime films helmed by Johnnie To (杜琪峯).1 David Bordwell has discussed the parallelism between the two groups of criminals as an example of To’s use of doubles in his narrative structures (Planet Hong Kong 256-59), while others, like Stephen Teo and Michael Ingham, have related the frequent coincidental encounters that drive the narratives of many of his films, including PTU (2003) and Breaking News (大事件 Da shijian, 2004). Different theorists attribute this to different reasons: Bordwell identifies these tendencies as stemming from a narrative structure that depends heavily on coincidence (Planet Hong Kong 259), while Teo and Ingham use them as evidence of the filmmaker’s fatalistic 1 Though the directorial credit is given to Patrick Yau (游達志) with Johnnie To and Wai Ka- fai (韋家輝) credited as producers, To allegedly took over filmmaking during production and the film is now conventionally considered part of To’s filmography (cf. Bordwell; Ingham; Teo), to the point that in a recent retrospective of To’s work at the Toronto International Film Festival, To was not only credited singularly as the director, but the entire retrospective of his work was named for this film. William Carroll 61 worldview (Teo 8; Ingham 11). However, I would like to focus on the spatial relationships of the opening sequence of the film: the apparent boundary between the two groups of criminals that quickly becomes shattered, and the buildings where the two criminals crisscross, causing one to lead the police to the other. This latter plot point becomes central to To’s later Breaking News, whose narrative covers the span of a police stakeout of an apartment where some robbers have holed up after a heist, unaware of the fact that a group of contract killers is staying in the same building.2 Though the apparently random encounter in each film can certainly be read as driven by either coincidence or fate, I consider them from the perspective of space: in particular, the space of a certain kind of rapidly developing, and thus rapidly transforming, modern metropolis; what Saskia Sassen calls the “global city.” Ackbar Abbas has argued that Hong Kong, both because of its rapid development and unresolved political status, has a unique identity in this framework (Abbas, Hong Kong) and To’s roots in the Hong Kong film industry may help to explain his interest in the subject. However, as we will see, To also explores similar spatial relationships in other major cities that are in the process of constant transformation in China, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. Considered from this perspective, there are two additional films from To’s filmography that both hinge on coincidental encounters (or non-encounters) that are facilitated by similar spatial arrangements: the romantic comedies Turn Left, Turn Right (向左走‧向右走 Xiangzuo zou, xiangyou zou, 2003) and Don’t Go Breaking My Heart (單身男女 Danshen nannu, 2011). Each of these films adopts a conception of space that Yingjin Zhang calls “space as productive,” in which “space becomes a dynamic force that generates changes, shapes experiences, and demands narratives” (Cinema 1). The way that To’s films hinge on encounters facilitated by urban spatial arrangements, I argue, articulates the way that spatial development and transformation affects human relationships in the global city. To’s crime films operate within a framework of spatial continuity: the action is confined to small spaces, like a single building or city block, and their narratives are driven by the way that these spaces force characters, or groups, to collide with one another. Though these collisions are partly driven by the genre’s needs for direct conflict, To’s films articulate the way that the global city, by virtue of its dense population and architectural organization, can facilitate unexpected, and perhaps unwanted, 2 Teo also notes the similarity between the opening of Expect the Unexpected and the overarching narrative structure of Breaking News, and asks To about it in an interview. To denies that the similarity was a conscious decision on his part (Teo 232). 62 Concentric 46.1 March 2020 encounters between its residents and passers-through. To’s romantic comedies, by contrast, operate within a framework of spatial fragmentation: they explore the way that relationships between people within a small geographic area are divided by the space of the global city. These divisions are partly driven by the genre’s need for a delayed union of their central romantic couple, but To maps this need onto the design of the city. Further, rather than confining their action to a single area, the romantic comedies show the same spatial relationship in different locations across one city, or even across multiple cities, revealing a uniformity of design and development in the global city. Though To uses both spatial continuity and spatial fragmentation to serve the purposes of their respective genres, his films ultimately articulate the ways that the design of the global city can thwart encounters just as easily as they can facilitate them. Milkyway Image and Genre Filmmaking To analyze the implications of genre on To’s depiction of urban space, we must begin by analyzing the differences between the two primary genres in which To operates. The implications of breaking To’s filmography into “crime films” and “romantic comedies” may seem straightforward, particularly if we only define the genres as a function of the film’s narratives. The crime films are about the criminal underworld, hinge on the violent confrontation between rival criminals and/or the police, and deliver action. The romantic comedies are lighthearted films about romance, hinge on the delayed union of a romantic couple, and deliver laughs. However, strictly focusing on the narrative content of the films misses several other differences between the genres. Specifically, the two genres have separate channels of distribution that engender different intended audiences. Alex Zahlten has advocated for analyzing the industrial features of genres that inform “the supposedly bounded feature film textuality,” arguing that in many cases specific genres are associated with specific modes of financing, production, distribution, and exhibition, and that these features can determine their content (2).
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