I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

FANTASIA DIARY: SO CLOSE

On Thursday, I saw my third film at FantAsia this year (and my token non-anime film), So Close (Chik yeung tin sai), directed by Corey Yuen.

I don't usually like to get too Harry Knowles-ish by writing personal anecdotes prior to providing a synopsis in a review, but, in this case, I think it's warranted. This Hong Kong film stars Taiwanese beauty Shu Qi (who modeled under her birth name, Lin Li-Hua, prior to becoming an actress). I didn't really know who she was until, in the RottenTomatoes.com forum, during a forum tournament called "Battle of the Hotties 2", I saw some rather naughty, but tasteful, pictures of a woman I found very beautiful even for an Asian, and it was Shu Qi (inexplicably, she got voted out of the tournament). Well, I think I found a new favourite actress, and I did a little searching and found out that she was in last year's Luc Besson-written & produced The Transporter, co-directed by Louis Leterrier and Corey Yuen, so I went out and rented it. It was a reasonably good time, with well-choreographed action scenes and car chases, and one very good gunfire & big explosion scene. I had the commentary track on, and the directors talked about Shu Qi being in the Asian version of Charlie's Angels, and, unlike a lot of critics, I happen to adore the two Charlie's Angels films, the most "pure silly fun" films I had seen since, perhaps, the original Wayne's World film, so I went to the Internet Movie Database and looked up Shu Qi, and, in the entry for So Close, I noticed that there was something about Shu Qi being a hacker called "Angel.com", so I assumed this was the Asian Charlie's Angels I heard about, and I was very pleased when I found a poster at Concordia advertising it, so I got a ticket for it and watched it on Thursday, as I said before. Turns out, although this film has three women kicking ass, it wasn't the "Asian Charlie's Angels" they referred to on the commentary track; I should have done just a tad more research on Google to find out that film is actually Martial Angels, but I enjoyed So Close plenty, nevertheless.

The plot, being more a formality than anything in these things, opens with a virus disabling the systems of a giant computer company. However, a benevolent hacker that goes by the name of Angel.com disables the virus, and later, the hacker, a beautiful woman by the name of Lynn (Shu Qi), goes to visit the head of the company, Chow Lui. However, the virus had been a hoax, just video images, and the company's data remains intact, and the company had been involved in drug dealings and other underworldy activities. Lynn turns out to be an assassin, and, while the evil head of the company thinks he is protected from her by dropping down a bulletproof glass tube from the ceiling, around his desk, Lynn had put her glasses on the desk which shoot out cyanide gas, killing the evil boss. Lynn, aided by her younger sister Sue (Vicki Zhao) who was monitoring her progress on a surveillance system, manages to avoid much of the building security, though she still has to take out some of the lackeys they have for security with her martial arts skills, in a scene set, weirdly, to the strains of The Carpenters "Close to You" (covered here by Mai Kuraki).

Lynn and Sue are adult orphans who still live together at home. Their father had developed the World Panorama system, giving them access to all the surveillance systems in the world by satellite, but he and his wife had been murdered by gangsters who wanted the system (but who, apparently, once they murdered the father, somehow forgot to take the World Panorama computers and such, but that's a minor plot oversight). Instead of giving the World Panorama systems to the Chinese government (probably for the better), they use it themselves to carry out assassination missions, though they seem to be honourable assassins, only killing "bad guys".

There's also a pretty "hot", though innocent, bathtub scene at home where you get glimpses of Shu Qi's naked body, but nothing too explicit, mostly covered by bubbles or by a shower curtain.

Kong Yat Hong (Karen Mok), a young policewoman, and her partner Mark (Michael Wei), investigate the killing of Chow Lui, and she senses she's dealing with a very talented woman, noticing she was able to avoid her face being captured by any security cameras. Her clue is the song "Close to You", and Lynn and Sue follow Hong's investigation of their activities. During a scene at an HMV (hell yeah, an HMV scene! Like in Bend It Like Beckham! I'm a big HMV fan...), Sue even lets Hong get a glimpse of her by putting a pair of "listening post" headphones onto Hong's head and playing the Kuraki Mai cover version of "Close to You" before Sue disappears into the crowd. How fortunate that Hong Kong HMV stores' "listening post"s seem to be equipped with every CD in the store rather than just a selection of 8 or so of the most popular CDs. Hong's investigation comes close to uncovering the truth, that Lynn was hired by Chow Lui's brother Chow Nunn to kill Lui because Nunn disagreed with Lui's business plans and because Nunn was sleeping with Lui's wife. Sensing that Hong is getting too close to finding out the truth, Nunn sends Lynn and Sue on another assassination mission, ostensibly to kill a guy at a nightclub from a sniping point at a hotel across the street. The initial hit attempt goes awry when Hong shows up at the hotel, and circumstances (movie critic code meaning "some complicated stuff happened to get them all together in one place which I forgot, but it isn't too important") lead to the assassins and Hong and her partner fighting each other in an elevator, eventually leading to a Mexican Standoff, with Lynn pointing her gun at Hong's partner Mark, and Hong pointing her gun at Lynn's sister Sue. But Nunn's thugs attack all of them, so they're forced to fight together (with Sue handcuffed to Hong) to fend them off in a long and elaborately choreographed sequence in a parking gargage.

Eventually, they get into a car, and Sue and Lynn drop of Hong and Mare at the curb and escape.

Lynn decides she doesn't want to be in the assassination business anymore, with dreams of marrying her longtime sweetheart Yen (Song-Seung Hon), so Sue decides to finish the job herself, leading her to get into a situation where she's being chased by the police and the bad guys, so Lynn has to direct her from her eye in the sky.

Then there's a rather shocking, realistic-looking bloody twist... I'd reveal it, thinking anyone that made it this far in the synopsis probably wouldn't care if I revealed all, but... nah, I'll be nice, this time. However, the synopsis on the official site actually does reveal what happens, if you absolutely want to know. Anyhow, cop and assassin must team up to defeat Nunn's men for good, and there is some sort of vengeance involved, I can say that much.

While most reviews I looked at pegged the centerpiece fight as being in the parking garage, I think the most impressive sequence in the film is the bit in the end in the skyscraper. It's an absolutely vertigo-inducing structure with an large opening in each floor with a walkway across it, and the openings go all of the way from the top floor to the bottom, and it's at least a 50 storey building, so it's the same effect as me looking at people eating in the food court on the "Tunnel Level" of the Centre Eaton shopping centre in Montreal from the big glass window in the cinema some 6 or 7 storeys above, except multiplied by ten. And, yes, like all regular Chinese people, the cop and the assassin have amazing jumping powers, and, as such, they can travel up and down from storey to storey through the openings in the middle of each floor. Actually, forget "vertigo-inducing", if you have even the slightest fear of heights, what these girls do is positively vomit-inducing, though, in this case, making you throw up actually means the effects of the girls vaulting across the gaps in the floor, with, I presume, the actual floors ending only a storey or two below and everything below that being computer-generated, are seamless. And, if you're the sort of person that is afraid of elevators, there's a scene here just for you too.

The final battle with Chow Nunn using samurai swords in some sort of dojo was actually a bit anti-climactic after the gravity-ignoring wire-fu of the sequence before.

One point I have to make is that, at the centre of this film is the issue of surveillance technology and cameras invading all public spaces, but, while a Hollywood film, and, obviously, I'm thinking primarily of Enemy of the State here, would beat you over the head with the message that all privacy is in danger of being eradicated by "Big Brother" technology, this film was interesting that the issue was never really raised, that the technology is amoral at worst, and whether or not constant surveillance is a good or bad thing depends on who is doing the watching. I don't have a problem with most closed circuit cameras in areas where the public gathers, but I admit connecting all surveillance systems in the world with one computer would make me queasy. But, since this is a Chinese film, no such issues are ever raised? I wonder if this is because Columbia's Asian film unit, Eastern Productions HK, didn't want to raise the ire of Peking... er, I mean, Beijing? Just a thought. Ah... it would have been annoying if they had gotten preach about this.

Some bits of the actual plot were very convoluted and hard-to-follow, and my difficulties following the plot were exacerbated at several points in the film by the straight white subtitles blending in with the background. Some shots of the subtitles blending into a white table ellicited laughs from the crowd. Also, the Caucasian actors playing the foreigners were laughably bad, for some reason, and their English pronounciation sounded almost as weird as that I'd heard in Sakura Wars: The Movie the week prior. But the fights were better than anything I'd seen in ages, and I was never bored. That's almost another reason right there why I should avoid Kill Bill... how on Earth can the fights in that possibly compare to these?

Supposedly there's also a lesbian subtext between Hong and Sue, but, honestly, I didn't see it. Like with Tomoyo's idolization of Sakura in Cardcaptor Sakura, I think people might be reading way too much into things.

Yes, I can enthusiastically recommend this film. It loses half-a-star for the lack of a coherent plot at certain points, but, you know, I came to see Shu Qi and the other babes kick ass, and so much ass this film did kick that my ass is still sore 3 days later and I had to put on some Anusol. (This film will be released in limited release in North American theatres this fall by Columbia Pictures, but, if you can't wait and you have the equipment to play Region 3-encoded DVDs, the legitimate Region 3 release, with Cantonese soundtrack and Chinese and English subs, can be bought from HK Flix, the Hong Kong online movie source which doesn't sell bootlegs.) ****�/*****

posted by Steve Brandon @ 3:10 AM