Director: Johnnie To

Starring: Anthony Wong, Simon Yam, Nick Cheung, Roy Cheung, Josie Ho, Francis Ng, Richie Ren

Featuring: Ka Tung Lam, Suet Lam, Ellen Chan,

After his two Election films, bleak and complicated studies of gangster lore and rituals of succession, Hong Kong director Johnnie To takes a more calculatedly entertaining tack in Exiled. The film is set in Macau, the former Portuguese colony, in 1998, just before the handover to China. It begins with an image of two knocks at a door, and two pairs of gunmen looking for the same guy. The four, who know each other, wait for their quarry to return. Two have come to kill him, two to protect him.

Exiled involves waiting games and bursts of speed. It is punctuated by impeccably choreographed set-pieces, often involving gunplay: not simply the hectic “bullet ballets” that Hong Kong cinema is often associated with, but more graceful exchanges of fire that have an almost sculptural sense of line and perspective, and others that have more in common with Leone and Peckinpah westerns. The buildings of Macau seems at times to echo the Spanish-inflected architecture of the western, and there are moments — landscape, music, motifs — when To reinforces the resemblance further.

Beyond the central figures of the four men (played by accomplished veterans Anthony Wong, Roy Cheung, Francis Ng and Lam Suet) who have come knocking at the door of Wo (Nick Cheung), there are memorable additional figures in the mix. Simon Lam brings his usual explosive manic energy to the role of a Hong Kong gang boss with a short fuse, and Josie Ho, as Wo’s wife, and the mother of his small son, has a small but emblematic part in the story.

Exiled has elements — actors, themes, dilemmas — in common with one of his earlier breakthrough films, The Mission (1999), the story of five men who came together to act as bodyguards for a gang boss, and were driven apart by a dilemma over loyalty and orders. But it’s a more calculated, artful work. It is a story about the past returning to haunt the present, about decisive moments and stages of transition: about male bonding, loyalty, certainty, chance and inevitability.

It plays with time, with the fixing of a moment, such as the taking of a photograph, and the arbitrary reversal of a moment, when a decision is made by the toss of a coin. And it plays, effortlessly, with time and motion, with the grammar and geometry of action-movie scenarios.

There’s black humour, too, in Exiled, notably in a scene in which an underworld doctor has competing claims on his attention: once again, To executes it with a wicked sense of symmetry and elegance. Great entertainment.

Film Review By: Jennifer Nichols

You can buy this DVD at: www.hongkong-store.com