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A question mark hangs over the future of the Hong Kong film industry, the third largest in the world, and until recently, one of the few to achieve better domestic box office than American imports. The gravest threat to HK cinema comes from the bureaucrats and censors of mainland China, who can't wait to rein in and defang a movie culture that has been described with epithets like "gloriously disreputable" and "shoot-from-the-id." Maverick filmmaker Wong Kar-wai admits that he rushed into Happy Together, his hyperkinetic new release about a doomed gay love affair, because he feared an inevitable postreunification clampdown.
Meanwhile, HK pictures ranging from classics like King Hu's 1975 Cannes winner A Touch of Zen to this year's nutty Triad flick, Too Many Ways To Be Number One, continue to win friends and influence moviemakers around the globe. "There's a vital energy, a genuine emotion you feel in the best of them," says Pierre Corbeil, director of Montreal's Fant-Asia film festival, which shows a knowledgeable selection of the ex-colony's genre movies to huge, wildly enthusiastic audiences.
Of all the HK directors being celebrated in the West, or trying with varying degrees of success to relocate here, John Woo is the one on a fast track to becoming cinema's first Asian international superstar. Japan's Akira Kurosawa once triumphed in the art houses, but Woo -- like the industry that nurtured him -- is a crossover success, equally beloved by the cognoscenti and the popcorn-munching crowd, especially since last summer's runaway hit, Face/Off.
Like Hitchcock's, Woo's appeal is intricate and multifaceted. While his box-office success undeniably depends on the joy that Buttheads everywhere derive from viewing bodies crashing through plate-glass windows, Woo's films soar far past the limitations of routine crime flicks and action-adventures.
In John Woo's universe, violent action is an operatic, balletic expansion of primary emotions. On one level, his dizzying fight sequences are all about the wish to gain mastery over one's life and vocation, exaggerated and stylized, as in a young boy's Billy the Kid fantasies. Woo's signature hero is the elegant gunfighter, dazzling in his gravity-defying bounding through space, part Gene Kelly, part wizard from Chinese mythology.
On the other hand, in pictures like the ironically titled A Better Tomorrow, yin...