1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 76: Comrades: Almost a love story

Compare this Hong Kong rom-com to Nora Ephron’s crowd-pleasers (When Harry Met Sally; Sleepless in Seattle; You’ve Got Mail).

Similarities:

• The lovers “meet cute”
• It takes years for them to end up together
• They’re played by big stars
• Maggie Cheung (compare: Meg Ryan)
• Leon Lai (compare: “rom-com” Tom Hanks, with a little of Forrest Gump stirred in)

Differences:

• The lovers are poor immigrants
• They don’t live in apartments that only millionaires could afford
• They don’t have respectable upper-middle-class jobs (a sample of Ephron-movie jobs: architect, journalist, CEO)

The man works for years to rise to the position of sous chef in a modest restaurant.

The woman, even more driven, holds an endless succession of jobs (hustles, really), several at a time:

• McDonald’s cashiering
• For-profit language school recruiting
• Stock trading
• Bootleg music vending
• Tour guiding
• Massaging
• Being “kept” by a gangster

But this isn’t a sordid movie, at least not tonally; it really does feel like something by Ephron.

The lovers pursue and retreat from each other, stringing the audience along. There are good arguments for their coming together, and for their remaining apart. What will the lovers choose? Or will fate choose for them?

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

They become friends because they’re lonely. Both have moved to Hong Kong from the mainland. One of them knows that the other is an immigrant; the other does not. The truth is revealed only gradually.

It won’t be these characters’ last move. The story takes them from China to Hong Kong to New York: least free, freer, freest.

Hong Kong, it seems, is the intermediate stage in a “natural” progression from China to the United States, whether or not the mainlanders who stop over in Hong Kong admit it. Their behavior in Hong Kong points to it. They take English classes. They eat U.S. food and watch U.S. movies. Mickey Mouse is a recurring image. One older Chinese immigrant, who has spent her life running a brothel of Thai immigrants, is obsessed with the actor William Holden.

On the other hand, the immigrants regard the mainland as shameful. They hush up their origins. If they cling to certain relics of the past, they keep them secret.

A pop star, Teresa Teng, dominates the soundtrack. Mainlanders in Hong Kong revere but won’t openly listen to her, lest they be detected as not native to Hong Kong.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The character who bucks the trend is Pau, a good-natured gangster played by Eric Tsang (who reminds one of Peter Lorre).

The woman involves herself with Pau during a difficult time. Pau isn’t stupid. He notices the lovers’ feelings for each other. Ruthless in business dealings, he’s surprisingly tolerant of his “kept” woman’s longings. Perhaps he can afford to put up with her equivocal feelings because, paradoxically, he isn’t a striver. He may pursue money, but he’s outside the usual hierarchy of advancement. He’ll always be riffraff; he knows what he is; he is contented.

He, too, moves to New York, and observes wryly that the rough-and-tumble neighborhood where he has ended up isn’t very different from where he began.

Meanwhile, the lovers are kept at arm’s length from each other by their mainstream notions of success.

This is my favorite image: Cheung on the left, Tsang on the right, Lai and his mainland bride in the middle. Four characters, three couples. The dream, on both continents, is for romantic and material success to issue predictably from hard work and prudent choice. But success is more capricious. The route is tortuous and unclear; at some junctures, travelers must be downright lucky.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 28: Richard III

Ian McKellen twinkles in the titular role.

Yes, eventually, the usurping King sees ghosts. When he dies, he is absorbed into a hellish fireball.

No matter. His glee is uncontainable, overpowering. I chuckled all movie long. Upon reflection, I’m somewhat troubled by this.

Richard charms his victims while arranging for them to be destroyed. In an early scene, he reassures his older brother, George, the Duke of Clarence (Nigel Hawthorne). George is being transported to the Tower of London at the decree of their eldest sibling – the ailing, insecure King Edward IV.

However, the audience already knows that the discord between George and Edward has been contrived by Richard. Richard has looked directly into the camera and confided this secret.

Richard appears so forthright that he charms one antagonist after another, making them vulnerable to his scheming. Alas, his intentions are anything but pure.

After George resumes his journey to the Tower, Richard says:

Go tread that path that thou shalt ne’er return.
Simple, plain Clarence, I do love thee so
That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven,
If heaven will take the present at our hands.

“If heaven will accept anything from me, that is,” is the paraphrase of my trusty No Fear Shakespeare. (Its cover drawing even looks a little like Ian McKellen.)

Richard hires a pair of murderers to ensure that George doesn’t return from the Tower.

After George is killed, Edward feels so guilty that he, too, dies. Edward’s young sons become Richard’s main obstacles to the throne. At first, Richard assumes the ironical title of “Lord Protector” (although Shakespeare took some astounding liberties with the history, “Lord Protector” was Richard’s title in real life, not just in the play). It isn’t long, though, before Richard allows himself to be crowned King. He arranges the murder of his nephews.

Meanwhile, Richard has wooed and married Anne, the widow of the deposed King Henry VI’s son. Anne knows that Richard murdered her husband and King Henry (on this point, Shakespeare definitely fudged the truth). Richard woos Anne because he is amused by the outrageousness of the match.

When she accepts Richard’s hand, Anne becomes, in effect, another of his sycophants. Richard has surrounded himself with kowtowing courtiers. One by one, they are squeezed out by the rest of the court – and killed.

And yet each courtier can see that Richard will eventually come after him. Or each one ought to see. Curiously, some don’t. The blandest courtier – arguably, the most chilling one – is the Duke of Buckingham (Jim Broadbent), who remains tethered to Richard until it’s too late.

Buckingham’s is an “unrewarding” role, says Harold Bloom. Compared to Richard, all the supporting characters (except, perhaps, George) are wooden, uninteresting.

They may be so on the page. The movie, however, gets around this problem by employing a trick perfected many decades earlier in the hilarious gangster farce, Beat the Devil. The villains in that movie would have been interchangeable but for the inspired casting of such physically distinctive, peculiarly mannered actors as Peter Lorre and Robert Morley. Similarly, each supporting actor in Richard III is distinctive – archetypal, even. Three examples:

• Jim Broadbent
• Jim Carter (of Downton Abbey)
• Robert Downey Jr.

Another inspired choice is the omission of the bitter Queen Margaret (King Henry VI’s widow). Mark Van Doren identifies her as the leader of a “chorus of women” whose purpose is to decry Richard. The chorus also includes the old Duchess of York, who is the mother of Richard, George, and Edward; Queen Elizabeth, Edward’s wife; and Richard’s Queen Anne. Piled up, their complaints grow tiresome. By leaving out the main plaintiff, the movie sharpens its focus upon the exuberant quality of Richard’s wickedness, which is what makes the play so much fun.

Two other women hardly speak, but their roles are magnified.

One is Princess Elizabeth, King Edward’s youthful daughter, whom Richard schemes to marry once he has unencumbered himself of Anne.

The other woman is an unnamed Pan Am flight attendant who is involved with the courtier played by Robert Downey Jr. Yes: a flight attendant. The movie is set in what appears to be an alternative 20th-century Britain.

This Britain is overtly fascist. The first scene shows the destruction of a library by a tank, which is driven by men who wear gas masks and carry Lugers. Edward’s court is decked in flags of red, white, and black. The courtiers wear armbands and sashes.

The set design alone provides sufficient reason for viewing the movie. What they most remind me of is the location shooting for the cult movie Hidden City (1987), which takes place in abandoned buildings, tunnels, garbage heaps, and other unseen but accessible areas of London. Richard III’s street scenes are shot in dingy pedestrian tunnels. There is also a vast morgue with rows of corpse-tables, apparently open to the public. Palace interiors, while expensively decorated, are strangely spare. From the outside, the buildings are queerly, rather brutalistically shaped – and huge. In the military camp scenes, tents are arranged in neat little rows next to a quaint railway line – under a parched, cloudless sky.

Most interesting is the exercise yard within the Tower of London. To reach it, George and his jailer climb up a long staircase. They unlatch a gate. Then George steps out into a yard that is just a small, circular slab of concrete surrounded by a great moat. The moat water is filty, and beyond it are enormous walls. Rain begins to fall on George. This is the setting in which he recounts his famous dream of drowning, in which Richard, who would rescue him, hinders him instead. The location looks realistic in its grimy detail, and yet it is a fantastical, forlorn sort of place.

Here the set design joins with George’s speech to create a scene of tremendous imaginative power. The movie briefly becomes something more than an anthology of Richard’s cruel witticisms.