Thursday, December 31, 2009

Chinese Box


Regrettably, movies like this aren't made anymore.

The opening credits played against a background of objects which have significance in the story, and just as they were ending, a beautiful lacquered box - a Chinese box - was shown slowly closing and then being slid, drawer-like, into a larger box which then closed, wooden-flap-after-wooden-flap.

According to Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, this film was released in 1997 and was a Japanese-French-USA production.

It features one of our greatest living actors, Jeremy Irons, in the leading role, together with a small cast who are unknown to me. Densely populated, sophisticated 1996-to-early-1997 Hong Kong is a central, omnipresent character.

This is a movie for intelligent, mature people for it engages both the heart and the mind.

It begins on New Year's Day, 1996, and ends on June 30, 1997, one day before Britain formally hands over sovereignty of their former colony of Hong Kong to China.

Jeremy Irons plays a British journalist living in Hong Kong, whose job has been to send political reports back to the English magazine which employs him. He's become distracted by, and immersed in the complex politics and culture of Hong Kong. To further complicate matters, he's fallen deeply in love with a Chinese woman who, years earlier, fled China to Hong Kong with a Chinese man who has become very successful and powerful in Hong Kong society.

These dynamics play out against several other simultaneous storylines, all set against the larger, momentous changes coming to Hong Kong and its citizens. The brilliance of this complex movie is that it's never confusing. Somehow all the concurrent stories are seamlessly woven together so the viewer is never confused. I marvelled at this, since the movie incorporates and portrays overlapping cultural, political and societal differences.

Given the current political dialogue about the conceptual differences between our western democracy and those of the Middle East and elsewhere, it's striking to hear the Jeremy Irons character discuss these very issues, and their looming impact on the impending surrender of Hong Kong to the Chinese, long before they came to current foreign policy prominence.

Already, even before they'd assumed control of Hong Kong, repressive China was revoking important democratic liberties which had existed under the departing British: the right of assembly and of protest. Some desperate Hong Kong citizens were committing public suicide in protest.

I was moved by the evolving tragedy of Hong Kong - citizens being handed over from freedom to tyranny as though they were possessions of government. Lives symbolized by a Chinese box ... lives being enveloped and contained, even as they fiercely sought love and meaningful life within their own circumstances.

It's a haunting film, one which I think would have pleased the late, great writer/actor/director Sydney Pollack, who said his greatest hope for a movie is that it make you think about it afterward and remember it.

I loved it.