As soon as I heard that there were multiple movies new to Criterion this month starring both Michelle Yeoh AND Maggie Cheung, I knew I would have to cover at least one of them. Then I watched both of them and realized I had to cover both of them. Because not only are there two movies that star three of the greatest legends of Hong Kong cinema (the third I wasn’t familiar with), but they are superhero movies! And superhero movies that really stand in stark contrast to any vestige of the genre as we know it today. And it’s a relief.
Michelle Yeoh is having a moment right now, at a time where she may well be on the path to winning a Best Actress Oscar, and since this whole thing started I’ve been interested in looking at her early Hong Kong work that made her one of the great action superstars. I wouldn’t have expected it of serene, quiet, breathtakingly beautiful Maggie Cheung though. But both these ladies alongside eastern pop superstar Anita Mui in 1993 made up a short-lived trifecta of kick-ass dames in a pair of movies by Johnnie To, The Heroic Trio and Executioners, both set in a vaguely defined though immensely contemporary dystopia that just so happens to also feature hefty doses of mysticism in its make-up.
In The Heroic Trio, a mysterious figure is kidnapping babies who are destined to be emperors, delivering them to an underground villain. Taking up the task of finding and saving these infants, as well as defeating the “Evil Master” is Wonder Woman (Mui) -not the DC Comics one- a masked sword-fighting martial artist vigilante whose secret identity Tung is a mild-mannered policeman’s wife. Eventually she teams up with Chat, a.k.a. Thief Catcher (Cheung), a tough-as-nails bounty hunter, while the evil accomplice Ching the Invisible Woman (Yeoh) is torn by her morality and ultimately joins the other women in bringing her master down. Executioners follows the trio as an official crime-fighting team raising Tung’s daughter while working to subvert a dictatorial regime that in Mad Max: Fury Road fashion has amassed full control of the uncontaminated water supply. Also, another servant of the Evil Master is lurking in the shadows for revenge. Oh, and Takeshi Kaneshiro is in this one!
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The plots aren’t terribly important to either of these movies, but interestingly To and the actresses put a lot of effort into the characters. There’s a lot of often melodramatic, overwrought pathos to their histories, identities, and motivations, but it’s so warmly charming that the shallowness falls by the wayside. In that first movie, both Tung and Ching are given a lot of personal drama to deal with, the latter especially reckoning with her actions and loyalties. By the second these are expanded upon and additionally with Chat, who’s perhaps the least developed in the first movie, undergoing a vital arc of responsibility. And it’s all really engaging to watch, trite though some of its writing might be, in large part off of the strength in the performances. Yeoh, Cheung, and Mui are bringing it all in their commitment, with Yeoh in particular, playing the most complex character, vividly shining. It’s also just a lot of fun in how well-constructed this superhero team is. Unlike a lot of modern equivalents, who seem to all work in conjunction off the same playbook and are a written to an identical metre, each of these heroes are markedly different with their own distinct methods and rhythms. It’s palpable in their sometimes hostile interactions in the first movie, and even in their friendship and deep comradery in the second. What they have in common is simply their fighting capabilities, and it’s understood from early on the formidable force they could make as a unit.
The action scenes are of course a lot of fun. The premise of this heroic trio of awesome women martial artists is basically built around them, and they do not disappoint in creativity or style. To choreographs and edits them with thrilling spontaneity and yet a stylized grace -using a slowed camera speed to enhance a beat for instance, making use of the specific elements like Tung’s sword or Ching’s cape or the various flips and kicks. Mui was well-versed in these kind of movies and by this point Yeoh was still the Queen of Hong Kong action cinema, but Cheung was a relative newcomer -and yet she holds her own very well in the frenetic, deliberately composed sequences. And that’s honestly one of the ways these movies feel more like comic books than the vast majority of western superhero films. To has a keen eye for composition, and shoots the action towards those moments of cool visual imagery. There is a fair bit of posing in these movies and it’s incredible. They also benefit immensely from not caring one lick about the reality of their setting and context -there are occasional grounded moments, but the largely campy movies never have any airs towards a kind of logical authenticity, which is the general tone of this genre of Hong Kong movie, and it’s one the west could certainly learn from -especially where it concerns something as innately silly and outrageous as the superhero genre.
There are small moments of wild violence once in a while that are good and fun until the climax of the second movie where it is turned on one of the protagonists in perhaps too austere a way; and occasional beats, especially in the first movie, that could maybe be handled with more consideration and intelligence. But these are secondary to the cool and the thrill of the films, of the characters, and of the actresses who play them so joyfully. Last year, Yeoh cited The Heroic Trio as a favourite of her Hong Kong career and it’s easy to see why, as someone who cared an awful lot about women getting to be action stars, here was a movie fronted by three of them, all extraordinary in their own right. And it’s a shame it ended at just these two. It’s the kind of thing I would genuinely like to see a reprisal of, but the combination of Mui sadly succumbing to cancer in 2003, Cheung being retired from acting for almost twenty years now, and Yeoh’s character being dead by the end of the second film makes it pretty impossible. But I’m extremely glad they exist, and at the very least maybe a remaster can be done -Tarantino is a fan of To’s work, perhaps he can spearhead something. They are a pair of weird fun movies that deserve more eyes on them.
Criterion Recommendation: Barton Fink (1991)
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This last year saw Miller’s Crossing enter the Criterion Collection which was a good point to realize that the Coen Brothers have relatively few movies that have received this honour. That’s not right. Especially when it comes to the movie they made right after Miller’s Crossing, which is one of their very best, though not talked about much for its sharpness of theme and tone. Barton Fink is the story of a neurotic New York playwright in the 1940s hired to come out to Hollywood to write a wrestling picture and struggling to do so from his dingy hotel room. During the process he meets and is disillusioned by his idol and befriends an insurance salesman in an effort to draw on “the common man”. Famously written by the Coens during a period of writer’s block, Barton Fink is one of the all-time great movies on the creative process, the harsh nature of the Hollywood machine, and the superficiality of elite neoliberalism -represented in Fink’s performative, merely aestheticized interest in the working class. It is John Turturro’s best performance, one of John Goodman’s, and is a deeply fascinating, unnerving movie of multi-faceted ideas and style. Probably the Coen’s greatest ending too, and Criterion should be as eager to explore it more as its fans.
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