Many people I know couldn't believe it when I urged them - begged them, even - to go and see Shaolin Soccer,
the last film by Hong Kong director Stephen Chow. The title alone, they
laughed, sounded cheesy and computer-game naff. Surely the movie could
appeal only to people with the attention span and emotional range of a
five-year-old child?
Well
no, actually. It was a terrific Catherine wheel of a movie, witty and
daring and fizzing with visual excitement, that confirmed what
chopsocky fans had known for years: Chow was the successor to Bruce
Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li - the new prince of the international
martial arts film.
Kung Fu Hustle is possibly even better. It flies, it kicks, it dances.
It
is the out-and-out most delightful picture of the year so far. The
audience I watched it with was practically throwing up with laughter
after the first couple of minutes. The perfect antidote to the gloomy
self-importance of recent Hollywood thrillers such as Sin City and
Batman Begins, I cannot imagine anyone leaving it without a huge grin
on their face and an immediate desire to rush back into the cinema and
devour it like a favourite pudding.
The film,
though as fresh as a forest after a sudden downpour, is set in the
past, in Shanghai just before the revolution of 1949. The Axe Gang is a
legion of ruthless men who sport top hats and dark suits like psychotic
figures from a Magritte painting, and descend on an apparently backward
rural village called Pig Sty Alley only to find it populated by
working-class kung-fu masters.
To their shame, and
our amusement, they are kicked out by tubby locals, but they vow to get
revenge and use a motley crew of misfits to do so: Sing (Stephen Chow
himself), a weedy Axe Gang wannabe whose sidekick is a
doughnut-scoffing dolt (Dong Zhi Hua), and "The Beast" (Siu Lung Leung)
- a monstrously powerful fighter who is said to have graduated from
"toad school", on account of the way he prepares for battle by blowing
his cheeks and sprouting a huge new chin.
In many
contemporary movies, and Sin City and Batman Begins are typical in this
respect, most of the characters are drawn from a restricted and
self-referential roster of filmic stereotypes. Kung Fu Hustle, however,
employs characters who are closer in range and gladsome variety to
those often found in real-life small communities.
The
matriarch of the village is a vinegary, sow-faced, fag-in-mouth
harridan (Yuen Qiu), chesty and with calves the size of redwood trees.
One of the victims of her scorn is her husband (Wah Yuen), a charmingly
lechy omnisexual landlord who is always pinching kisses from his
tenants and pinching their bums. Against all odds, this rickety couple,
portrayed at first as village bullies, turn out to be key resistance
fighters.
And in fact, this is a film in which no
one and nothing is quite what they seem. A short villager who is picked
on stands up and turns out to be about 8ft tall; a puny-looking, speccy
intellectual proves to be a barrel-chested tough; a civil servant turns
out to be a face-pounding he-man.
This is in
keeping with one of Kung Fu Hustle's key themes: that human beings -
even, and perhaps especially, those who seem to be feckless - are
protean, transformable and capable of doing and becoming far more than
even they might ever imagine.
Chow and his fellow
writer Tsang Kan Cheong have crammed the script with tons of
side-stories and sub-plots, all of which add up to a highly theatrical
and satisfying finale. Its energy never flags. Chow makes brilliant use
of computer-generated imagery, not, as so many directors do, to create
pseudo-realistic effects or fakely teeming crowd scenes, but to
exaggerated, comic, liberatingly anything-goes ends.
Sometimes,
the celluloid itself seems to vibrate with delight at the images it
carries: the harridan-matriarch chases Sing from her village across a
series of lusciously coloured country paths, swerving through and under
traffic, faster and faster like something out of Wacky Races, so fast
that she starts flying through the air and doing fantasy-gymnast
somersaults - until she splats into a billboard.
Another
beautiful scene sets a pair of silently vicious musicians, hired by the
Axe Gang, against the villagers. They use notes and vibrations from
their stringed instrument to set off sharp missiles that spear and
decapitate anyone in their way. The village fighters sway and bend like
slo-mo belly dancers to avoid being killed.
Small
wonder that this movie shared last year's Hong Kong Film Award with
2046. In his own freewheeling, often slapsticky and very vulgar
fashion, Chow is as fastidious an auteur as Wong Kar Wai. He
slam-drives a mishmash of pop genres together for precisely calibrated
comic effect - there are droll allusions to recent stellar-budget
Hollywood pictures such as The Matrix and Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon, as well as his own Shaolin Soccer.
He
also manages to be reverential to the "Bruceploitation" martial arts
films of the 1970s and early 1980s, coaxing out of retirement a number
of actors. The result transcends pastiche or parody: it is a tribute to
its filmic forebears, whose surreal wit, manic drive and recombinant
élan bode well for the future of the mainstream martial arts movie.
Special
plaudits deserve to go to fight choreographer Yuen Wo Ping - and to
whoever is responsible for the slangy, funny subtitles that very
effectively translate the film's earthy humour: it's a shame he or she
isn't credited.
Czech
Dream is a different kind of comedy. It is a high-concept satire in
which ideas take the place of pratfalls. The directors, Filip Remunda
and Vít Klusák, call it "a film reality show".
They
establish a mammoth new hypermarket, extravagantly hyped and promoted.
It is called Czech Dream, and thousands of people turn up to its
opening on a blazingly hot summer's morning. The problem? It doesn't
exist.
The film has been a big hit in the Czech
Republic and on the international documentary circuit. It seems to have
been inspired by the anti-consumerism pranks of the Yes Men and of
Adbusters. Media studies undergraduates will love it, but I'm not sure
it tells us anything about modern society that wasn't evident from the
TV footage of the Ikea riots in north London earlier this year.