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PEACE HOTEL (1995) An extremely good-looking movie (produced, incidentally, by John Woo) in which Chow Yun Fat appears as a sort of Lone Ranger for Shanghai in the 1920s. A formidable killer (CYF) sets up the "Peace Hotel" as a haven for the desperate: no hunter can pass into the hotel in pursuit of fugitives. There's only one catch: the rule is, that you can never leave. But all rules are malleable for Cecilia Yip's character, a swindler to whom lying comes as easily as breathing... The flick contains some wonderful scenes of CYF attitude, complete with impressive bald-headed sword-wielding mayhem-induction, and a dazzling performance by Cecilia Yip Tung as a seductive, conniving swindler. Director Wai Ka-Fai's aesthetic sense is manifest in the Wong Kar-Wai style action sequences, more about the blurred slow-motion screaming than the usual fast-paced bodycount. Wa Ka-Fai's preoccupation with morally ambiguous, sometimes unlikeable characters is also expressed in CYF's killer and Cecilia Yip's cheat. Scenes of violence and carnage alternate, in quintessentially HK style, with lingering, affectionate scenes of family love on the one hand and slapstick, conflicted relationship development on the other. The genre-bending combination of wu xia swordplay, "Western" cowboy references, and comedy/drama anticipates Wai Ka-Fai's breakthrough flick Too Many Ways to Be Number 1 (1997), and fans of HK cinema will also recognize many references to heroic bloodshed movies of the 1980s. But although Peace Hotel is comparatively light-hearted, the beautiful images and careful cinematography bring to mind The Odd One Dies (1997): there's the same kind of preoccupation with patterns of light and shadow. Wonderfully entertaining.... WINNIFRED LOUIS These days Winnifred Louis is a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Research on Group Processes in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland. Back when she was in Canada with more free time, she set up the website Chow Yun Fat - God of Actors, a seminal resource for CYF fans on the web.
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