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WILD SEARCH (1989) If a movie like A Hearty Response is a Hong Kong love spell where the city becomes a kind of magic forest full of coincidences, missed meetings, helpful secondary characters popping up like pixies to sow a little magic dust, romantic karaoke montage, and love blooming between disparate characters kept apart only by frantic scriptwriters desperately battling the stars' magnetic attraction to one another in order to stretch the movie out to its required 90 minutes, then Wild Search is this kind of fairy tale taken back to its Grimm roots. The magic forest isn't enchanted in Ringo Lam's romantic melodrama - it's cursed. His characters are overwhelmed by disappointment, strangled by lives whose boundaries shrink every year as their personalities calcify and wither. The secondary characters are people like Bullet (Roy Cheung) - a psychopathic arms dealer whose hobbies are revenge and torture. He wouldn't make a good pixie. A shameless remake of Peter Weir's Witness this is the kind of movie that invites direct comparison between Hong Kong and Hollywood talents: Harrison Ford vs. Chow Yun-fat; Kelly McGillis vs. Cherie Chung; Peter Weir vs. Ringo Lam. For those comfortable with the conventions of the Hong Kong motion picture the clear winner is Wild Search. Eschewing the massive swathes of blood that festoon most of his movies, Lam goes for tender romance and the results are predictably warped. Chow Yun-fat plays alcoholic cop, Mew Mew, who gets stuck with Ka Ka, a clueless five year old girl whose arms dealing mother (Elaine Jin, who also played a mother in Gorgeous, Tempting Heart and Metade Fumaca) was just wiped out in a business transaction gone high caliber. Ka Ka's aunt, Cher, lives in one of the New Territory villages far from urban Hong Kong. Played by Cherie Chung with an earthy sexuality oozing from her pores, Cher is a country bumpkin, but nobody's fool. She's quick to pin Mew Mew for what he is: a loser. His only protection is to wage siege on her morality and virtue, and when he discovers she's in the middle of a divorce (which her father and most of the villagers regard as a loathsome mistake) he chooses to back down, rather than use this new weapon to destroy her sense of herself as a righteous person. It's this kindness that changes Mew Mew's life as he and Cher draw closer for warmth in the cold, shattered world they live in. Deftly drawn, and without an ounce of sloppy sentiment, Wild Search also sports a series of jagged, quick action setpieces that serve as omens of the unkillable Bullet's approach. As the world gets to be a colder, older place, Ringo Lam's romance becomes all the more valuable. In place of unkillable studs with a smoking hot hunk of steel in each fist, Lam gives us something real to hold onto: a belief that beneath our calloused exteriors we're good people. It's not a lot, but it's something genuine to believe in. Something that lasts. Scored throughout with Teresa Teng's heart-rending ballads, the original soundtrack of Chinese loss, Wild Search is a remarkable movie that earns its romance honestly. GRADY HENDRIX Grady Hendrix lives, writes and watches movies in New York City. He is one of the members of Subway Cinema, a heroic collective of film fans who have been screening tremendous Asian cinema festivals in NYC. Grady contributes the notes for each film - check out his fine raves for the Subway festivals Expect the Unexpected (on the films of Milkway Image), Once Upon a Time in Hong Kong (the films of Tsui Hark) and When Korean Cinema Attacks! (new Korean films). Grady is also a regular contributor to the Mobius Home Video Forum.
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Most pictures are from Leigh Melton's |
