OUTSTANDING b&w crime thriller out of Hong Kong. Winner of 2 Asian Film Awards for Best Sound and Best Production Design; the Hong Kong Directors' Guild Award for Best Actress; 2 HKFCS Awards for Best Actress and Best Film; Catalonian Int'l Film Festival Award for Best Cinematography; and the MYmovies Purple Mulberry Award.
This film is near perfect in every recognizable cinematic category. Director Soi Cheang and writer Kin-Yee Au have given us a truly unforgettable realistic dark crime thriller drama that is going to set the standard for in crime thrillers for the next two decades. This was not a comic book adventure where a star wades through 25 armed baddies and puts them down in 40 seconds flat. This movie is realistic rough non-stop action that plays out in dark, drizzly, narrow, garbage-strewn, urban alleys, by desperate and traumatized men and women. In the long struggle scenes not a martial arts move is seen. The climatic fight scenes is 6 minutes long and involves 4 people fighting it out over a stretch of garbage. One of the best fight scenes that a director can bring to the screen. But, every action scene from start to finish, is a marvel in rough and tough, or touching and troubling, realism.
The settings, lighting, sound, filming and music, all come together to effectively support the moods that the story conveys.
Film co-star Yase Liu, was out of this world, as a street urchin. I watched the film twice in a 24-hour period. The second go was mainly to zero in on her performance. WOW! Action heroines in Hollywood and elsewhere need to tune in and learn from this young actress. Until further notice, she is the best. This is not to belittle the performance of co-star Ka-Tung Lam who played the role of a plainclothes police detective hunting down a psychopath with a fetish for the left hands of women. But, the character appears more obsessed with tracking down and humiliating the street urchin. Great performance Ka-Tung Lam.
