And films like Swallowtail Butterfly (Shunji Iwai, 1996) use approximately the same milieu and Chinese/Japanese mix to tell a completely new kind of story. Writers like Haruki Murakami can take a similar character and situation and play with it, ironize it. The film's problems begin when you begin to realise that none of the noir elements is deployed in a particularly fresh or subversive way. Ryu's challenge is to set the various groups against each other while surviving the growing emotional entanglement between him and Xiao Lian.
A sleepless town series#
And the femme fatale, Sato Natsumi/Xiao Lian (played by Japanese actress Mirai Yamamoto) has her own series of gradually exposed agendas and kaleidoscopically shifting identities. The Taiwanese and Beijingers are also interested, for complex reasons that don't become fully clear until the end of the film. The Shanghainese order Ryu to find and turn in Fuchun, against whom they hold a grudge.
The plot concerns Ryu's former partner, Fuchun, who has mysteriously reappeared. Practically the entire catalogue of the noir style is deployed: high contrast lighting, skewed camera angles, male narrator (though, in this case, a rather insufficiently paranoid one, as he goes about trying to untangle the baroquely complex conspiratorial web that he is enmeshed in), and a femme fatale. This tangled setting, set in night-time, neon-lit Shinjuku, is classic noir material, and that's where Lee Chi-ngai's film centres itself. The film's dialogue, in - at least - Mandarin, Japanese and Taiwanese, makes this complexity audible.
A sleepless town plus#
Arrayed in shifting patterns around and against this central group are the Shanghai gang (headed by Yuan Chenggui (played by Eric Tsang)), a particularly vicious Beijing group (a small gesture in the direction of political point of view, here, or merely the non-Beijinger's contempt for "northerners"?), with scatterings of Cantonese and Fujianese, plus two children of Japanese colonizers of Manchuria. Ryu Kenichi is connected with the Taiwanese sub-group, headed by Yang Weimin (Sihung Lung). With nary a cop nor detective in sight, Sleepless Town dwells in a self-sustaining underworld fraught with complexity: Chinese gangsters in Japan. From that point on, we're totally immersed in this mixed world of outsiders. To them, he's an outsider: he explains his "bastard" origins: half Japanese, half Chinese (casting comments on diegesis here: Kaneshiro himself is Taiwanese, of mixed Japanese Chinese parentage). The film addresses its central issue right away: the prologue opens with narrator/protagonist Ryu Kenichi/Liu Jianyi (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) stopped by police in Shinjuku.
It is a hybrid in many ways: a Lee Chi-ngai magical romance grafted onto a baroque neo-noir, a Hong Kong art film cum Japanese contemporary hyper-urban thriller. Sleepless Town, a Japan/Hong Kong coproduction, internalizes the issue of hybridization that can beset transnational film production. Coproductions, though, can come with their own problems, central among them a set of mixed or conflicting agendas. Given the recent phenomenal flow of pop culture products between Japan and Hong Kong, in both directions, it's not surprising that prominent HK filmmakers like Lee Chi-ngai find themselves working on Japanese-financed films like Sleepless Town (others include The Christ of Nanjing (1996), Kitchen (1997), and Moonlight Express (1998)).
The Hong Kong film industry, mired in financial crisis for several years now, has looked to several alternative strategies for survival: idiosyncratic, ultra-low budget films that are quick to produce, and less risky if they lose money ( Made in Hong Kong (1997), 9413 (1998), Love Will Tear Us Apart (1999), The Accident (1999)) massive high-concept and high-budget spectaculars that aim to fill the SAR's theaters again ( Stormriders (1998), and A Man Called Hero (1999)) and coproductions, with the mainland, European investors, or East Asian partners who still have money to spend. Xiao Lian/Sato NatsumiĪlso starring :Seijun Suzuki, Toshiya Nagasawa, Kippei Shiina, Shosuke Tanihara, Producers: Masato Hara Tsuguhiko Kadokawa (exec. Screenplay: Lee Chi-ngai Seishu Hase (novel
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