Made in Hong Kong

Late-1990s Hong Kong Cinema: An Exemplar

The traits of the city were the traits of its cinema. Hong Kong, 1997. The eve of the handover of the colony to China, filmed contemporaneous to this seismic sea-change, although there's little evidence to me-as-foreigner that things are in full conversion mode; instead, the handover seems to be on the horizon, something shopkeepers, and white and black markets, are meant to handle and lay into place. Fruit Chan's debut (the on-screen Chinese title Heung Gong jaijo pretty much dead-on reflects the on-screen English title, as is often the standard case with Asian films).

Death on the installment plan for Ping, wait-listed for a kidney, while Mid-Autumn gives the impression of youth-turned-death, six-pack abs and twisted swallow. Goodbye green-noise from the streets, stand ever upright apartment districts that loom over the sewer, dream on Mid-Autumn and Ping. Made in Hong Kong is a dream dreamt backward as in such Wong Kar-wai films as As Tears Go By, and Days of Being Wild.  Start, continue, and finish in five registers of chili-oil. Dab the step-prints and add more heat via homaged Wong's successive step-prints — we'll be investigating the fully formed Fruit Chan Film more as able. •

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Madame Bovary (Version by Minnelli)

Northanger Abbey, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary

Above right: the cover design for the Penguin Classics edition of Flaubert's debut novel Madame Bovary as released in North America and the UK — the "definitive" edition of the novel published in 1857, which source text is also used in the above left Folio Classique edition in France. I love both editions' covers and find them appropriate to Flaubert's story at hand, but for me the detail from Corot's painting represents how Emma Bovary 'should' be depicted.

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Of the Corot painting there exudes if not the smell of dung, then a whiff of sour, of sweat: in the hollows of her moist pits a cheap eau de Cologne rings the olfactory system, and as we compare this to, say, the Pierre-Auguste Renoir ensorcelled in his paintings' portrait technique, so here does Minnelli's interaction with the film's adaptations by Jean Renoir, Claude Chabrol, et al, really underscores the difference of one another as the watch's novels inhabit the novel. Lost or confused narcissism of Emma in the mirrors, hers indeed a fiction of the kind she has dropped by into dizzying ballrooms (or a kind of space) once twice and many. Jennifer Jones, Louis Jourdan, et al, resemble ghosts inhabiting the novel.

The final page delivers one of the most shattering diminutions, foreseen in the final passage of a key earlier chapter: "madame Bovary était enceinte." As for the truly final lines of the book, I'm reminded of the brilliant deflation in Thackeray's and Kubrick's Barry Lyndon regarding the Croix d'Honneur.

Framed by the biographical detail of Flaubert's court trial fighting obscenity charges brought against Madame Bovary, I must stress the excellence (on the part of Minnelli and the production, or of Gustave Flaubert's presumed 'dashing' calculation for the setting) of James Mason, toupéed for trial, all odds plucked from the fishtank for the benefit of mankind. •

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Other writings at Cinemasparagus on the films of Vincente Minnelli:

Cabin in the Sky [1943]

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