Competition
Dir. Wong Ching Po

The viewer who is at least superficially familiar with Asian cinema of the past decade will have no difficulty in taking the movie into its constituent parts which he has already seen elsewhere. The lovers – she is, to put it plainly, nuts, and to put it poetically, God’s fool, and he is a silent pauper – enjoy their toy festivities of love, merry-go-rounds, garlands of lanterns and toy pandas. Self-mutilation (of which peeling the skin from one’s fingers is the most innocuous) is abundantly offered by the most famous directors. Police stories with shoot-outs and chases along green slopes shot with spectacular slow-motion and fade-outs constitute Asian cinematic know-how. The movie is divided into five chapters persistently using the words “Devil” and “Armageddon” in their titles. It makes use of detective narration, so it is not fare to divulge the plot.

“Revenge” is constructed in such a way that it is not possible to make it sound interesting without disclosing its plot twists. And still you might get the desire to see the film, taking into account that it has been quite some time since the screen emanated such fury defending the little, frail, lost world of someone who cannot assimilate in society. And still if nobody interferes with him, he has the strength to stand on his own two feet, to feel happiness and face the world of harsh omnipresent and lawful violence, which is the equivalent of any known social conglomerates or institutions. This fury outpours into the sweetest images of revenge: pour petrol into the throat, fire into the mouth and watch your enemy burn from within. Were there ever more complete, thirst-quenching punishments of self-confident injustice on screen?

The plot of the movie was invented by the 27-year-old son of a Hong-Kong multimillionaire Juno Mak. From Wikipedia we can learn that at school he used to fall behind in all subjects from mathematics to physical education, had to retake the year’s course three times, squandered a million of father’s dollars on a house which he bought for his first girlfriend and that his singing career was accompanied by scandals, that he gets top listing in charts allegedly because his father buys out al his recordings and at Juno’s concerts he bribes the entire crowd so that they pretend to be his fans. When Juno acts he seems to explode. And it is so nice that there are people among the rich who look upon their situation as an exceptional one and do not consider themselves part of the horde of the chosen few. That they are ready and prepared to express the fury which the hangdog crowd cannot even feel, but which it is necessary to feel and pass on like a relay torch.

Alexey Vasiliev