Philip Yung Tsz-kwong’s The place the Wind Blows is an artistically completed, genre-bending epic of the kind that’s hardly ever tried in Hong Kong cinema. The author-director takes the true-life tales of two of the “4 Nice Sergeants” – probably the most notoriously corrupt cops in Sixties and ’70s Hong Kong and freely turns them into tragic heroes in a fever dream of gangland bravado, star-crossed romances and wartime trauma.
The movie, which marks Yung’s first function since 2015’s acclaimed Port of Name, might seem at occasions to be echoing Wong Kar-wai’s aesthetics with its slow-motion pictures of smoking, repeated use of poetic onscreen texts, and sights of Tony Leung Chiu-wai pining for the one who acquired away.However The place the Wind Blows presents a lot extra of the whole lot else – from its sweeping historic scope to its ambivalent depiction of police corruption – that it is vitally a lot its personal beast. It is a interval biopic stapled to against the law thriller and embellished with a wholesome sprinkling of historical past.
By adopting a kaleidoscopic construction for its decades-spanning narrative, this twin portrait of police sergeants Lui Lok (Aaron Kwok Fu-shing) and Nam Kong (Tony Leung) ceaselessly jumps between the 2 to cowl the whole lot from their beginnings in an period when graft was the norm, to their meteoric rise to energy within the Sixties, to their remaining years in exile.The recent-headed Lui is portrayed initially as an idealistic younger man (performed by Chui Tien-you) struggling to adapt to a tradition during which everyone seems to be on the take.
His subsequent rise by way of the ranks is satirically proven to be orchestrated by his resourceful Shanghainese spouse, Tsai Zhen (Du Juan), who secretly pulls strings with town’s organised-crime syndicates behind his again. Nam is a rich younger man (performed by Lam Yiu-sing) who turns into a sharpshooter after he’s taken in by a Japanese commander in the course of the struggle. His journey to turning into Lui’s fiercest rival within the police power isn’t any much less convoluted.
Regrettably, The place the Wind Blows is much less eager about cataloguing the intricacies of their felony actions than in considering their romantic heartbreak. Lui’s marriage is marred by his longing for a lady (Jessie Li) he misplaced in the course of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong within the early Nineteen Forties, whereas Nam’s unconsummated need for Tsai feels arbitrary at finest. Because the stand-ins for the 2 different “Nice Sergeants”, Michael Chow Man-kin’s seemingly righteous Bee and Patrick Tam Yiu-man’s duplicitous Yim go away solely passing impressions.
In the meantime, Tse Kwan-ho’s supporting position because the legendary drug seller Ng Sik-ho, higher referred to as Crippled Ho, is without delay gripping and much too temporary.All of them are in the end overshadowed by Michael Hui Koon-man’s scene-stealing flip as Unbiased Fee In opposition to Corruption officer George Lee. Hui solely reveals up within the Nineteen Seventies-set scenes that bookend the movie, however his highly effective speech in regards to the impression of corruption has doubtless carried out sufficient to make him a favorite in the very best supporting actor race on the Hong Kong Movie Awards.
Regardless of its wildly bold strategy to storytelling and beautiful manufacturing values – the movie does engross with scene after sumptuously staged scene all through its 144-minute period – there’s something inaccessible about this sprawling and regularly brooding effort.
Its relative lack of narrative momentum, the repeated detours from the protagonists’ larger-than-life felony careers, and their generally indecipherable motivations all mix to render The place the Wind Blows extra of a visible feast for an art-house-inclined viewers than the entertaining caper that mainstream viewers might need hoped for as a substitute.
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