Chinese Box

By Peter Calder

****

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Gong Li, Maggie Cheung

Director: Wayne Wang

Rating: M

Born and raised in Hong Kong, but having spent his adult and professional life in San Francisco, Wayne Wang is perhaps ideally placed to make a movie set against the handover of the territory in 1997.

He has spoken in interviews of his profound ambivalence about British rule - the colonial administration rooted out official corruption but was itself endemically and corruptly racist - and of a sense of being culturally marooned as a man of Chinese features and Jesuit education, raised on cricket and cucumber sandwiches.

It's that sense of ambivalence and rootlessness that infuses this unusual film which blends documentary and fiction, heavily stylised and wildly improvisatory styles to intriguing effect.

Jeremy Irons plays John, a expatriate English journalist, burnt-out and missing deadlines as he works in the looming shadow of the handover. He discovers that he has a terminal disease and the limit placed on his - and the territory's life - drives him to try to reconnect with an old lover, Vivian (Gong Li in her first English-speaking role), a former courtesan who is waiting in vain for a local businessman to marry her.

Meanwhile, he becomes intrigued by a punky streetwise hustler (Cheung, who is one of Hong Kong's biggest stars) whose conspicuous facial scar mirrors deeper emotional wounds.

The danger that these characters might become crude symbolic archetypes needs hardly be stated (the film's very name, as the title sequence makes clear, is a metaphor for endless layers of mystery and as John comes to terms with doctor's death sentence he wonders in a voiceover whether "I'll hold out longer than the British.").

There are times when the trio seems to carry the aspirations of entire cultures on their frail shoulders., but the style never feels heavy-handed.

The screenplay, penned by Jean-Claude Carriere (who adapted Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being) with input from Paul Theroux, has an edgy disjointed quality which perfectly suits the subject. Vilko Filac, Emir Kusturica's cameraman, blends a visually dizzying documentary style with moments of elegiac splendour.

Thus the unevenness of tone and pace become part of the film's essence; the jagged edges feel deliberate. Those who were entranced by Wang's Smoke will have some sense of what to expect from a film-maker who is full of surprises. Chinese Box is no masterpiece, but it is one of the more unusual and original films you'll see this year.