REVIEW: Exquisite Vengeance is Trademark Johnnie To

Vengeance, which was shown at Cannes last spring, isn't getting a U.S. theatrical release, but IFC is making it available via video-on-demand. That means there's a shred of hope that average movie-loving civilians -- outside of Hong Kong cinephiles, to whom To is old news -- will find their way to it. Unlike most current action movies, Vengeance is virtually silent: Working from a script by Wai Ka-Fai, with whom he's frequently collaborated, To prefers to tell the story visually -- the picture is blessedly free of verbal explication. (Also, much of it is in Cantonese and English, with a little French thrown in.) To stages various shootouts, one in a forest where a multifamily picnic has just taken place (the hit men watch as some nearby kids send mysterious, glowing rainbow boomerangs through the air); another takes place in an ordinary field near a recycling lot, where bales of wastepaper become both moving barricades and modern sculpture.

We also watch as Costello, having brought his new hires to his daughter's deserted, trashed house to investigate the murder scene, cleans up the kitchen and hustles up a meal for his crew. Hallyday's observant but guarded eyes and his confident, measured movements don't betray anything so straightforward as grief. For Costello, getting on with things isn't a plucky way of dealing with sorrow -- it's more as if an essential sadness flows into everything he does. In a later scene, he plays ball with a bunch of kids on a beach (only Frenchmen can get away with wearing trench coats on the beach), and though To doesn't show us any close-ups of his face, we can see that for once, there's joy and relief in the way he moves.

Although the French love Hallyday, I've rarely heard Americans do anything but make fun of him. (Denigrating French pop music may be the second-greatest American pastime.) But he's marvelous here, as the lone white guy among fine actors like Wong and Simon Yam (another To regular). In a certain kind of light Hallyday's face resembles a rubber devil mask. His expression is quiet, discerning, mischievous; he has Diablo's beard and eyebrows.

But as a man brought to foreign territory on a sad and terrible mission, he looks strangely not out of place. Perhaps that's because, as Hallyday plays him, Costello is the perpetual nowhere man, at home everyplace and noplace, though he's less a man without a country than a man who carries his country with him. At one point in Vengeance he asks, "What is revenge?" It's neither a disingenuous question nor a spiritually searching one -- he really is grasping for the essence of the word. That's a mini-metaphor for the way To himself keeps making movies about things we've seen before: honorable gangsters, lost men, double-crosses and acts of retaliation. For To, it's all about finding an infinite variety of answers to a few seemingly simple questions.

Pages: 1 2