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Curse of the Bloody Genres

By Brian Hu

On paper, Alexi Tan's Blood Brothers may be the biggest Chinese film of summer 2007. But in practice, its overall effect is decidedly smaller than the sum of its parts.

Two genres seem to dominate in the contemporary mainstream Chinese film industry. One is obviously the wuxia film and its variants: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hero, Warriors of Heaven and Earth, the forthcoming The Warlords, etc. The other is the 1930s Shanghai film: Shanghai Triad, Purple Butterfly, Lust, Caution, and others which combine political turmoil, cultural decadence, and tragic romance into nostalgic yearnings of pre-1949 glamour.

Alexi Tan's debut feature, the star-studded Blood Brothers, promises elements of both genres, but ultimately fails to deliver the goods of either. Set amidst the glossy neon nightlife of 1930s Shanghai, Blood Brothers is superficially of the second genre, but its story aspires to the themes of the former. The film follows the adventures of three "blood brothers" -- two by birth, one by comradeship -- as they take the familiar trek from the sepia idealism of the small town to the corrupt but exciting world of the cosmopolitan Chinese city, where dapper men in Western suits and pencil-thin moustaches brush shoulders (and guns) with scar-faced gangsters and floor-show dancers. Trouble ensues, allegiances shuffle, and wide-eyed boys fall for full-lipped beauties. Needless to say, brotherhood is tested, and blood is shed.

The story harkens back to wuxia films: for instance, the classic 1973 Chang Cheh film of the same name. As in Tan's film, Chang's Blood Brothers features three buddies who have their bonds tried by ambition and women. Tan's film has also been tied to the modern resurrection of the wuxia film, the heroic bloodshed films of John Woo -- Bullet in the Head in particular. (That Woo and frequent collaborator Terrence Chang are featured prominently in the advertising as the producers of Tan's film also solidifies that connection.) By the time Woo got around to the wuxia traditions of blood brotherhood, they had become clichés of Chinese cinema; Woo took Chang's slow motion bloodshed and slow motion male-male bonding to a decadent, almost self-reflexive level. Yet, he never betrayed the spirit of the genre, never shying away from the over-the-top emotions and gushing cold-blooded idealism of the jianghu's code of ethics.

However, in terms of emotion, Tan's Blood Brothers seems absolutely aloof, even cold. Given the film's (and its advertising's) connections to the emotionally saturated Chang Cheh and John Woo, I'm afraid to say that this emotional coldness is probably not an intentional play on the genre, but rather a result of poor storytelling. The story moves much too fast, never achieving the epic, Sergio Leone-esque scope it clearly seeks to mimic. Characters are introduced but rarely do we get to see their deeper purpose within the plot.

However, the brisk way in which emotions are set up and then discarded so frigidly has the provocative effect (intentional or otherwise) of making this vision of 1930s Shanghai especially cruel. Characters that are obviously important to the plot and to the other characters get stylishly killed off, but the melodramatic payoff is so amateurish and uninspiring that we're led to feel as if this is a world in which brotherhood is tentative and emotions are guaranteed to be dead on arrival.

If it was only on the level of emotion that the film seemed undeveloped and unprofessional, Blood Brothers may have gotten away as being a thrilling, nihilistic portrayal of human cruelty, á la the recent Dog Bite Dog. Unfortunately, the whole project is a dead ringer for the work of a first-time director. Or more precisely, the first work of a music-video director. That Tan uses fast cuts for stylistic and emotional punctuation is welcome (and to some extent, completely effective), but his inability to pace the film to fit the longer format is perhaps the film's main weakness. There are some fantastic action set-pieces (especially the climactic killing spree in which stars Daniel Wu and Chang Chen exude bad-ass as well as anyone from Woo's films), but there is no overarching momentum that ties the sequences together in an exhilarating way. The employment of music video aesthetics is one of the more exciting facets of contemporary Taiwanese cinema (see Formula 17 and Eternal Summer, for instance). But Tan, who made a 14 minute short film for singer Jay Chou's song "Double Blade," doesn't extend the short film into a feature film format, but rather presents what seems like three or four stylish 14 minute shorts tied together with deflating exposition.

Meanwhile, the young stars often look as if they are kids playing dress-up. Liu Ye is great as the oldest and most ambitious brother, but the film progresses so quickly that his costumes changes seem to move much faster than his emotional development. It's exciting to see Tony Yang transplant his character from DJ Chen's Formula 17 and Catch into a period setting, but to see him act alongside the experienced Liu Ye shows that even the most promising young Taiwanese actors seem out of their league within such big-budget transnational productions. Meanwhile, playing the Keanu card, Daniel Wu is effective as the emotionally unexpressive brother -- simply by not expressing any emotions. Only Chang Chen and his Three Times co-star Shu Qi seem glamorous enough to belong in the film Blood Brothers was supposed to be. Chang is a convincing neo-noir anti-hero, and his cold-blooded, blank countenance sits delectably well beneath the brim of a white fedora and the corrupt city's looming shadows. Shu Qi too is perfectly cast as a sexy chanteuse caught between the affections of three men. Unfortunately, the film is so disinterested in the romance that her character (like much of the film) becomes mere eye-candy.

Weirdly enough, the film's casting stands out for making the mainland actors (Liu Ye and the always-electric Sun Honglei) the evil characters, while the Taiwanese and Chinese American actors (Chang Chen, Shu Qi, Tony Yang, Daniel Wu) are the sympathetic and heroic ones. I doubt there's any allegorical intention for this division of labor, but it does call to attention the ways in which regionally-specific star personas perform different character types. Chinese film scholar Shu-mei Shih has written about the pan-Chinese casting of co-productions like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a kind of radical flattening-out of Mandarin accent hierachies through what she calls "linguistic dissonance." However, Blood Brothers exhibits the persistent hierarchies associated with star images and audience desires. Seemingly pan-Chinese genres like wuxia and the 1930s Shanghai film in fact mobilize intra-Chinese differences in their depictions of the genres' character types.

If there's anything that seems truly "pan-Chinese" about a contemporary Chinese blockbuster like Blood Brothers, it's the visual design, which ends up being the film's most successful characteristic. Tim Yip and Alfred Yau's costumes and designs for Blood Brothers are absolutely breathtaking. Michel Taburiaux's cinematography taps Conrad Hall's visionary style from Road to Perdition, particularly in his fusion of noir stylization with dreamy pre-war nostalgia. That said, in terms of visual style, there's nothing here we haven't seen before, and in fact, the film seems stubborn about not straying too far from this now-standardized, easily recognizable (and marketable) look. Don't expect a new vision of the 1930s Shanghai film: it's the same story of sing-song girls and the gangsters who love them, it's the same turn-of-the-century fusion of East and West, and it's the same warning that small town folks who go to the city can never go back the same again.

The one promising thing about Blood Brothers is that, with the right funding, there are young Taiwanese-slash-Taiwanese American directors like Alexi Tan that can make blockbusters with action scenes as exhilarating and story development as staid as most of Hollywood, Korea, and Hong Kong. Tan's also one of several Asian American talents (alongside Ham Tran, Stephane Gauger, Daniel Wu, Ian Gamazon, Neil Della Llana, and others) who have recently combined a fresh, culturally hybrid energy to traditional Asian styles and stories. That Blood Brothers almost works despite its emotional ineffectiveness shows that there's still more to be seen by this crop of transnational filmmakers.

Date Posted: 8/24/2007