A month had passed between my visits to the Metrograph, when I stopped by last week, and so had a lifetime of headlines. On February 9, the Metrograph’s two screening rooms, lobby and commissary burst past capacity, as the spaces played the Academy Awards telecast live and free of charge. Two friends and I sat cross-legged on the stairwell in the “quiet” room, pulling our knees back when those lucky Oscar-watchers with real seats took bathroom or cocktail breaks. An especially inebriated woman spilt her gin and tonic on my shoes while soliloquizing about her brother’s military service (1917 had just won Sound Mixing). When Parasite took Best Picture, more glasses tumbled, and Bong Joon Ho’s translator was drowned out by the room’s applause.
Mid-afternoon on March 12, the lobby stood empty, the commissary occupied by five or six laptop-endowed millennials, the “quiet” room truly quiet. But that would have been the case for any pre-spring day’s matinee haze. Note that it was bald heads and gray hair watching Made in Hong Kong, the film on the cover of the Metrograph’s March-April program. I picked one up on my way out, even though I knew that most of the scheduled films would not play. (The theater officially closed on March 15.)
It felt essential to act irrespective of changing circumstances, and thus each act during this three-hour period collapsed into a small, strange slideshow, depicting an institution obsessed with decorative details—the pull-chain lamp and distressed leather sofa in the commissary; the branded pen I asked to borrow, and was able to keep—which existed outside political or economic spheres, only to disappear, perhaps temporarily, because of their effects.
Made in Hong Kong is a 1997 film written and directed by Fruit Chan, the first in his “handover” trilogy, following the semiautonomous territory’s reacquisition by China from the British. The film reflects immediate skepticism toward the mainland agenda, a “nostalgia for the [then-]present,” as the critic Shu-mei Shih puts it, and the fact that such sentiment has fueled recent protests produces a certain violent pop sheen. The film’s sartorial choices are relevant doubly as Vogue collages and front-page attire, the American film posters on characters’ walls (My Own Private Idaho among them) modern Tumblr fodder for the culturally confused native.
Unable to do or watch anything without the coronavirus coloring my perception, I first felt strongly about the film when I saw the apartment inhabited by Autumn Moon, our narrator, at once a video-game alias, TV-movie pop star and tangible urban victim. Moon does not have a real job, and his father ran off with a mistress to the People’s Republic; his mother often laments both these facts. Her and Moon’s living quarters might pass as a Brooklyn coffee bar, dark wood shelves lined with compact discs, plastic sheets obscuring shelving, rags in lieu of doors to mask Moon’s glowing red matchbox of a bedroom. Here I examined the surfaces—the kitchen tiles, the grime on the windowsill—and I struggled to imagine self-isolation with less than ten feet of floor on which to pace back and forth.
This fear extended to the apartment complex that Moon visits, on behalf of a local gang, to demand payments from a woman whose vanished husband owed money. (Grown men prove hard to find.) The complex resembles a paper towel roll, with the middle carved out, exterior landings instead of hallways, and mostly absent sunlight. When a television set is tossed over the railing of an upper floor, we get the sense that enclosure is inescapable. Down the TV tumbles, its surroundings a blur on repeat, until it splinters, glass and metal parts careening like meteors across the concrete courtyard. Does the same fate await the complex’s residents?
Possibly. Ping, the daughter of the bad debtor, has kidney disease, yet she moves quickly and expresses little pain. Moon falls for her, and she joins his quest to find the recipients of unsent letters retrieved by his friend Sylvester from a suicidal schoolgirl. Of course, seeking out the girl’s addressees forms only part of the agenda for the group—though Sylvester and Moon both run odd jobs for loan sharks, they don’t really have a lot to do. They end up spending whole days outside—a suddenly miraculous proposition—on tennis courts and in a graveyard, stunning for the way it slopes steeply downward through tropical jungle. Ping and Moon stand atop a tombstone and Ping shows Sylvester her bra, which makes his nose bleed.
It is striking how these crude sexual gestures and irreverence among the dead intersect real mortality. Ping, Moon and Sylvester will each lose their lives by the film’s credits, though their attitudes toward death feel more disconnected than the contexts for them. The characters bear shifting opinions on their environment, intermittently disdainful, more often nonchalant, even ecstatic. Maybe I sought chronology, but Moon dances with the gun he uses to shoot his tyrannical “big brother,” like those silhouettes in early-aughts iPod commercials. Moods are not cumulative or justified for him, and they stand as fiery insulated forces, while the past and future dissolve.
The bridge between Hsiao-hsien-esque anti-plot and third-act tragedy is a distillation of Scorsesian vengeance, offering numerous versions of one event: Moon’s assassination assignment. The targets are two Shenzhen businessmen on a scenic road, conversing casually, suitcases in hand. Moon emerges from a tunnel, sprinting in slow motion, and shoots at the guy on the left, who crumples. The camera cuts to a rubbish bin, where Moon tosses the gun, but then we follow him through the tunnel again, and he points but doesn’t pull the trigger. Still he sprints from the scene, onto racetracks below the road; we see the tracks from a distance, and consequently the verdant wilderness that borders them. No conclusion can yet be drawn from the stream of conflicting signals, the swagger and cowardice that cancel each other out. Does the viewer finally have a judgment to hold onto—that Moon will not kill when asked? Is that enough?
Made in Hong Kong cost less than $70,000, which meant gathering the ends of used film rolls from various studios and producers. Analog has in the 2010s turned high-brow, which for a contemporary audience scrambles Chan’s aesthetic, but the chaos described above unquestionably achieves a sense of inadequacy. The gaps in movement—Moon is halfway across the track, then near the bottom of the frame—bring to mind feverish hands replenishing cartridges, even if that is not what happened during production. Loose narrative structure gives way, splintering like that television-meteor, prefacing not an emotional reset but an emotional finale.
I couldn’t help comparing this “transition”—an inappropriate label lacking superior alternatives—to the state of limbo my world has reached. Outside the Metrograph, New Yorkers marched posthaste to meetings, appointments and concept shops, and two blocks north, Grand Street buzzed with activity (maybe fainter than normal). In the last seven days, I am told, the buzz has dissipated. The coronavirus pandemic possesses little history, passionless intentions, no specific articulated enemy. I wonder now whether we face a reset, finale, anti-plot or third-act tragedy, or something else entirely, some other inconsistent and unprincipled narrative tack.
Fergus Campbell is a sophomore in Columbia College.