Purple Storm

Anyone who reads Sprocket Holed regularly will probably note I watch a fair amount of Asian cinema. I suppose that part of the attraction is the slight cultural difference between East and West.

When a woman gets hit in the West, she is a victim whilst, in a Hong Kong film, she is just as likely to stand up and beat seven shades of shit out of her attacker. The vampires hop until you pin prayers to their heads and battles are won by having the biggest alter. Familiarity breeds contempt and a glimpse through another lens can always be exhilarating.

Asian cinema has a raw energy that seems to have been ironed out by focus groups. There is an apparent feeling of political incorrectness and the liberation of anarchy. I should be careful using those terms so I’ll offer you an explanation.

I’m all for political correctness. It seems perfectly legitimate to me that we don’t use language as a way to judge people based on race, gender or sexual orientation. It pisses me off when people demand their democratic right to be an arsehole. We do not have the democratic right to walk over and slap some poor bugger silly just because we dislike his haircut so why should we have the right to insult large chunks of the population based entirely on our basest of prejudices?

The trouble with political correctness is it has been taken up by committees and focus groups as a tool for their collective prejudice and a reason to stop everything. The kind of people who join committees are the same kind of folk who had no friends at school. A committee is the only place they can find someone else to talk to. Naturally, these folk live their lives under a curse of jealousy. They were never invited to the parties where all the snogging happened.

Placing political correctness in the hands of a bureaucrats is like giving chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein. These are mediocre people who seek to lower the bar of human experience as far as they possibly can. They like a neat and tidy world and people are not neat and tidy. We pretend we don’t burp or fart but that really is the only reason to keep a dog around the house. We can always blame them for our all pervading bad odours.

Imagine you have a multicultural street festival (we used to have a few of them in Sydney) and one ethnic group protests about the amount of bare skin exposed by performers of another grouping. This second group are asked to cover up so they will not cause offence even though the performers were displaying far less flesh than would be on show at a public beach. Using an argument of not wanting to cause offence and justifying it by using a politically correct line of sexual objectification is not political correctness. It is fascism pure and simple.

There is nothing in the PC handbook that says we should not have or want sex. It only says we shouldn’t hassle people who don’t want to have sex with us and that seems perfectly fair to me. We shouldn’t have to worry about upsetting Bible (or Koran) thumping bigots. They can thump themselves to their hearts content but don’t let them start thumping me.

Anarchy can mean chaos and it can mean a complicated social order involving no hierarchical structure and governed by a principle of individuals taking responsibility for their actions. Before I began my little rant, I was talking of the former rather than the latter. In the cinema, a feeling of ‘anything goes’ is fun. It has a thrill which comes from the absence of responsibility.

Today, as a writer, I am showing an anarchic disregard for my narrative. I am enjoying my little divergence but I am still a long way off reviewing this film. It’s a good film so you should bear with me.

Returning to my central theme, whilst both Japanese and Korean cinema are both noted for their intellectualism, this is not a notion that often bothers Hong Kong cinema. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, it just is. Even films like “The Killer” or “Infernal Affairs” have, at their hearts, a simplistic honour code and a quest for identity within the contradictions of duality. I love these films but I also love Howard Hawks and John Ford westerns but nobody is going to write about the moral complexities of those films.

Actually, I might just do that because I am the kind of guy who is big enough to hold a few contradictions. Besides, for my argument to hold any merit I have to pretend Wong Kar-Wei isn’t a Hong Kong film maker. I think that you need an exception to prove every rule.
This brings us to “Purple Storm”.

The Khymer Rouge regime is falling. Soong is told that this is not because the regime killed so many, it is because the regime failed to kill fast enough. He is sent off to find new technology so that he can achieve this goal where the party failed. Twenty years later and this plan is approaching completion. He has gotten his hand on a bio-weapon called Purple Storm. Unfortunately for him, his son Todd is injured whilst trying to retrieve the weapon and turns up in police custody suffering amnesia.

Oh no, I hear you groan. Not amnesia. I know what you mean. Have you ever met someone with amnesia? It happens so often in movies but so seldom in real life. Head anti terrorist cop Ma Li wants to bust Soong and sees Todd as a tool to achieve this. Psychiatrist Shirley Kwan (played by the very wonderful Joan Chen) believes in rehabilitation and second chances.

Todd is reprogrammed to believe he was an undercover policeman. His moral values are rebuilt from the ground up. His synapses are rewired with new symbols in scenes that recall “The Parallax View” though the logic system employed in the retraining seems more believable.

Once back in the field, it is not long before Todd’s real life begins to filter back in, caught up in half heard songs and the turn of a bicycle wheel. Although the substitute identity collapses, the new moral values do not and Todd is caught between his loyalty to his father and the realisation that his father and his father’s beliefs are evil.

This film is stuffed full of all the action you have come to expect from Hong Kong cinema. It is also intelligent and morally complex. It doesn’t seem to have had any kind of Australian release but it seems tailored made for a Hollywood re-make. They will fuck it up though I will forgive them if they let Joan Chen reprise her rôle. If there isn’t a campaign to deify Joan Chen (and I find it hard to believe that there isn’t) then one begins here.

This film boasts great acting, direction, writing, pacing and production values. If it gets any better than this, I want to see it now. I want you to see it now. I want everyone to see it now.

Do you think I’ve made my case clearly enough? If you get a chance to see “Purple Storm”, ignore the two dollar bin title and grab it.

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