At The Movies

Le : Gong Li stars as
Vivian, a bar owner
and beautiful mistress
of a Chinese business-
man.

Special to The Jewish News

C

hinese Box has the perplexing
effect of an elegant watercolor
of emotion, laid over the fren-
zied neon buzz of Hong Kong
as it passed from.the British to China
last year. The elements never quite lock
dramatically, but they make an intrigu-
ing try, and the movie is flavorful.
Though "timely as today's head-
lines" (well, 1997's), this film has a
generic relation to old exotic-East corn
like Macao, Soldier of Fortune and The
World of Suzie Wong.
Now the Wong is Vivian, played by
the lacquer-box dream of current
Chinese cinema, Gong Li. Vivian
came to H.K. with her boyfriend, the
soberly alert businessman Chang
(Michael Hui), tends bar for him and
lives with him, but her dubious past
(and complex present) keeps him from
marrying'her.
Irons, who seems to be about
halfway into a seance with Graham
Greene, is the journalist and financial
pundit, John. He loves, but is bewil-
dered by, the city as it prepares to
change owners. And he is haunted by
a past near-affair with Vivian. He hov-
ers around her, sometimes being a
pest, a poignant Ugly Brit, if not the
foreign devil of Chinese contempt.
John faints, not from love. He is
facing a terminal medical crisis. Irons
is excellent at gauntness and at being a
floating soul lost, but he never seems a
leukemia sufferer. His medical down-
slide closely parallels the expiration of
Her Majesty's Crown Colony, a piece
of plot synchronicity that shows some
pooled desperation of four writers
(Jean-Claude Carriere, Larry Gross,
Paul Theroux and director Wayne
Wang, back in H.K. after a long time
in America).
While Irons gives us the fluttery
and frustrated emotions of John, ele-
gantly detailed (and with a Sancho
Panza for his Quixote — a photogra-
pher played by Ruben Blades), he
never has much chemistry with Gong
Li. The lady is a primal element all by
herself, lovely and remote, and her
most connective scene is not with

David Elliott writes for Copley News
Service.

5/15
1998

12,0

Photos by Chan Kam

DAVID ELLIOTT

Below: Jeremy Irons
stars as John, a
British journalist liv-
ing in Hong Kong
reporting on the his-
toric hand-over of
Hong Kong to China.

Irons, but with a video clip of Marlene
Dietrich that she mimics amusingly
(as a tip, Irons gets a comparison to
Gary Cooper).
Chinese Box was probably made
largely because the makers wanted to
be in Hong Kong during the hand-
over. There is a ripe sense of occasion,
the urban hive caught in the bruising-

ly kinetic images of Vilko Filac, for
whom H.K. seems to be Blade Runner

Now.

Among the many faces and voic-
es, there is a standout to match the
stars (in fact, to surpass Gong Li):
Maggie Cheung as Jean, a facially
scarred beauty who can't get over a
youthful love crush, and whose force-

ful melancholy makes John feel more
alive, less terminally alone.
Cheung is so dartingly damaged as
this haughty shrapnel of love that, by
contrast, Gong Li becomes even more
enameled. We half wish that John and
Jean would fly off together, maybe to
join Ben Gazzara in the sexy
Singapore of Saint Jack, leaving Vivian
to asphyxiate among the drooping
lilies of her moods.
There is, however, a great shot of
Gong Li asleep. One imagines Manet
and Renoir, grasping palettes, trying
to break down the door to get to her.
Under the door, flat and finished, is
woebegone John. Rated R.
** 1/2 stars.

****
***

Excellent

Worthy

Mixed

.Poor