Time and Tide

TIME AND TIDE (2000)

Time And Tide's Tyler who's more like Fight Club's Jack: Nicholas Tse Here's the plot of Tsui Hark's latest film: sad-sack bartender Tyler (Nicholas Tse) drunkenly impregnates undercover lesbian cop Jo (Cathy Tsui) who wants nothing to do with him. Torn between raising money for their child-to-come and getting enough cash to ditch Hong Kong permanently for a tropical paradise, Tyler quits slinging beers and joins a security firm run by corrupt ex-loan shark Uncle Ji (Anthony Wong). Around the time Ji's force is hired to protect wealthy HK industrialist Mr. Wong, Tyler becomes friends with Wong's estranged second daughter, Hui (Candy Lo), and her husband Jack (Wu Bai), the cause of Hui's estrangement. Hui, like Jo, is far along in her pregnancy. Jack, like Tyler, has a competence with dangerous situations and a tendency to be underestimated by everyone around him. Unlike Tyler, however, Jack is actually a defected member of a ferocious Central American hit squad, The Angels. When The Angels come to HK demanding that Jack bump off his father in law in order to put things right with the team, Jack has but one choice: kill his former "brothers" before they can kill him or his wife. And Tyler, caught between loyalty to his new friends and his own team, is torn between helping Jack and trying to catch him. In short, this may be the closest Tsui Hark will ever get to a frothy family comedy, as both Tyler and Jack struggle with the past and the "families" who've chosen them (Anthony Wong's hilariously poignant and untrustworthy father figure, Jack's savagely bloodthirsty band of "brothers"), and the future and the families they're choosing to make. As in Tsui's best films, these issues are debated and resolved using handfuls of supercharged action sequences.

The influences in Time and Tide are enough to make any post-modern formalist feel like a giddy child on an easter egg hunt: The first third of the movie, with its pallette of blues and greens, laconic voice-over narration, and hapless lovers, is clearly either a parody, homage or rip-off of Wong Kar-Wai; Jack's "family" problems recalls David Goodis's The Burglar, and the grand finale had to have been deliberately designed as a contrasting response to the "save the babies!" sequence of Hard Boiled. Also, a very canny choice by, I assume, a smart-ass translator gives Nicholas Tse's character the name "Tyler" to contrast with Wu Bai's Jack, thus granting the two male leads the same "names" as the leads of Fight Club. It's fun and even edifying to compare and contrast the two films--the mirror imaging of the leads, the film's themes and outrageousness--but I'm still not sure it's anything more than a lark.

As for the action quotient, it's scattered sparingly through the first two-thirds--just enough to let you know that Tsui's aware Wu Bai: Time and Tide's Jack is like Fight Club's Tyler? why you came--and then explodes in the last third with a staggering action scene starting in a Hong Kong tenement (I am Jack's extended shootout) then moving, almost without pause, to a train station, a stadium where a pop concert is in full sway, and finally a small utility room. I'm still unable to convey the greatness that is the shootout in the tenement--snipers, explosions, ambushes, desperate fistfights; but I'm especially in awe of the moment where Jack rappels through one of the complex's inner shafts--spinning down through discarded garbage, dilapidated air conditioners, seemingly forgotten laundry--like a diver descending through a forgotten world. It literally took my breath away.

Interestingly, despite all the great things Time and Tide has to offer, it's not a great movie. Although I could be fooling myself, I feel like I'm a lot more clued in to what Tsui is trying to do with this one than most of the other critics I've read, and I still find Time and Tide only excellent (probably better than any other movie I've seen this year) but nowhere near the masterpieces of HK filmmaking. I think in part it's because Tsui keeps trying to mix ultra-cool characterization and red hot action. I love the intimate and naturalistic performances that result (Candy Lo totally steals whatever scene she's in, but all the leads are great), but one never gets the operatic highs of, say, a John Woo movie. This is more than a facile comparison. Both Woo and Tsui work best with a movie's theme--which is, almost by definition, intuitive, emotional, and "hot"--rather than with its plot--whose charms are intellectual, rational and "cool"--but Tsui is more often dismissed as calculating and cynical because his resistance to melodrama keeps the audience from feeling a strong (and simple) connection to the movie that they, in turn, assume the filmmaker possesses to be emotionally connected to the work. Or something.

But don't let such issues snag you up: if you have any love at all for the simple charms of an action scene knocking your socks off, and are happy to see some very good performances and interesting moments until the sock-removing happens, you should see Time and Tide, particularly in this summer of brain-dead summer movie sorta-thrills. Highly recommended.

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