Through a Glass Darkly

 

The most beautiful image I remember from visiting New York, a city I'm not particularly fond of, was something I didn't even physically see. It was conjured in my head, from the claim of a tour guide while walking through Manhattan's Chinatown, that people in the 20th century were born, lived and died within the confines of that neighbourhood without venturing outside, or using any language besides Cantonese. That mental film repeatedly popped into my head while watching Year of the Dragon (1985), this masterpiece where New York's Chinatown is "not the Bronx or Brooklyn, it's not even New York," as the head of the town's mafia brags. A greasy three-room tenement where fugitive gang youths recover from bullet wounds in the bathroom; gang war casualties submerged in a stygian soy-bean basement, filled with elderly workers who have slaved away in its depths for four decades; a Chinese New Year's parade, which the film launches us into from the opening credits, a street opera of confetti and firecrackers exploding in thin air amidst a sea of costumed dancers and drummers; this is the hermetic world of a people that have sustained themselves for thousands of years. The NYPD officers on-duty there are never called.

This film has been a favourite of mine since high school for two primary reasons: the intensity of Mickey Rourke’s acting as a quixotic, heavily flawed, police captain; and Michael Cimino’s unbelievable mise-en-scene, which achieves a dense, tactile richness in detail – in the sets, the light, the colours, the framing, the camera movement – that I genuinely have not seen matched in any American film except Cimino’s others. This was previously my rationale for loving the film; it has taken me until recently to grasp its significance as a complete work.

Similarly to Welles with The Stranger (1946), we have a case of a director forced, by certain exigencies of maintaining a Hollywood reputation, to adapt to a smaller, safer mode of film than they were creating before – in Cimino's case, reclining from the historical epic to the police film following the financial flop of Heaven's Gate (1980). But even moreso than with Welles, Cimino is such a genius that this shrinkage in the form's potential hardly seems to matter at all; it's the most expansive, transcendent police film I have ever seen. 

The story precedes from a common theme of crime films, the revelation of a kinship between the cop and the criminal: Stanley White (Mickey Rourke), a patriotic, racist soldier of the Vietnam War and now of the police, who foresakes his personal life and breaks the city's corrupt "arrangement" with Chinatown's organized crime families to destroy their operations; against Joey Tai (John Lone), the ambitious young turk of the Chinatown mob, who assassinates his elders and foregoes their traditional dealings with the Italian mob to increase his profits. There's obviously a dualism in both being ruthless iconoclastic members of their respective group, yes, but more importantly, their parallelism manifests in the shared desire to conquer the vertigo of the world's vastness – in space, in history, in cultures. White is trying to dig at something, scouring books of Chinese railroad work history in America, uncovering corpses in soybean basements, for the sake of this ridiculous ideal of "winning the war in Chinatown," the victory over a non-integrating diaspora he can't understand, the victory over the wound of a war he can't understand; transcending his suspension in history. This is the beautiful surrealism underlying the scenes in his ally and lover Tracy's (Ariane Koizumi) apartment, which Cimino described in an interview as a "magical Chinese kingdom": the skyline of Brooklyn, with cars cometing across the Brooklyn Bridge as orbs of light, stretches out before him like God looking over the earth; it represents both the transcendance White is trying to achieve, and the alienation and harm that his yearning causes to his wife, his friends, Tracy, and himself.

David Lean, particularly The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), clearly evoked

“As above, so below”: Joey Tai seeks the capitalist sublime in the mountainous jungle of Burma, clothed in Khaki’s like one of David Lean’s romantic adventurers (Lawrence of Arabia stands among Cimino’s ten favourite films). He seeks to surpass the ossified traditions of his predecessors, to found a global empire. In the end, both he and White fail to achieve their aims, are disgraced, and removed from their commands. It is certainly no accident that their final deathly confrontation takes place on railroad tracks, that monument to China’s hidden painful history in America, a failure of the two men against the oblivion of history. 

A good definition of a genius is someone who does not depend on any system but his own imagination. Cimino, an alchemist who turned a generic police story into tragic myth spanning the ends of the earth and of human history, fits this definition quite perfectly. 

In a magnificent article by the French critic Serge Daney on the film, he makes what struck me as a brilliant observation in the first sentence, that Cimino's big artistic preoccupation in this film seems to be asking, "what is near, and what is far away?" Cimino's Chinatown is a very fantastical place, a kind of theme park infused with millennia of history from thousands of miles away, and yet it is located in the same city as the quiet Polish district White comes home to every night. Inversely, the 'war in peacetime' that Stanley White wants to wage against the Chinese mafia, whose heroin imports trace all the way to paramilitary forces in the Burmese mountains, is in his mind a continuation of the Vietnam War, a kind of nonsense-rationale itself traced back to an overseas wound 15 years prior. "There, I never saw the goddamn enemy. Here, they're right in front of my eyes!" White tells his boss; it's not a pithy "action movie" line, its a credo of Cimino's cinema. "How," Daney asks, "do things go about reaching us from the ends of the earth?" The Deer Hunter (1979) is all about this, an odyssey to Vietnam and back again that seems to infect the characters' minds, and never lets go of them.

At a point in the middle of the film, we move from following White, whose wife has just been murdered by hitmen ordered from Joey Tai, to Tai's 'business' exploits in South-East Asia, bringing with him the decapitated head of a rival gang leader to strike a heroin deal with his supplier. From that shot, we cut to the head of a religious icon watching over a Catholic funeral for White's wife in New York. Into this "white" space of mourning enters, completely unexpectedly, a Chinese soybean basement worker Stanley met in Chinatown earlier in the film. Somehow he heard the news, and arrived to pay his respects. It's a moment reminiscent of the miraculous ending of Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) where the universe seems to converge on the hero in a climax of feeling. In Daney's words, Cimino's cinema in moments like these are "movies with ever-wider concentric circles, where the threads connecting what’s close and what’s far are woven before our eyes, where the whole world communicates with itself." 

Score: 4.5/5