英雄本色 95 min., 1986 Hong Kong
Cantonese, Czech and English subtitles Director: John Woo
Forty years ago, Chow Yun-fat, under the direction of John Woo, lit a cigarette with a burning banknote, put on a dark coat, and changed the history of the action genre. The story of an ex-gangster (Ti Lung), his best friend (Chow Yun-fat), and his younger brother (Leslie Cheung) working as a police officer remains one of the defining works of Hong Kong cinema. A Better Tomorrow is a masterpiece full of emotions, clashing value systems, honour, and the bitter taste of revenge, much like a wuxia chivalric epic. Most importantly, its action sequences are one of the finest of all time.
In 1986, John Woo and Tsui Hark burst onto the cinema scene with a risky plan: to present an extraordinarily dramatic gangster movie at the height of the popularity of Cantonese comedies. The film also co-starred Chow Yun-fat, who had found success on television but had yet to achieve the same success at the box office. Together, they accomplished something exceptional: they created a unique work that, on the one hand, reinvented the action genre while, on the other, still felt familiar to viewers. Woo drew on both his previous directorial experience and his vast encyclopaedic knowledge as a cinephile. He combined the value system of the wuxia chivalric epic with the aggressive shooting style of kung-fu cinema, built upon the basic story of the 1960s hit The Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967), the distinctive tone of Jean-Pierre Melville, and drew inspiration from the star image of James Dean. To this, he added his own unique style, characterized by complicated camera movements and even more elaborately choreographed action sequences, with a cool factor going off the chart.Against the studio’s expectations, A Better Tomorrow launched Chow Yun-fat into the forefront of the industry and launched John Woo’s career as one of the most influential genre filmmakers in the history of cinema. The film has lost none of its energy, homoerotic tension or appeal. Furthermore, it nostalgically transports viewers back to a time when a genre film was a platform for stylistic experimentation.
