Runaway Pistol
Director: Lam Wah-cheun
Year: 2002
Rating: 8.0
Director Lam Wah
Chuen attacks his audience with a continual series of ice pick stabs to the
organs with this dark disturbing film. This is a helpless scream in the dark
– a Hong Kong Guernica of violence, pain, hatred and destroyed lives. A long
time cinematographer for Fruit Chan, Lam treads the same low budget, unknown
actors, independent territory, but his film feels like trawling through the
gutter of mankind with not even a ray of hope offered to the audience. The
world is cruel and unforeseen Lam seems to be saying, no one is safe from
a world where violence bubbles up to the surface like an infected boil ready
to burst. It’s brilliant filmmaking - raw and visceral – hypnotic in
its uncompromising hopelessness. It is also one of the most fevered
cries against guns put to celluloid – but there is no hollowed preaching
here, no answers – just the cold stark reality of a gunshot to the stomach.
The narrative is told from the perspective of a gun – at first this struck
me as a rather nonsensical framing device – almost cutesy – but as the story
unfolds you realize that this adds a sad overview to it. Only the gun empathizes
with his victims – only the gun shudders in horror at what it does. In kinetic
fashion the film follows the gun around, as it is passed/found from one person
to another over a short period of time. The film stays with this person until
the gun finds another owner, another victim. It’s never a happy ending for
someone. One couple upon finding the gun exclaim “this is our lucky day”
– we know that’s not likely – their luck just took an express bus south.
Over the film’s 84 minute running time, it tells a number of short ragged
stories – some drawn out a little longer, some brief and quickly ended with
a burst of gunfire. It begins with an Indonesian housemaid who hands it over
to her Nepalese boyfriend (the gun wistfully mentions that he thought his
days of destruction were over with the maid – but then he rues they never
really are). He sells it to a young triad punk whom ends sticking it
in a girl’s mouth while having sex and on drugs and being filmed – the gun
gets off, he doesn’t. A young Mongkok hooker (director Barbara Wong) finds
it on the street, takes it home, her abusive boyfriend (director Wilson Yip)
and she decide to sell it for a quick fix of gambling money – she gets the
buy call while using her feet to satisfy a customer – the buy goes very wrong
(the husband is played by director Kenneth Bi). A little girl points it at
her mom – a broken hearted lover uses it to assuage his pain – two Mainland
robbers think it’s their ticket to riches. And so it goes.
There is barely a shred of humanity that leaks out of this story that in
a sense has no beginning and no end. Perhaps Lam could be accused of going
overboard with this negative portrayal of the human race – hitting us over
the head with one ugly moment after another until we feel like we have reached
bottom on the human scale. I find his total unwillingness to give the audience
a morsel of remorse or hope rather wonderful if far from feel good. Almost
any other director making an anti-gun film would almost certainly set it
up so that you cared about a character and then had them shot - so
that you would feel an emotional impact – but Lam doesn’t go down this easy
path – his characters are flawed or worse (even a group of children turn
into a pack of wolves). Yet he still manages to make it all painful and frightening
– and discharges a jolt of dread to your synapses each time the gun is picked
up. From a technical aspect this is a very well made film – a wonderful eye
for street scenes, terrific fluid camera movement, crisp editing, good color
schemes – and the performances from these actors (fellow directors or unknown
to me) feel absolutely authentic. This is easily one of the best films in
2002 and perhaps one of the more systemically socially cynically downbeat
films since Tsui Hark’s Dangerous Encounter – 1st Kind .
