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Chaos and Order: The Way of Johnnie To, a 24-film retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 12 September–13 October 2024.
Exiled 《放·逐》 2006. Hong Kong. Directed by Johnnie To. Image courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
A gift to New Yorkers from the movie gods, the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective Chaos and Order: The Way of Johnnie To brings together two dozen works by a Hong Kong director who has made more than seventy films, in a head-spinning variety of genres, since the 1980s. Organised by the MoMA film curators La Frances Hui and Dave Kehr, the series is an affirmation of Hong Kong’s inimitable contributions to popular cinema.
Arriving under the MoMA imprimatur, Chaos and Order: The Way of Johnnie To also caps a steady rise in (Western) critical esteem for the versatile veteran director. Until recently, at least, To never quite attained the name-brand recognition among US audiences of his peers Tsui Hark and John Woo, and screenings of his movies have been frustratingly elusive even in New York’s arthouse and revival circuit. That makes the current survey a chance to experience a significant body of work the way it was meant to be seen—and to learn, just maybe, how one filmmaker managed to keep making good personal movies for years after the Hong Kong film industry was commonly assumed to be on life support.
The MoMA series kicked off on 12 September with the 69-year-old director in person (looking dapper in a tailored suit and white sneakers) and a screening of his 2006 film Exiled 放·逐. Exiled is a taciturn action yarn that tracks a mismatched assortment of Hong Kong hit men across Macau as they navigate shifting loyalties and storms of bullets over the course of two days. In the best genre tradition, the assassins choose to do the right thing when they’re presented with a moral quandary—and thereby seal their fates. Because they’re characters in a Hong Kong movie, too, these killers are styled and dressed as if they’re about to take the runway in a Milan menswear show, so their trajectory gives full dramatic life to the notion of “going out in style”.
Anthony Wong and Simon Yam in Exiled
I had enjoyed Exiled when MoMA streamed it for a week back in 2021, during the pandemic, but seeing it again on a big screen revealed a much better film. The lustrous 35mm print did justice to the range of blacks in Cheng Siu Keung’s cinematography—crucial for a movie whose first half unfolds largely at night, and in so many shadowy interiors. More than that, the experience of watching it with a pumped-up crowd made me appreciate just how much humour To and his expert cast sneak into an ostensibly sombre tale about stoic gunmen staring down doom. (Pride of place in that cast belongs to a tamped-down Anthony Wong as the lead hired gun and Simon Yam, irresistible as ever, in the role of yet another preening, strutting Triad boss.)
Most of all, the widescreen offered ample opportunity to marvel at one of this director’s signature gifts. To has an ability to capture moments of transfixing stillness in the midst of his action set pieces—in the middle of a firefight, for instance, smoke, spent shell casings, and shadowy forms will momentarily cohere onscreen to downright painterly effect. Before that effect becomes studied, though, he invariably cuts away, having held the image just long enough to imprint it on your retina and send a frisson down your spine.
The critic Stephen Teo has evoked Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings as a point of comparison with this aspect of To’s art. In a lively Q & A with the director after the screening, MoMA’s La Frances Hui mentioned Teo’s analogy, and projected some aptly chosen screen captures from Exiled that bore it out. To seemed more comfortable offering classical Chinese ink painting as a source of inspiration—but the still images projected behind him gave the director an opportunity to articulate something like an artistic credo.
Speaking in Cantonese, and translated by interpreter Joanna Lee, To explained that for him the essence of filmmaking is encapsulated in the single English term “motion picture”. The two halves of that term need to be in perfect balance, he elaborated, for visual storytelling to work.
To cited the film we had just watched as an example. Exiled began shooting, he said, without a proper screenplay—“no script, no paper, nothing”—and came together through a largely intuitive process. His remarks helped illuminate how a movie that unfolds through remarkably little dialogue exerts a magnetic narrative pull. (Exiled is set in 1998, just before Macau’s handover to the People’s Republic of China, but To was understandably more circumspect when asked about possible political overtones in this and his other movies.)
Needing You… 孤男寡女
It was shrewd of MoMA to launch Chaos and Order with a crowd-pleasing entry in the genre for which To is most famous. But the marvel of the retrospective is that New Yorkers will get to see so many more of the modes in which the director has tried his hand—in movies not just about cops and criminals but about harried office workers, ghosts, firefighters, and an alcoholic judo master, among many others. And because To’s work so often explores almost exclusively masculine realms, I’m especially curious about two movies that foreground female experience, Needing You… 孤男寡女 and My Left Eye Sees Ghosts 我左眼見到鬼, both featuring the pop singer Sammi Cheng. (In a moment of disarming candour at MoMA, the director admitted that the reason women are so often peripheral to his movies is that he just doesn’t know that much about them.) This series is going to be a blast.
Click here for more information and a complete list of movies screened in MoMA’s Chaos and Order: The Way of Johnnie To.
How to cite: Tompkins, Jeff. “Johnnie To Unleashes Chaos and Order at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 16 Oct. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/10/16/johnnie-to.
Jeff Tompkins is a writer and zine artist in New York City. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, IMPULSE, and Words Without Borders, among other outlets. In previous incarnations he was a Senior Producer for Asia Society New York and the Online Content and Community Manager for Library of America, the non-profit publisher. [All contributions by Jeff Tompkins.]
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