I haven’t seen many Johnnie To films — something I should rectify immediately — but I’m guessing there’s at least one fantastic street scene in each: the tense standoff in front of Nick Cheung’s apartment building in Exiled, the glorious first ten minutes of Breaking News, or even the schizophrenic surveillance sequences in The Mad Detective.
Almost as sprightly as its avian namesake, To’s latest film Sparrow (Man jeuk) continues the director’s work in the crime genre, except that in this film, it’s all about the streets and the people who make their living from and on them. This time — despite the occasional beating — there’s also a bit of a spring in To’s steps. In noir, the streets are filled with menace, populated by grifters and femmes fatales and heavies; they’re in the streets of Sparrow too, but the tone is almost sweet, even romantic, with Hong Kong filmed as if it were Rochefort.
The always-good Simon Yam stars as Kei, the linen-jacketed leader of a gang of pickpockets; it’s a joy to see him bicycling happily through the crowded lanes, dodging street vendors and shoppers, taking black and white photographs of passersby with an old Rolleicord. The film is a breezy delight: we see the gang of four strolling through the streets of Hong Kong as larcenous flaneurs — or, more often, perilously riding a bicycle that’s obviously too small to carry all four of them. (You almost expect B.J. Thomas to start singing in the background.)
My Butch Cassidy reference notwithstanding, Sparrow seems to have something of a European sensibility. The jazzy, orchestral score by Xavier Jamaux and Fred Avril even feels like something out of The Thomas Crown Affair. In an early scene, To takes the erotically-charged frottage from probably the most famous pickpocket movie of them all — Bresson’s Pickpocket — and turns it into a paradoxically delightful, precisely coordinated ballet, as if he replaced someone like Ching Siu-Tung with a dance choreographer.
All four pickpockets run into a mysterious woman (Kelly Lin), who flies into their lives (like a sparrow which flies into Yam’s apartment at the beginning of the film). She’s clearly up to no good, for she’s as coolly slick in her thieving techniques as they are. It turns out (though no one is quite sure) that she needs to escape the clutches of her old sugar daddy, a master pickpocket himself, and the gang devises a comically complicated scheme to save her. This culminates in a showdown of sorts (no spoilers here), and I do not exaggerate much when I write that the climactic, slow-motion scene is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg but filmed at street-level.
Sparrow seems like a relatively light effort from To, but one can just as easily argue that it’s because To isn’t weighed down by the grimness of, say, the Election trilogy. Here, Sparrow soars just like one.
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