Between body and building
It’s November: I attend the excellent Five Flavours Asian film festival in Warsaw. There, I see several films concerned with the moving body. They make immediate impressions: King Hu’s coruscating wuxia movies (Come Drink with Me, 1966; Raining in the Mountain, 1979) gild the fleet-footed martial artist; Mabel Cheung’s slapstick An Autumn’s Tale (1987) celebrates the intrepid duncery of its male lead; Hou Hsiao-hsien’s dissipating Millennium Mambo (2001) etherealises its sylphlike, spellbound heroine. Each of these films feels profoundly attentive to the relationship between embodied movement and physical space. Each shades the connections between bodies and buildings.
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But first, my accommodation. A vinyl leopard wall-print gazes across my room. I’m holed up in the city’s financial district, specifically the 12th floor of an astonishing skyscraper hotel, the NYX, which, according to its own write-up, “oozes a sleek, edgy vibe.” Buildings shouldn’t ooze, I think. From the lobby, the impenetrable lift system proves a monument to white-collar hubris, shuttling me up and down in full sight of the Varso Tower, the tallest building in that brain-melting physical geography, the EU. I watch the people on their computers, partitioned like a grid.
Imagine it: a speck of a man, locked in a glass elevator, rising and plummeting, ascending and decelerating. Imagine him crumpled and pathetic, a creature on display. That’s what the office people see. They are laughing.
The snow is handsome as it tumbles past us, falling faintly and faintly falling, like the descent of its last end, upon all the central European bankers and their trusted corporate friends. Looking out from building to building, I am struck by the idea of a huge balloon that might catch in the ravine beneath the towers. I recall Donald Barthelme’s The Balloon (1968), whose narrator reveals that a floating object, stretching across Manhattan over the story’s run, is in fact “a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure […] awaiting some other time of unhappiness” to be inflated again. I envision the bulge that might appear if the balloon were to squeeze itself between the Varso and the NYX.
Two cinemas elsewhere in the capital host the festival programme: the Kinoteka, a mixture of screens housed at the bottom of the gargantuan, art-deco Palace of Culture and Science; and Kino Muranów, a gorgeous, pickled independent near to the old town. The latter encourages you to hang up coats and jackets in the wings of the theatre, a pleasingly functional and communal activity that has me checking my bare pockets with intermittent alarm. Seated and uncertain, I watch as many films by King Hu as I can.
What’s so striking about King Hu’s work is how it privileges evasion and deflection over contact and combat. In Come Drink with Me, the heroes rely on misdirection to hide and then assert their physical prowess. Strength lies in innocuous appearances: Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei), the government officer tasked with hunting down a gang of bandits, is slight and diminutive, shrouded in a wide-brimmed hat; her accomplice, Drunken Cat (Yueh Hua), the slovenly beggar followed by a merry band of whistling children, is a kung fu master whose revelatory skill leads to a gory showdown with the crew’s evil leader.
It’s important to note the buildings in and around which the action takes place. Golden Swallow demonstrates superior trickery inside the airless drinking tavern, surrounded and spotlighted by her smirking adversaries, all of whom are inevitably mocked and confounded by her indifferent dodges and weaves, a noticeably nonviolent succession of precise movements that amount to a kind of dance. Later, outside in the hallowed courtyard of the temple, our hero slices through what appears to be a regenerating horde, almost (but not quite) defeating the venal cast of crooks that engulf her. These varying fortunes are dictated by the differences between spaces and the people who occupy them: the tavern provides a coherent layout for resisting the boozy gathering; the courtyard yields a plein-air uncertainty from which waves of attackers can endlessly respawn.
Hu’s treatment of ensemble movement in both the tavern and the temple is established through medium shots that cut fast to instances of comedic and dramatic expression. At the tavern, the antagonists’ weapons are caught in the beams of the ceiling; in the next image, we’re shown Golden Swallow’s unfurled fan as it collects detritus from the falling projectiles. Inside the temple, we see in close-up her wheeling arms make an expansive pose; in the subsequent shot, a cadre of fighters are sent flying from the altar. In each case, the careful cutting between action and reaction sustains a kinetic relationship between our hero, her enemies and their environs. Hu deploys different situations to alter the viewer’s expectations of people and setting: murderous brawls are reserved for holy arenas and among those who plead in pieties. As Jade-Faced Tiger (Chan Hung-lit), whose lurid white-face typifies pure malevolence, remarks: “I don’t think you should spill blood in a place like this.”
I stick around for Hu’s Raining in the Mountain, where the connections between corporeal motion and constructed space are even more pronounced. As the critic David Bordwell notes, in this film, combat forays have been replaced with “zigzag chases, evasions, and hide-and-seek manoeuvres.” Hu reuses the sacred temple locale, pairing his ironic detachment towards its inhabitants with an intimate sense of its configurations, as competing factions try to steal a priceless scroll amid the jostling of monasterial politics. We mock wryly the monastic contingent and their superficial adherence to spiritual matters, as the air of subterfuge inspires both the movement of the characters and their manipulation of the real-world environment, the eighth-century Bulguksa Buddhist site in which the film was shot.
Whereas Come Drink with Me offers a revenge tale spanning multiple locations, Raining in the Mountain is strictly situated within the byzantine layout and complex construction of the abbot’s retreat. On this point, Bordwell writes perceptively that “the geography of the monastery gave [Hu] vast opportunities for booby-trapped compositions. Figures and faces pop in and out of doorways, corridors, and windows.” These visual possibilities are widely afforded to the viewer, who sees everything: monks appearing from behind walls, assassins backflipping over ledges, spies tip-tapping across porches, and intended victims standing alone, prey to others, idling in passages and along walkways. The self-contained area accentuates every small gesture; our eye is drawn less to how characters intervene in the space and more to how they exist within it.
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Extracted from my Hu enclave, I catch other retrospectives. The sprightly yearning of An Autumn’s Tale is carried by its leads: Chow Yun-fat’s jack-in-a-box gait provides the clowning counterpoint to Cherie Chung’s doe-eyed composure. Both play immigrant Hongkongers in New York’s Lower East Side, living in tiered, tumbledown apartments, a background for the pair’s unconsummated affection. Shooting on location, director Mabel Cheung fashions scenes of minor textures framed by major landmarks: the most striking of which has Chow’s hero-schlub, after a failed romantic chase, strolling forlornly down a slip road from Brooklyn Bridge, as a droll procession of taxi cabs hurtle around behind him. Thwarted desire is undercut by concrete matters: the incline of the highway, the flow of traffic, the sad slump of the human form.
This comic scene is brought into relief by the opening sequence of the Taipei-set Millennium Mambo, where the overpass supplies an earnest and exultant demonstration of transient longing. Incandescent, cylindrical lights fixed overhead denote the path the camera follows, dipping behind Vicky (Shu Qi) as she bounces, stretches, and waves to the end of the crossing. Hou Hsiao-hsien tracks his protagonist in slow motion, stylising her movements, glorifying her fluidity, funneling her person (literally) into the narrative.
Mambo is not a clear-cut story of cause and effect, drama and plot. As Esmé Holden suggests, the film presents a string of memories that begin to “lose their precision and chronology.” Through abrupt temporal leaps, we find Vicky’s life at disconnected points and places, a montage of estranged moments captured in slow pans and long takes. Foreshadowing the love affairs that deteriorate inside this woozy, urban maelstrom, Hou first portrays Vicky’s vaulting presence over the footbridge as a diaphanous rumour, as a set of possibilities, as a single limitless threat.
For all this rumination on movies of yesteryear, the tensions between body and building are most suggestively pursued in Lee Jeong-hong’s A Wild Roomer (2022), which wins the festival’s Grand Prix. A slippery portrait of two awkward, atomised South Korean men in premature middle-age, the film navigates wealth, mediocrity, and pallid aspiration, to produce an atonal and seductive mystery. It depicts a desultory carpenter tangled up in the life and house of his landlord, and the pair’s proximity is predicated on both their physical intimacy and their psychological dependence. The goateed tenant, another hero-schlub of distinction, is at the mercy of his slicker (but no less pathetic) proprietor, who solicits him for day-drinking and general hanging out, all the while chipping at the porous barrier that divides owned and rented space.
Which is to say, they can neither escape nor resist each other. The film’s main joke, after all, is about “separation and connection”, the vapid ethos for the home architecture that both men inhabit. This mantra of interior design suggests an insidious social politics: there is no such thing as private experience, scrutiny is guaranteed, and life, in essence, is one long concession to perpetual spectatorship. You should be able to see one another, always. I reflect that my yo-yo impression between the high-rises, while mostly an oscillating exhibition of human folly, illustrates an eternal sentiment: observation is a virtue, and we must not look away. The sum of which transports the affective relationship of body and building into the startling present: what does modern home ownership say about us? And more to the point, what do those tall things in the sky tell us about our feelings?
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