Final Victory represents the meeting point of Patrick Tam and Wong Kar-wai’s creative paths, when the former already has works like The Sword and Nomad on his résumé, and the latter, a young screenwriter, chomps at the bit to make his debut in the director’s chair with grandiose projects in mind: a trilogy, nothing less, with a gangsterish flare, of which Final Victory should represent the third and final piece. The first, As Tears Go By, would be brought to the screen by Wong Kar-wai himself, while the second part will never see the light. Final Victory can be related to Wong's debut via the initial scenes: there, Andy Lau has to take care of his sickly cousin Maggie Cheung and of the reckless Jacky Cheung; here, the clumsy Hung (Eric Tsang) receives the task of taking care of the two women of his brother/ boss Big Bo (Tsui Hark); both movies develop around the complex relationship of hierarchic and emotional dependence between the two criminals, with a variation, though, in the narrative register. Wong will choose the “big brother” point of view of Lau; Tam that of the chubby and fearful Hung: the result is a bittersweet and introspective stream, that if on one side only marginally touches the typical elements of noir, on the other, it anticipates some narrative suspensions of the diptych Chungking Express / Fallen Angels.
But it would be wrong to see too much of Wong – who still considered it his best script at the time – in Final Victory: Tam took the story and the characters and made them his own. One of the most obvious tools the director uses is colour: a large share of the scenes are characterised by a primary colour, which indicates the dominant emotional temperature. The blue that fills the screen in some sequences introduces Burning Snow, to mark down the characters’ solitude (Big Bo alone and immobile on the bed, the night before going to prison) or their precariousness (Eric Tsang and Loletta Lee after having made love for the first time), while the red introduces passion, like when Hung sings for Mimi at the karaoke bar surrounded by warm, rich reds; on the other hand, in the sequence of the Tokyo peep show, the changing room where Mimi undresses is alternately lit up in red and blue, to highlight the contrast between the surface passion to which the woman is compelled, and the intimate humiliation that results from it. Tam often tries to include the three primary colours in the shot: when Mimi and Hung are finally alone in the abandoned school they found as a temporary refuge, and where the girl will declare her love for him, the scarlet red of his t-shirt and her yellow skirt are the only elements to distinguish themselves from the monochromatic surroundings. This restates how the director (who also takes care of the set design) plans every element of the chromatic scale to induce a result which is not only of a great formal beauty but also of a precise expressive content.
The manipulation of sound also pursues a similar purpose: in the karaoke sequence, when Hung starts singing, the musical background stops to make space for the man's voice, initially hesitant, then increasingly confident: then the volume amplifies superimposing itself, before fully substituting itself again when Tam shows the scene through Mimi’s eyes. Elsewhere – as is the case in the prologue – the sound is a dramatic counterpoint: the still shots of Hung and Big Bo immobile, one in front of the other, are superimposed with the audio of the robbery that Ping (Margaret Lee) and Mimi will carry out before a quick flash forward of Mimi wounded.
Within the pastiche of genres in Final Victory there is room to revisit the common traits of the Hong Kong-style gangster movie. Tam narrates a criminal milieu of little guys who think they are princes, and who impose their power with absurd retaliations, of such a grotesque cruelty that they become surreal: the usurer Choy makes Hung eat a basket of ping pong balls to pay his dues. A little world with little myths (the vague and illusory splendour of Tokyo's skyscrapers and games arcades which welcome Hung and Ping, loaded with dried tiger members and fake Rolex watches to make a few yen); a microcosm where appearance is what counts, communication takes place through ritual rules and phrases and the adherence to behavioural symbolisms and codes become the non-sense of an act. To underline this, Tam often makes the actors address the camera directly, structuring the scenes in an alternation of shots and counter-shots that will turn out to be deceiving when we discover that the interlocutor is not the person to whom the speech was directed or is, even, completely absent. In the opening sequence, Big Bo seems to be threatening Hung: in truth, he is training him on how to confront the Filipino bully who stole his girlfriend, in a sort of final rehearsal of an “opening” that will go wrong due to the cowardice of the brother. Wearing a green hat to symbolize offended honour, Big Bo practises the sentence to be uttered: “Either you cut your testicles with your own hands, or I will do it for you!”. But he will realize the extent to which this ultimatum is absurd himself when, ironically, he finds himself in the same initial situation. Moving forwards, at the deli, Hung prepares the monologue (cocky, in a worldly-wise manner) he would say to Ping, directly addressing the camera (and at the end he asks: “How was that?”); but he will not know what to do when, instead of the woman, he finds himself facing a sprightly kid.
Tam and Wong sneak off the tracks of the gangster vein: in Final Victory there is no trace of the violence of heroic bloodshed, to the point that the key sequence of the robbery is not even shown, if not through the initial audio fragment. And the ingredients of the genre – the heroism, the emphasis on violence – are demistified by the gags. Hung, in his ridiculous inadequacy, is the picklock with whom Wong and Tam unhinge the conventions of this world – or rather, they unhinge its ridicule absurdity. It is for this reason that Eric Tsang – an almost unparalleled comical figure in the cinema of Hong Kong – never is a tout-court clown-like figure, not even when, with his mouth full of ping pong balls, he is deformed into a bizarre living cartoon character; the melancholy vein of Hung constantly emerges, as soon as he finds himself alone, away from indiscreet eyes. As happens to the bubbly Ping, no longer a young chanteuse, who boasts to Big Bo of her power over the male sex, more to convince herself than to make him jealous, and who acts coquettishly with whoever is around out of inertia, trapped in the social role that men granted her.
Already in Cherie, Tam traced the open misogyny of his country’s society, and humiliated and repressed sexuality will be one of the themes in Burning Snow; Final Victory also rekindles this theme, with tones that are half-serious, half-facetious. The to and fro tightrope walking improvised by Hung in Mimi’s apartment and dripping with sexual misunderstanding, generates a sequence with impeccable comical rhythm, but never falls prey to the superficial excesses of some Hong Kong comedy: actually, it is a prelude, the following morning, to Ping's disconsolate observation regarding the egotism of men who, in bed, only seek their own pleasure. The strength of the female characters, which contrasts the impotence and inconclusiveness of the men, is the ultimate slap in the face to convention. It is Mimi who courts Hung and who declares her love, it is her who points the knife at Choy’s throat to free her friend in the sequence of the mahjong, and it will be her and Ping who rob the bank, after having realised how cowardly Hung is.
Final Victory is also the story of the discovery of another life, of the conscience of another world. It is so for Hung, who, thanks to love, learns to have confidence in his own feelings and body, and matures the awareness of a possibility of redemption; but it is also the case, in a much more bitter way, for Big Bo, who impotently witnesses the collapse of his illusions and of the support columns of his universe, while in jail: the shell he built to protect himself – he, an orphan who grew up in poverty and who became a gang boss at the price of painful humiliation and sufferance – is now worthless. If the final victory is Hung’s, the true loser is Big Bo, who, in the end, is left alone with a question (“How am I going to face the world now?”) to which he does not know the answer.
Note
1) Note the scene in which Hung helps the girl wear the lost little shoe, which reminds one of the moments in Chungking Express in which Takeshi Kaneshiro attends to the shoes of Brigitte Lin.