Blue skies, white clouds. On the roof of a building stand two men. One, the more smartly dressed of the two, has his wrists cuffed behind his back, while the other scruffier one points the barrel of a gun between his eyes. As the restless camera frenetically darts around them, the two men exchange a few words... Is there a more immediately recognisable scene in the history of Asian cinema than this? Do we really need to add that the elegant man is Andy Lau and the scruffy one is Tony Leung Chiu-wai?
After presenting it to Western audiences in 2003 as we documented the dazzling rebirth of Hong Kong genre productions, the Far East Film Festival now brings Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's gripping cult movie back to Udine: it will be the eye-popping 4K restored version of Infernal Affairs - curated by Media Asia (Hong Kong) - that will be officially closing FEFF 23 on 2 July! An unmissable opportunity to see this masterpiece sparkle again almost twenty years after it first exploded onto screens. An explosion that caught the eye even of Martin Scorsese: as everybody and their dog now know, 2006's The Departed (for which Hollywood fielded Jack Nicholson, Leonardo Di Caprio and Matt Damon) is the American version of Infernal Affairs. The remake won itself four Oscars and, just as was the case more recently with Parasite, the "Far East" started to feel a lot less far...
A tense, geometric action-thriller where the police place one of their men in the triads and the triads place one of theirs in the police, Infernal Affairs never lets up the pace and keeps turning the plot on its head. And it boasts an all-star cast that couldn't be more "Hong Kong" if it tried: along with the leads, Andy Lau and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, there are other big names (and dear friends of the FEFF) like Anthony Wong, Eric Tsang and Chapman To. So what's left to say about this film that hasn't already been said?