Tonight I watched the second of this month’s DVD from Amazon’s Vine programme: Triangle.  Fortunately this was not the dodgy 80’s ferry-based TV show with Kate O’Mara in it, but a Chinese action film.  Here is what I thought:

I think that the Amazon description for this film is a bit misleading, and does the film no favours. We are told that the film is made by three directors, but what we are not told is that they do not work together but instead they each direct a 30-minute segment: Tsui Hark sets the story up, Ringo Lam does the middle bit and Johnnie To finishes it off. I am no expert in Chinese cinema so I didn’t notice the joins (in fact I did not know the film was made this way until after seeing it) but others may spot when the directors pass the baton.

The Amazon description also says that the story is about three friends in a “quest to unearth a treasure buried beneath the Hong Kong legislative building” which led me to expect something like the Italian Job, Oceans Eleven or Welcome To Colinwood where the film is all about the planning, culminating in the success (or failure) of the actual deed. Actually the search for the treasure is over very quickly and the main part of the film is not about finding the treasure but trying to keep it.

At the beginning the film is very complicated. I was not entirely sure what was going on or why, with all the criminal plotting, double-crossing and unfaithfulness, but by the time it came to Ringo Lam’s segment it started making some sense as he concentrated on a few of the possibilities presented by Tsui Hark.

At the end it got complicated again but in a more straightforward multiple Mexican stand-off sort of way.

Most Chinese films I have seen have either been martial arts/gunplay films or those amazing Chinese vampire/ghost stories, but this is more of a ‘caper’ film. What fighting there is in the film is short, naturalistic and at times brutal rather than choreographed.

Although I was confused for half the time, I enjoyed the film and I will almost certainly watch it again and enjoy it even more the second time around because I will not be so much in the dark.

I really will be watching this again so I can see if I can spot where the directorship changes hands.  Knowing that the film is made along the lines of an exquisite corpse will (I hope) mean that it makes a lot more sense.  The first third has loads of ideas that are not really carried on and I did wonder if the director(s) forgot about them or got bored, but now I realise it is more likely that Tsui Hark was just throwing out loads of ideas so that the following directors would have lots of options for the continuation.

I am still confused by the motivations of Ling – the wife – and the relationship between her and her husband.  During the film I thought it was clever how she was presented as one thing (a woman with a husband plotting to kill her for the insurance like he did with his first wife) and then later it becomes clear that the plotting is the other way round.  Now I suspect it is even more clever than that and that the first director may have presented that storyline but the second one turned it round just for the hell of it.

The more I think about it the more I feel that the film demands a second viewing.