Film noir is a story of migration and its uncertainties. The genre made its way from France in the crime novels of Marcel Duhamel via the term Série noire, then smuggled itself into the United States in the mid-1940s, first used by Nino Frank to undress the battered pulp of Dashiell Hammett. It was pilfered again by other writers to describe the influx of post-WWII films that were bathed in expressionistic and literal darkness, following disoriented protagonists and their futile searches for an American Dream that was little more than a bear trap. The genre’s tropes and cliches — gruff antiheroes, sensitive men broken by the world, corrupt politicians, voracious femme fatales — have traveled past its own boom time, when big studios and their poverty row counterparts found these kinds of crime movies cheap and easy to make. But after all this time, the genre keeps trespassing national boundaries. Its narratives and characters straddle a line between type and vessel with specific anxiety that makes them ideal for almost any political context, be it McCarthyism, spreading like an infection from within the United States, or the unsolvable jigsaw puzzle of national and cultural identity in other countries.
That the genre (or style or wave) is rooted so firmly in, well, rootlessness, is what made it so appealing for director Wayne Wang. The groundbreaking filmmaker of Asian Americanness, and the question of its very paradoxical existence, refashioned the style for his debut solo feature “Chan is Missing” in 1982, an inverted mystery about the search for a cab driver and, more philosophically, an answer to the question “What is an Asian American?” Cruising around San Francisco’s Chinatown in black-and-white shots at once painterly and bracingly tactile, Wang wends his way around how film noir informs and transforms social and political context. In that film, it’s not a question of the American man and his place in a society piecing itself back together after the war; instead, it’s about a foreign man figuring out himself as an American, and the complex intimacy and distance that comes with such an ambiguous categorization.
As the 1980s approached their twilight, and the handover of Hong Kong from Great Britain back to China began to crown, Wang, with co-director, writer, and star Spencer Nakasako, headed home to find a bizarre hodgepodge of Chinese history, Western modernity, and the political claw marks of both communism and capitalism. Shaped by Wang’s experiences dealing with uncompromising gangsters while he filmed 1989’s “Eat a Bowl of Tea,” Wang’s kaleidoscopic “Life is Cheap… But Toilet Paper is Expensive” casts its jaundiced eyes towards Chineseness more broadly. Once again, noir migrates, only to unearth more danger and uncertainty.
Nakasako’s Man With No Name finds himself aping another genre in this film, too. He’s not just the protagonist whose sense of self has been obliterated by geopolitical changes; he’s a cowboy in the “Wild Wild East”, there to deliver a matte silver suitcase with important documents from one San Francisco boss to another in Hong Kong (Lo Wai). With a hat and a gem-set scorpion resting on his shirt, Nakasako’s attempts to deliver the package are unsuccessful, but he observes the dynamics at play: an unhappy daughter (Bonnie Ngai) being sent off to be married to a dull anthropologist (John K. Chan), who intends to drag her to the United States; a mistress named Money (Cora Miao), who wields more power than anyone in the city can fathom; and an uncle (Cheng Kwan Min) who dodges questions about what is going on.
But Wang feeds the audiences this plot in fragments, strands of a crime movie that burrows into the transformation of late ’80s Hong Kong. There’s liminality scattered amongst voice-over, interviews with cab drivers and duck killers, and roving shots of city crowds swallowed up by the competing tempests of change and tradition. With the film’s cunning blend of nonfiction and fiction, straightforward narrative and experimental montage, hardboiled pastiche and literary eloquence, “Life is Cheap” expands Wang’s usual formal plate. In many scenes, essay filmmakers like Chris Marker come to mind. In that sense, as director, Wang does as much anthropology and topography in this film as crafting another exercise in genre and style.
And yet despite expressive editing and vivid cinematography, “Life is Cheap” feels too torn between its avantgardism and fidelity. While Want wants the narrative to thrive in its complexity, the film instead comes off as convoluted; although arguably, the film’s lack of tidy integration between its rhetorical approach regarding class, national identity, and power and a genre movie about a man and a MacGuffin may belie Wang’s true intentions. What Want wants “Life Is Cheap” to convey is the deep discordance between Hong Kong’s recent history and its complicated relationship with China, Great Britain, and the United States in its narrative form. If Wang succeeds in this, the film’s formal audaciousness nonetheless undermines its plot’s dramatic weight. No characters really have much in the way of interiority, with character psychology and thematic concerns rarely overlapping. For a film ostensibly about Hong Kong as a city, “Life Is Cheap” remains frustratingly distant from its citizens and their inner lives.
Unlike this film, there are strong, transfixing examples of films that blend essay film and genre film, like João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata’s “The Last Time I Saw Macau.” That film employs voice-over to describe the region’s complicated history and its site as Orientalist fantasy, but also develops its few characters with a texture that configures them caught both in the machinations of pulp and cultural transition. But “Life is Cheap,” while admirably transgressive in its style, tone, and approach, succumbs to being somewhat of a pointillist film, whose point needs a little sharpening.
Anointed by the MPAA with an X rating upon its 1990 release, the film’s shocks have less to do with anything featured on screen and more the lingering jolts of angst over how Hong Kong’s mix of Eastern and Western ideologies mutated into its own monstrosity: a culture stuck between the gnawing fangs of two different cultures and worlds. “Life Is Cheap… But Toilet Paper Is Expensive” boasts both ingenuity and bursts of energy but it never totally coheres, particularly in its guerilla sections of slaughter, bloodletting, and full-throated consumption (be it meat, money, or otherwise). The same bloodshed spills across class and social milieus and nations, too. It’s enough to make one wonder when Wang might make bypass film noir, westerns, and essay films for yet another genre: the horror movie. Or perhaps, with this film, he already made one. [B-]
