If "Exiled" could at first appears as a cold style exercise that focuses itself on the mathematical numbers of five and two, the movie is at the end one (if not the) best Johnny To's movie, and carries within a incredible felling of freedom and melancholia. I think that with this movie, Johnny To archive to reach the level of the best of his older masters, like John Woo or Tsui Hark.
FIVE : That's around this number that the all movie seems to be build. "Exiled" tells the story of five men against the world, in five parts (that means five gigantic gunfights). But the logical of the number five is broken by one of the member of this gang of five : Wo, who left them years ago. The movie stars when he comes back to Macao, where his four old friends, his wife and his baby, are waiting for him. But the unity is already lost : when they met again, two wants to kill him, and two wants to protect him. There's no wonder why this breaker of symmetry rapidly died, when he refuses to bend over the mathematical beauty of the movie. The former gang will indeed try to find a fifth member (it will be a moral mercenary), but they'll be only four to finish their road. Anyway, the movie isn't rationally build on the number five, but rapidly chooses errancy and coincidences to makes its way. That's the way the gang also fallows when he lets a coin game chooses its path. It's then in in number two, like the two faces of a coin, that the movie will find its unity.
TWO : With the use of that coin, the exiled of the movie takes the face of the duality. The gunfights, if you watch them carefully, are also duels (even with multiple characters and combinations). The number two is indeed at the beginning of Johnny To's project, witch is to combine the codes of a classical Hongkongue polar (with it's killers with sunglasses and ethical from another time, its alway on the move camera, that shoots the killings like musical ballets, etc.) with the ones of 60's European westerns (...Per Qualche Dollari in piu is directly quoted, the atmosphere of the movie reminds the Peckinpah's ones, the OST is a pastiche of Moricone, etc.). It's like the movie itself is a cultural translation of Macao, the Chinese island where the movie occurs, and that has been a Portuguese colony for years. In that original mixture, the movie reminds me of "Cowboy Bebop" (an anime that also mixes Asian culture and occidental western in order to creates feeling of nostalgia and freedom) or of a reverse "Kill Bill".
But this cultural duality is like an echo of the personal style of Johnny To, that always breaks his beautiful gunfights with lighter and melancholic scenes. This fusion and complementarity of the style with its subject creates a great movie, full of freedom, that becomes magnificent in its last killing, beautifully seen through the eyes of a can of Red Bull.
FIVE : That's around this number that the all movie seems to be build. "Exiled" tells the story of five men against the world, in five parts (that means five gigantic gunfights). But the logical of the number five is broken by one of the member of this gang of five : Wo, who left them years ago. The movie stars when he comes back to Macao, where his four old friends, his wife and his baby, are waiting for him. But the unity is already lost : when they met again, two wants to kill him, and two wants to protect him. There's no wonder why this breaker of symmetry rapidly died, when he refuses to bend over the mathematical beauty of the movie. The former gang will indeed try to find a fifth member (it will be a moral mercenary), but they'll be only four to finish their road. Anyway, the movie isn't rationally build on the number five, but rapidly chooses errancy and coincidences to makes its way. That's the way the gang also fallows when he lets a coin game chooses its path. It's then in in number two, like the two faces of a coin, that the movie will find its unity.
TWO : With the use of that coin, the exiled of the movie takes the face of the duality. The gunfights, if you watch them carefully, are also duels (even with multiple characters and combinations). The number two is indeed at the beginning of Johnny To's project, witch is to combine the codes of a classical Hongkongue polar (with it's killers with sunglasses and ethical from another time, its alway on the move camera, that shoots the killings like musical ballets, etc.) with the ones of 60's European westerns (...Per Qualche Dollari in piu is directly quoted, the atmosphere of the movie reminds the Peckinpah's ones, the OST is a pastiche of Moricone, etc.). It's like the movie itself is a cultural translation of Macao, the Chinese island where the movie occurs, and that has been a Portuguese colony for years. In that original mixture, the movie reminds me of "Cowboy Bebop" (an anime that also mixes Asian culture and occidental western in order to creates feeling of nostalgia and freedom) or of a reverse "Kill Bill".
But this cultural duality is like an echo of the personal style of Johnny To, that always breaks his beautiful gunfights with lighter and melancholic scenes. This fusion and complementarity of the style with its subject creates a great movie, full of freedom, that becomes magnificent in its last killing, beautifully seen through the eyes of a can of Red Bull.