The Violent Ballad of the Triads

Watching director Johnnie To’s “Election” and its sequel, “Triad Election” (formerly known as “Election 2”), is like being abducted and tortured by gangsters for three hours, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Lean, mean, and running a downright anorexic 99 minutes apiece, these flicks are political atom bombs — throat-searing screams from an economically devastated Hong Kong. There are great modern crime movies out there — Michael Mann’s “Heat,” Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s “Infernal Affairs” trilogy — but the last crime film to feel as nightmarish and surreal as this pair was Orson Welles’s 1958 masterpiece, “Touch of Evil.”Early in “Election” a cop snaps, “Triads were electing their leaders a hundred years earlier than Hong Kong,” and that’s the bloody crux of the two films, which open in tandem at Film Forum today: Every two years the Wo Sing triad elects a new chairman, and their campaigns are brutal. Triads are like the Freemasons crossed with the Mafia: real-life Chinese criminal gangs that trace their roots back hundreds of years and mask their modern-day criminal activities behind elaborate rituals, loyalty oaths (“I do the work of the society, anyone who stands in my way shall be killed by a thousand swords”), and secret signs.In Hong Kong they are blamed for starting anti-British riots in the 1960s and for ruining the movie industry in the ’90s (both 2005’s “Election” and 2006’s “Triad Election” are produced by Charles Heung, whose brother, Jimmy, was convicted of running Hong Kong’s Sun Yee On triad, which has an estimated 25,000 members). The quickest way to get a Category III rating in Hong Kong movies (the equivalent of an NC-17) is to show triad ceremonies or to use triad language onscreen.Mr. To has stripped his gangs of their romantic trappings to tell a tale of raw greed and naked ambition. “Triad society itself is a world of outrageousness,” he said. “They are still disciplined by a set of internal rules, but when people are after power and profit they will cross those lines and become inhuman.” In other words, if you thought the 2000 election was stolen, wait until you see an election in which elderly opponents are nailed inside wooden crates and rolled down mountains.In “Election,” the “uncles” of Wo Sing are choosing between Lok (Simon Yam), a quiet brother interested in making money, and his opponent, Big D (Tony Leung), a ferocious grandstander who dresses like an Italian circus tent and whose only tone of voice is shouting. When they endorse Lok, Big D steals the Dragon Head baton, a symbol of the chairman’s power, thus launching a lethal game of hide-and-seek so confusing that even people who worked on the film claim they can’t follow it.But the confusion of “Election” is part of the storytelling; plotlines lose their clarity briefly only to emerge from the shadows when you least expect them. “Election” is about darkness that exists in a world where there seems to be a law against owning more than one light bulb at a time. Its gallery of 15 characters is cradled lovingly by the shadows: Elderly Uncle Teng glides along like a tiny blimp; Jet, a psychotically dedicated enforcer, is as aerodynamic as a 1920s hood ornament; Jimmy, a young corporate climber, looks like he’s ready for Wall Street. By the time the film is over, you feel like an entire season of “The Sopranos” has been distilled to its purest essence and injected directly into your brain. Even as a critic, however, the finale is so harrowing that it’s hard to watch.“Triad Election” picks up two years later and its tagline is taken from a controversial statement by China’s Public Security Minister: “There are patriots even among the triads.” In the 1990s, China’s Public Security Bureau held several meetings with Sun Yee On leaders before the Hong Kong handover, saying, “As long as they are patriots, concerned with maintaining the prosperity of Hong Kong, we should respect them.” Not surprisingly, “Triad Election” has not only been banned in China but its publicity materials, which were printed there, were seized and burned.And so, in “Triad Election,” China is the gangster running the game from the shadows as two characters from “Election” campaign for the position of chairman with sledgehammers, machetes, and, in a scene that riffs on Abu Ghraib, German shepherds. Every location in “Triad Election” reflects the unwell minds of its protagonists like some kind of forgotten German Expressionist film; think “The Sausage Grinder of Dr. Caligari.”There’s a point in the movie when a Mainland Chinese character begins to quote reunification slogans to justify the hideous things he’s doing to a Hong Konger. When I saw “Triad Election” premiere in a hall packed with a couple of thousand Hong Kong Chinese, they went bananas, cheering, laughing, practically ripping their seats out of the floor. Mr. To is saying, with his stripped down crime films, what no one else will dare. And, no matter what country you’re from, the effect is thrilling.Through May 8 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).

The Violent Ballad of the Triads

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