Wilson Yip's Policier Movie "Bullets Over Summer" (Bao Lie Xing Jing, 1999)

My crash course or mini-retrospective of Johnnie To movies has made Francis Ng and Louis Koo household names in my household this summer. In "Bullets Over Summer" (Bao lie xing jing, 1999), directed by writer-turned director Wilson Yip (Yip Wai-Sun), they play plainclothes policemen Brian (Koo Tin-Lok) and Leung (Ng Jun-Yu) first foil a burglary, the extract information from an informant in which a durian poses a threat of more than its notorious smell, and residents of an apartment building refuse to let them in to stakeout an apartment across the street.

They more or less collide with an elderly woman (Helena Lo, also romanized as Law Lan) taking out the garbage and charge into her apartment. She is more than a little addled, and believes they are her sons. The stakeout is extremely sloppy as both cops are more than distracted by amours: Leung with a pregnant and abandoned dry cleaning operator across the street, Jennifer (Mei Ching-Lei) and Brian with a flirty schoolgirl Yen (Michelle Seram).

Meanwhile, the old woman whom everyone calls "Granny," dotes on her boys. After the ultra-violence of two robberies near the beginning, the movie is a comedy of the two cops and three women (filial surrogate sons to "Granny" and engaged in two unorthodox romances). There is a very tense dinner (for which "Granny" forgot to cook the rice) that is inherently comic, then extended (chase) violence. The ending involves a machine slow to dispense a can of Coke. (This is followed by a coda that reprises the prologue.)

The most developed part is Leung, and Francis Ng turned in a memorable performance in what seemed to me a Wong Kar-Wai mode of sad unfulfilment (the cops in "Chungking Express" especially came to mind). Louis Koo plays the hornier matinee-idol junior partner.

Comedy giving way very suddenly to extreme violence must be almost taken for granted in Hong Kong crime/police dramas, not just To's. There are some very Theater of the Absurd touches in each of the outbreaks of violence in this movie. A lot of innocent bystanders are slaughtered attendant to a bank robbery near the beginning, too.

Lo/Law won both the Hong Kong Film Award and Hong Kong Film Critics' Award as best actress; Ng was nominated for the former and won the latter. (The screenplay by Yip, Matt Chow, and Ben Cheung also won the HK Critics' Award. Andy Lau took home the Hong Kong Film Award best actor prize for To's "Running on Empty," a role with a signficant characteristic shared with Leung.)

I'd been happier with less blood and more of Louis Koo, but have to admire the choreography of the battles, and of how Ng and Koo function together when the chips are down. Their characters can read each other's minds when catering to Grannie's conceptions of them, too.

The subtitles were white and not outlined white, but mostly readable and closer to grammatical than the English subtitles of many Hong Kong movies.

See trailer here.

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Koo played Jimmy Lee in To's "Election" and "Triad Election," the lead, judo-champion-turned-nightclub-owner, Bo Sze-To, in To's "Throwdown," and Inspector Wong in the "Troublesome Night" franchise.

Ng also starred in "Infernal Affairs II," To's "The Mission," and "Exiled." He also won the Hong Kong Film Critics' Awards for "Once Upon A Time In A Triad Society" (1996) in "Gung yuen 2000 AD" (2000).