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Indeed, Time And Tide is a new breath that action movies needed
for a while.
Moviegoers
love a good plot and strong characters, especially for action movies. But for Tsui Hark
the world is not that easy to understand, the characters are neither good nor bad. The
movie begins with Tyler (Nic Tse) reading the Genesis. The seventh day, God rests, so
nobody (even the director) is there to give a logical direction to the story. The world is
a mess, so is Time And Tide.
In this kind of world, the characters must try to survive as well as they can and the
camera has to shoot as much material as it can. Violent world is very complex to
understand because of speed. Bullets and fights go so fast that it's impossible to show
them without cheating. Choreographed fights idealised the reality. In Time And Tide, the
camera dives in the heat of the action. But as action runs too fast, sometimes it's
impossible to understand what's going on. For instance, a sound is heard then a guy fires
his gun. Meanwhile, the camera gets lost in the mayhem. The end of the scene reveals a
skateboard and a child lying on the floor. We understand that the sound was made by this
kid. The guy made a mistake because like the camera, he couldn't perceive quick enough the
action.
In Time
And Tide, as the camera can't show action because it's all chaos, it just dives in
the action tries to catch visual feelings and sounds. The camera can follow objects, see
through character's eyes, heard sounds without understand what they are, go through
guns… The environment of this movie is a strange world, but probably most interesting
than usual action movie because the audience has to explore it to make their own view. In
this world, the two lead characters represent two ways to react. Tyler (Nicolas Tse) is a
young immature boy. He is passive and undergoes life as it goes. For instance, he slept
with a woman and they end up having an unwanted child. During action fights, Tyler is
always beaten up and thrown away by his opponents. In the other hand, there is Jack, a new
kind of hero. He reacts to conflicts with no fear, he is very fast, often more than the
camera, and so he managed to beat his enemies.
Indeed, Time And Tide hasn't a casual
"good" plot and the characters aren't usual but it's not Tsui Hark main
objective. He just created a new way to shot action. Unfortunately, audience don't seem
ready to accept movies like Time And Tide. Even the wonderful The Blade,
already experimenting new ways to show graphic action, wasn't very successful in
Hong-Kong. Too bad! But as long as directors like Tsui Hark can make amazing and original
movies, we can have hope like Time And Tide's heroes had with the new-borns. Lots
of movies are boring because they are always made the same way.
Thank God, Time And
Time has tried something else.
Original
text written by Laurent HENRY - May 2001.
English
version by Thomas, November 2001
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