ELECTION (dir by Johnnie To, 101mns, Hong Kong, 2005)
If Hong Kong master moviemakers had sibling days with western moviemakers, you might pair Wong Kar-Wai with Terrence Malick, Johnnie To with either David Fincher or Howard Hawks. To shares with Fincher a love of procedural precision and with Hawks a preference for competence as the highest virtue — and a corresponding skepticism toward passion, which he treats as a liability.
ELECTION is a gangster film set in Hong Kong in the years after the 1997 handover. Two Triad brothers compete for the chairmanship of their crime family: Lok, pragmatic and patient, and Big D, volatile and ambitious. Around them, the organization watches and calculates. The dragon head baton — the ceremonial object that confers legitimacy on the chairman — becomes a MacGuffin that moves through the film like a dark joke about power's need for symbols.
To values intelligence and craftiness over brute violence. The film's violence, when it comes, is depicted with telephone-booth realism — sudden, ugly, disproportionately effective. There is none of the choreographed elegance of Hong Kong action cinema. Violence here is a management tool, employed when other tools have failed, and its use is always a sign of someone losing rather than winning.
What makes ELECTION more than a genre exercise is its treatment of the Triads as a reflection of Chinese family structures — hierarchical, bound by loyalty codes, organized around the suppression of individual desire for collective stability. The post-1997 context gives the film political weight it doesn't advertise: this is a film about how organizations survive regime change, about the accommodations that survival requires.
The final sequence raises profound questions that the film declines to answer directly. This is characteristic of To at his best: he is a director whose films are meant to be enjoyed even more than analyzed, but the enjoyment keeps producing questions you have to sit with afterward.
The sequel, ELECTION 2, is equally essential. Together they constitute the most rigorous examination of criminal organization in recent Hong Kong cinema.
