Starring:
Anthony Wong, Joe Odagiri
Director:
Yu Lik Wai
Scheduled release:
now showing

Nearly a full year after it was fairly savaged at the 2008 Venice Film Festival, Yu Lik Wai’s Brazil-set existential crime drama finally sees the light of day. Heavily criticised for its lack of real narrative, nearly half an hour has been excised from the original version, which now clocks in at a modest 96 minutes. However, I can only imagine what an ordeal the original version must have been as even in this truncated cut Plastic City quickly descends into incoherence.

It all starts off promisingly enough with a frantic jungle chase that leaves young Japanese immigrant Kirin orphaned and in the care of Chinese bootlegger Yuda (Anthony Wong). Flash forward 25 years to a dazzling aerial view of Sao Paolo, Brazil. The samba pounds on the soundtrack and we are taken into the backstreets of the Liberdade district, where Kirin (Joe Odagiri) stands Christ-like on a favela rooftop, allowing large bundles of crisp reals to flutter from his open palms down to the crowds of expectant disciples on the streets below. “The goods we sell are fake, the money we make is real”, he whispers to himself, almost like a mantra.

It’s a stylish and hypnotic opening and the film affectively draws its audience into Kirin’s world as a peddler of counterfeit goods and first lieutenant of his adopted father Yuda’s empire. They are not hardcore gangsters but rather competent and successful businessmen functioning outside of the boundaries of the law. While the authorities are quick to label Yuda a criminal overlord, the film instead paints a less romanticised picture of his illegal dealings. However, after Yuda rejects the revised terms of a local politician he finds his shipments impounded and himself in jail, leaving Kirin in charge of the business. While he is no hooligan, Kirin seems a little detached from reality to handle the intricacies of a crime syndicate. He is respected by those on the streets and fawned over by the hookers and strippers but ultimately he’s a lover not a fighter and when push comes to shove he struggles to defend his family’s foothold.

Anthony Wong and Joe Odagiri are two of Asia’s most consistently reliable screen actors and Plastic City proves to be no exception. Where the film comes unstuck is in its inability, or profound disinterest, in its own narrative. Somewhere around the halfway mark, actions and events suddenly begin to go unexplained and soon actions and events simply fail to occur. There are momentary flirtations with bushido ethics and a gangland brawl that appears to have been filmed by Zack “300” Snyder, complete with computer-generated backgrounds and blood splatter. The camera pays increasing attention to the surroundings, the lights, reflective surfaces and nature, leaving the fates of the characters by the wayside. Even the soundtrack, so vibrant in the film’s opening third, becomes gratingly repetitive.

It is not too outrageous to suggest that the film’s entire last half-hour could be re-edited into almost any order and it would fail to make any less sense than it does currently. It is painfully obvious that while Yu no doubt shot a lot of footage in Brazil, he struggles to make any of it mean anything. The film does attempt to pass off a message of spiritual oneness with the planet in its closing moments, but it reeks of an editor and director in desperation, rather than anything genuinely profound. By the time the film finally acquiesces to let its audience go home, the memories of the exotic, vibrant and visually arresting opening act have been muddied by a solid hour of self-indulgence, cobbled together in the hope that audiences might do the hard work themselves and piece together an intelligible story, where Yu has sadly failed. James Marsh