Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Andy Lau

Tsui Hark's Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (henceforth Detective Dee 1) is a relatively diverting martial-arts spectacle from 2010. A major figure in Hong Kong cinema since the 1980s, Mr. Hark has amassed over fifty directorial credits and even more as a producer. Most of what I've seen of his work is gaseous and over blown with little characterization or thematic impact. Detective Dee 1 is greatly helped by the efforts of the director of its action sequences, Sammo Kam-Bo Hung, who started as a stunt man in 1969 and who gives Detective Dee the palpable thump it needs. The efforts of action sequence directors in martial arts films is akin to that of the choreographers, like Jack Cole, who staged the song and dance numbers in Hollywood musicals; often without credit.

The scenario for Detective Dee 1 is a jumbled tale of intrigue set during a fancifully depicted Tang dynasty. An advisor to the Empress (Carina Lau) spontaneously combusts and, soon, other characters suffer the same fate. Detective Dee (Andy Lau), who has been languishing in jail after a trumped up treason charge, is given the task of finding the culprits behind these mysterious deaths. Amidst a background warring clans, Dee learns the truism of every half-assed mystery: no one is to be trusted. So, the plot is hooey, but the numerous action sequences are propulsive. A film like Detective Dee 1 is designed to appeal to the eight year old in all of us. How else can you explain a flick in which a character is named Donkey Wang with Scabies? Judged purely as a popcorn picture, Detective Dee 1 is better crafted and more exhilarating than, say, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.             

Mata-Hari

            

George Fitzmaurice's Mata Hari, from 1931, is one of the more turgid of MGM's vehicles for Greta Garbo. Garbo stars as the titular spy, but no effort was made to be historically accurate; which is a pity because it is quite a story. Four (listed) screenwriters concocted a hoary yarn with unmemorable dialogue. The espionage angle of the film is its weakest aspect, pure codswallop. What's left is your typical Garbo triangle with an older lover (Lionel Barrymore) and a younger one (Roman Novarro). Barrymore is pretty good as a wheezing donkey of male impotence. Novarro, born in Durango, is supposed to be playing a Russian flyer, but wisely doesn't attempt an accent. Though ridiculous in his role, he is good at shining his puppy love eyes at la Garbo. Garbo is great, natch, but I was disconcerted by her pronouncing the country, "Rush-ee-ah." Lewis Stone and Karen Morley are also good, but under utilized.

Classic Hollywood was often an echo chamber and Mata-Hari is a good example of this. It seems a response to Paramount's success with the exoticism of the Dietrich and Sternberg, nicking the cabaret sections from Morocco and the fatalistic spy shenanigans of Dishonored.

Mata-Hari, like Dishonored, ends with its heroine facing a firing squad. However, Fitzmaurice's static visual style is like flat beer compared to the bubbly champagne of Josef von Sternberg's play of light and shadow. This despite the striking work of cinematographer William Daniels whose credits include The Shop Around the Corner and many Garbo features. I did enjoy the wigged out costumes and Orientalist set designs, but their appeal is mainly to a camp sensibility. Garbo provokes more mystery when she turns her face into a mask, as during the finale of Queen Christina, than when she does a bump and grind around a pagan idol in a sheer outfit. Less is sometimes more. 

Nearly all copies of this film, including the Warners Archive disc I viewed, contain a truncated version of the film released after the institution of the Production code. A complete version has been found in Brussels with about three more minutes, mostly of Garbo shimmying lasciviously and seducing Novarro in a see-through negligee. Sounds great, but I don't think these sequences would ultimately redeem Mata-Hari. 

A mugshot of the real Mata-Hari

Hamnet

Chloe Zhao, Paul Mescal, and Jessie Buckley

My reactions to Chloé Zhao's Hamnet find me in a sea of relativity. It is a fine literary adaptation, but fine can be a limiting adjective. It is a better film than Train Dreams, at least the characters in Hamnet have dirt under their fingernails, but Denis Johnson is a superior writer and storyteller compared to Maggie O'Farrell. Ms. O'Farrell collaborated with Ms. Zhao on the screenplay and it hews closely to the novel. The only thing that I especially missed was the opening chapter in which a ship docks in London and a rat escapes to gift Britain with the plague, but I can certainly understand why it was dropped. The film is well cast, it is refreshing to see a Anne Hathaway (here called Agnes, as in her father's will) who is actually older than her mate. Mescal is good with his readings, but I would have preferred more of a hint of rascality in his portrayal of the Bard of Avon. O'Farrell's book centers on Agnes, as does the film, and Jessie Buckley is up to the challenge. She is always capable and intelligent in her choices. What has earned her awards this time is that awards are given not to the best performance, but to the most performance. Buckley gets to howl at the moon in pain and grief twice in Hamnet, but I am a little dubious of the notion of trauma being alchemized into great art. 

Countering the calumnies visited upon her by Frank Harris and others, O'Farrell and Zhao turn Agnes into an Earth Mother Courage roaming the forest searching for wild herbs and roots with her pet hawk. Zhao is able to derive a chthonic pull from Agnes' journeys into the forest primeval. On the whole, though, this is Zhao's least distinctive film. Most of the flaws of this film stem from the book which suffers from the misperception that the Elizabethans were just like us. The concerns of Hamnet owe more to 2020. The technological and moral latitude of the Elizabethan age was a world apart from ours. If you want to get an idea of what is missing in Hamnet's portrait of this world, I'd two Elizabethan novels by Anthony Burgess: Nothing Like the Sun (in which Shakespeare is the protagonist) and A Dead Man in Deptford (in which Christopher Marlowe is the protagonist).