NEW YORK -- Even though we tend to assign fixed identities to the directors from Hollywood's golden age, the résumés of filmmakers such as Ford, Hawks, Cukor and Wyler actually cover a range of movies.
Forty-six films into a nearly 30-year career, Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To is one of the few directors whose career shows that kind of versatility. Now 52, To, whose film "Exiled" opens today, began his career in the early '70s as a messenger at Hong Kong's TVB television network, working his way up to production assistant, props man and director of serial dramas before making his first movie, "The Enigmatic Case," in 1978.
To has long been revered by American fans of Hong Kong filmmaking who have seen his movies on DVD or at film festivals. That's about to change with the American release of To's 2006 "Exiled," which opened in New York last week, in Los Angeles today and in other cities around the country. It's the widest distribution a Johnnie To film has had in the U.S. Serendipitously, it's also as fine a piece of genre filmmaking as anyone has made in the last 10 years.
Though he's known primarily as an action director, within that description can be found martial arts outings, superhero movies (the wonderful "Heroic Trio" and its sequel, "Executioners"), gangster films ("Election" and its sequel "Triad Election"), cop thrillers ("Breaking News," "PTU"), and one film, the sublime 2004 "Throw Down," which was made as a tribute to Akira Kurosawa (whom To cites as an influence) but recalls the playfulness and lyricism of Jean-Luc Godard's "Band of Outsiders."
"People sometimes see me as an 'action' director," writes To, in an e-mail conversation we conducted between Hong Kong and New York, "but when I conceive how action is staged, I always think about what these set pieces would convey of the emotions of the characters or the mood of a scene." In "Exiled," To follows the story of a former hit man, trying to leave his gangster past behind to live peacefully with his wife and child. When his former associates (among them the wonderful actor Anthony Wong), now split into rival teams, are assigned to finish him off, they instead band together and ignore their contract to help their old friend get clear of his past.
