'Triad Election'

Comments (0) By Michelle Orange Tuesday, Apr 17 2007

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Triad Election
Directed by Johnnie To
April 25 through May 8, Film Forum

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Heroically prolific Hong Kong director Johnnie To has made it his mission to bring the gangster film into the 21st century, even while portaging another century's worth of genre baggage on his back. In Triad Election, the sequel to 2005's Election (also playing at Film Forum), To locates a new frontier—the wild west that is the Chinese economy—and sets up a secession parable that incorporates Hong Kong's tentative relationship with its new ruler, dissent and disillusion within the secretive Triad Society, and the ardent desire of one its members (smoldering Louis Koo returns as the MBA-wielding, sharp-dressed Jimmy) to go straight. Jimmy's plan to get out by getting back in is the platform for a lot of loaded roundtable sit-downs and clenched, stagy street fights. To's rangy camera circles its cagey subjects like prey, sometimes drawing in for a close, almost tender framing of his cut-out characters, sometimes yanking back to find them swallowed by the grandeur of both urban and rural China; each angle—and To's take on the plight of the modern gangster—is inspired.