Movies in love with the movies. Hong Kong director Johnnie To began making Sparrow (2008) over three years in between other projects, most of them crime movies about cops and/or gangsters like Election and Exiled. There’s an element where it feels like Sparrow was another lane to escape to, and even though it is still about crime, the focus on a quartet of pickpockets is used as a catalyst for a throwback caper romance. While a femme fatale named Chun-Lei (Kelly Lin) eventually charms each of the pickpockets, the romance is bigger than that, a romance with the city of Hong Kong itself and of course, a romance with movies.
Citing Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg as an inspiration, Sparrow falls into that sub-category of non-musical musicals. There’s no singing or dancing, just the jazzy score by Xavier Jamaux and Fred Avril, and the way sequences eschew dialogue for silence and symbolic communication. Such as when the leader of the pickpockets, Kei (Simon Yam), is picked up by Chun-Lei in an open-top convertible and they drive into the night, neon reflected in the windscreen. A flirtatious bit of business with a cigarette shared between them is milked for all of its playfulness. Yam is charismatic and playful as the debonair pickpocket leader, and the character’s interest in photography, cycling around the city taking photos works as a metaphor for the director himself. In accompanying interviews, To talks about his push to make Sparrow was in documenting a Hong Kong that was disappearing, and it’s a strong city movie, predominately in characters chasing each other or encircling around one another in public squares, open streets and alley ways.
Similar to other To movies I’ve seen, like The Mission, the quartet of thieves which includes Gordon Lam, Law Wing-cheung and Kenneth Cheung are efficiently drawn with enough personality to distinguish them, but function as a unit, playing off each other with familiarity and cheeky brotherhood. Their day to day grind is upended by Chun-Lei’s presence who wants help separating from a wealthy benefactor who keeps her under close watch and has her Chinese passport locked away in his vault. Sleight of hand reaches a crescendo in its slow-motion climax where pickpockets are pitted against each other across crosswalks during the rain, a collection of opened umbrellas competing for visual attention. While I was watching this sequence, I just thought, what else is like this? There’s something so beautiful and elegant about it all, even within just constructing a sequence around the magic of walking through a crowd in a rainy city.
I was delighted to finally catch up with Sparrow thanks to the Chameleon Films remaster and release on Blu-ray. Check it out!
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