Over the past fifteen years, Johnny To has built up a small empire in Hong Kong devoted entirely to the production of genre films, mostly his own: Milky Way Image Company. Accident is Milky Way’s latest star, a little nugget directed by the daredevil Soi Cheang (ten films in the last nine years), who has thrown himself wholeheartedly into a directorial fury, thanks to a dream pitch: the mastermind of a gang of hitmen specializing in crime disguised as accidents is overcome by vertigo when accidents occur that are not too beautiful, but too perfectly oiled to be true. Of course, it’s easy to see this as too clear a metaphor for cinema, as a stratagem masquerading as an accident… But with no other considerations, Soi Cheang’s primary concern is to stage these accidents as bravura pieces of art, at the cost of an exhilarating virtuosity. The rest is a bonus. But when he launches into the B-movie genre, the filmmaker also manages to summon up a whole arsenal of modernity, as confused as it is with a moral of doubt and a wavering of signs: Accident is somewhere between Blow Up and Secret Conversation (we think a lot about it, of course), the whole thing put under tension by adrenalin 100% made in Hong Kong.
Jean-Philippe Tessé
