As far as this writer is concerned, Category III films – Hong Kong’s answer to the good old-fashioned X rating – are where it’s at. Johnny To’s triad thriller, the first film to receive the dread stamp in quite some time, isn’t the crimson tide we might have expected, nor indeed does it stylishly swagger into theatres like the director’s girl gang epic The Heroic Trio.
No. Election is, superficially at least, a rather grittier, lower key affair than Infernal Affairs or other recent hit titles from the former British colony. A solid gangster flick that’s sure to invite comparisons with a certain Francis Ford Coppola film from 1972, the film charts the rivalry between a cynical Simon Yam and a flamboyantly psychopathic Tony Leung Ka Fai as they battle it out over Yam’s election to the top of the Wo Sing triad society.
It’s a common trope in Hong Kong cinema to muddy the line between cop and criminal and Election rides upon a heavily sustained irony – that the lawless have a greater sense of democracy and tradition than the people around them. Much of the film involves a search for a talisman, without which no chairman may take his place. Like samurai from neighbouring Japan, sure, you can butcher people and thrive on protection rackets, but you can’t go without the trinket for the ancient ceremony.
There are few surprises here; as a genre piece, Election is as impressively unembellished as Stagecoach or Stray Dog, but the streamlined effect, like the mobsters, seems honourable. Election 2, happily, is already on the way.