A thunderous rainstorm portends trouble brewing for young people in Hong Kong.
Don't Play With Fire (orig. Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind) (1980)
The film, restored in 2K, opens September 11 for a weeklong run at the Metrograph Theater in New York City as part of the 11-film series Don't Play With Fire: The Films of Tsui Hark. The series began September 4; see all the details here.
Director Tsui Hark's third feature film is more finely honed, as best as I can recall from
watching his first two films on VCD years ago -- horror mystery The Butterfly Murders (1979) and cannibal comedy We're Going to Eat You (1980) -- though it's still rough and raw, emanating from the mean streets like steam hissing up from manhole covers in the summertime.
The opening images set the mood, including an unfortunate rat suffering at the hands of an unseen assailant and an older woman nearly being hit by objects thrown off a rooftop by unidentified young people. In response, the older woman yells: "Good for nothing punks," which is as good a description as any for the four young people who play prominent roles in the film.
Three bespectacled teenagers get together one night for no particular reason, except to drive around in a car belonging to the father of one of them. Paul (Albert Au) is the rich one, Ko (Che Biu-law) is the tall one, and Loong (Lung Tin-sang) is the other one; there's little difference between them in attitude or conduct. They somehow end up running over an unlucky pedestrian. Their would-be hit and run is foiled when they are spotted by a young woman with a fierce stare.
More accurately, it's a glare, only the first fierce stare that Wan-chu (Lin Chen-chi) will fix upon a bushel of men throughout the film. And with good reason.
For example, her older brother, Tan (Lo Lieh), a police officer, slaps her around when he finds her playing with his gun. (This is also when we realize the identity of the unseen rat assailant: Wan-chu.) Their parents died, so Tan became her adult guardian, but he doesn't have the faintest idea how to parent. Instead, he comes home drunk most nights and doesn't ever pay her any mind, unless she's playing with his gun.
The morning after the failed hit-and-run, Wan-chu is working at a print bindery before a colleague angers her, prompting Wan-chu to pour ink all over her, which gets her fired. As she storms out, she runs into her social worker, whose chief purpose is to inform the viewer that Wan-chu was previously in a reformatory for fighting.
Wan-chu ignores her when she sees Paul, Ko, and Loong, who flee in terror at the sight. They can't hide for long -- as Wan-chu reminds them a little later, 'Hong Kong is a small island' -- and she enlists their unwilling assistance so she can have a little "amusement."
Obviously, individuals who are cruel to defenseless animals have serious psychological issues, and that's where Wan-chu begins: harming a rat, and then a cat, before moving on to expressions of inner rage against people. Yet she is constantly confronted aggressively by men, prompting her to respond in kind.
After the oil-pouring incident, a young man at a playground taunts her, then exposes himself to her, to the merriment of his friends nearby. In response, Wan-chu angrily lights a cigarette and then tosses it in his shorts.
Later, after Wan-chu has gathered her hapless criminal colleagues, she visits an old man to buy illegal explosives. The old man tries to rape her, prompting an angry response from Wan-chu.
Indeed, that's a pattern that is repeated multiple times throughout the film: Wan-chu is assaulted, and she defends herself. She has never had any kind of positive example in her life, male or otherwise, so it's no wonder that she is defensive and becomes increasingly aggressive.
Her inner soul is burning with anger: at the loss of her parents, at the way her older brother treats her, at the way society minimizes her and tries to deny her agency. She is anti-social to an extreme degree, and attaches little value to her own life.
Early in the film, it is established that Interpol agents (including Ronny Yu and Tsui Hark) are searching for traffickers who are aiming to import weapons, funded by Japanese money orders, which cannot be cashed in Hong Kong. Really, it's only a red herring, but it justifies many of the rather extraordinary action scenes that follow.
Of and by themselves, the action scenes are notable for the persistent manner in which they appear, often out of nowhere, yet always gripping in the (apparently) reckless and foolhardy style that marks Hong Kong cinema of the period. Among other perilous delights, we get an explosion at a cinema, an attack on a bus, a footrace up hundreds of steps leading to the threat of tossed fire, beatings, bombings, more beatings, a furious race down stairs and through an underground garage as the four of the protagonists flee from a small army of assailants, all leading to a climactic sequence at a graveyard that goes far different than anyone could have anticipated.
Often breathless in its pace, Don't Play With Fire, which takes its original English-language title, Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, from a 1956 law banning explosives, is a ferociously entertaining picture. The original cut of the movie was initially "banned for its violence and allusions to the 1967 Hong Kong riots," and also implicated Paul, Ko, and Loong in the movie theater bombing, which initially brought them to Wan-chu's attention. (News footage of the riots is included in the introduction, and also later.)
The revised version that I watched includes Interpol agents and other changes to appease the censors. It was released on December 4, 1980, per Hong Kong Movie Database.
Our own, Hong Kong-based editor James Marsh saw the original, uncensored version back in 2011 at a screening, and has more information about what was cut, along with comments on the film's depiction of foreigners and the issues that informed its making. His review is highly recommended reading.
It's rather amazing that after just one more film -- All the Wrong Clues for the Right Solution (1981) -- Tsui would make his first certifiable classic, Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), leading to an amazing run of good to great movies over the next 13 years or so.
An angry, urgent, vividly-realized social thriller, Don't Play With Fire is an absolute must-see.
Advisories: The film contains imagery of cruelty to animals, as well as a scene set at a gay bar that contains slurs and one 'f-word.'