Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind
 

PostED ON 20.10.2023

Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind is one of Tsui Hark's contemporary movies. The Hong Kong filmmaker delivers a pitch-black political thriller.

Every character is sacrificed sooner or later. They are all products of an unstable world of Western, English colonisation, still underway in the Hong Kong of 1980. People’s brains seem to take on an insanity in this teeming, contaminated, derelict urban universe. Even animals, the last trace of innocence, are not spared. Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind is aptly named. With a deliberately poor sense of framing, and editing that appears unstructured, Tsui Hark, then a young director, composes a film as explosive as a burst of machine-gun fire. His aim is not to make the overall film seductive. On the contrary, he seeks to express a horribly foul atmosphere that savagely kills the young, the old, cops, colonisers or the sons of good families indiscriminately. With an accumulation of dialogue like slaps in the face and gestures of violent sadness, Hark paints a portrait of a community under occupation, which, regardless of what it is, can only provoke the reign of hatred. A keen observer, Hark recalls the wave of terrorist attacks and crimes perpetrated against the British in Hong Kong in 1967, and remarks unflinchingly on how little one can recover from living in a society that is not totally free. In this respect, Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind is a stupefying film that is still relevant today.

Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind by Tsui Hark, 1980  © Spectrum Films 

Virginie Apiou