Can you believe it? The press coverage for Soi Cheang’s Accident is better than for Tetsuo the Bullet Man. In fact, the film even received applause!
Let’s start with comments from Twitter:
TimeOutFilm> Johnnie To produced ‘Accident’ is impressive Melvillian riff on Mission Impossible & Double Indemnity. Fluffed last reel.
DanaFukazawa> So everyone in Venice thought ACCIDENT was just another action flick from HK and now they know they’ve got it all wrong.
We learn from an AP’s article that Soi Cheang wasn’t satisfied with Shamo. Also, Accident features no chase scenes and no bullets fired. Finally, Cheang was requested by his producer, Johnnie To, to make a “non-Cheang movie“.
And according to Variety, To’s idea was good:
Clearly benefiting from the creative discipline of working with Johnnie To’s Milkyway team, Cheang has ironed out his usual rough edges and scripting weaknesses without losing his natural smarts as a genre director. Result, tagged to To’s name as producer, looks set for robust fest play, warm theatrical in friendly territories, long life on ancillary and remake possibilities.
NonSoloCinema, adds
Accident, produced by Milkyway by Johnnie To, is one of those rare, magical films that exploit the genre and then go past it and integrate it with something new (…) the physical violence always shamelessly exposed by Cheang becomes a mental violence (…) Cheang deals with an extreme dryness, resulting in a film with almost no soundtrack, a dry and immediate work, emphatic tones and a little muffled, like you have never seen for years in Hong Hong.
And in a short note, CineCitta says:
[Accident] seems to wink at such classics as Coppola’s The Conversation and Blow-up of Antonioni, but at the press conference the director said he has never seen these films.
Here’s what the Screen Daily writes:
Kicking off with an impressively well-edited sequence which will ensure audiences never view an accident in quite the same way again, its three main set pieces are enough to see this film break out in Asian markets (…) even if they ultimately become mired in something of a narrative fog.
By the way, this film has already a french theatrical release date set for December. No doubt, if feedbacks are that good, and if it wins an award, distributors from all over the world will definitely buy it.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for this mix of reviews.
Eager to see this critically-acclaimed film!
From a journalist “Accident is Final Destination-like made in HK”
(updated with the SD rev)