The Enigmatic Case of Johnnie To

Now that’s a suit, I think, as Johnnie To walks into the offices of the Museum of Modern Art in New York—shades on, cuffs shot. I’m not there in person, but even through the low-resolution video-chat window, the Hong Kong maestro cuts a sharp silhouette. If you’re familiar with To’s films—most of which boast a lithe 90-odd-minute running time—then his expertly tailored aura makes perfect sense. Just like the man himself—who, five months shy of turning 70, appears to be in rude health—there isn’t an inch of fat on a Johnnie To picture. To is best known in the West as an action director with an innate sense for space and place.

He released his first film eleven months after Tsui Hark’s debut, The Butterfly Murders (1979), coming up a few years behind John Woo. But To’s approach to genre couldn’t be more different from that of his better-known contemporaries, eschewing Tsui’s ungovernable formal extravagance and Woo’s heightened romanticism for something more coiled, contained, and generically eccentric. His crime films—often made with only the barest bones of a script in place—combine virtuosic set pieces with multivalent psychological complexity, anatomizing the dynamics of group ecologies while playing fast and loose with genre expectations.

 To was in Manhattan on the occasion of a 24-film retrospective, the largest ever mounted of his work in the United States. While hardly comprehensive—To boasts some 75 directorial credits across film and television, and as many again as producer—the MoMA program provided rich pickings from a filmography that has often proved elusive. Thanks to labels like Eureka in the UK and Chameleon Films in Australia, there has been a groundswell of To movies appearing on home video in the West over the last five years. With its release of Throw Down (2004) in 2021, and The Heroic Trio and Executioners (both 1993) earlier this year, even Criterion has taken notice. While each of the dozen or so titles available on home video may well be a certified banger, they don’t even begin to tell the full story of this consummate polymath’s extraordinary career. As the MoMA program illustrates, there’s more to To than action.

“To’s comedies allow for a more pure appreciation of his style,” wrote Daniel Kasman in these pages back in 2014, and it’s true that his romantic comedies—particularly those made with frequent collaborator Wai Ka-fai—are invariably hotbeds of formal and generic experimentation. Kasman was reporting from that year’s Toronto International Film Festival, and a decade later, the festival circuit still represents your best chance of catching To working beyond the boundaries of the action-thriller in the West. And there’s plenty to see. From romantic comedies and wacky ghost stories to piercing indictments of social injustice, To’s filmography far exceeds the sum of its action headliners...

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