Infernal Affairs
Two moles, ten years, and a movie so tightly built that Martin Scorsese remade it and won Best Picture for it.
- Released
- 2002
- Directors
- Andrew Lau, Alan Mak
- Starring
- Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Andy Lau
- Runtime
- 101 minutes
- Cantonese title
- 無間道
The Cantonese title is the useful one. 無間道 refers to Avīci, the lowest of the Buddhist hells, where suffering is continuous and there is no interval — no pause, no death, no release. That is the premise stated before a frame of film: two men who cannot stop being someone else.
A police cadet is pulled out of the academy and sent into a triad, his record erased. A triad recruit is sent into the police academy and rises through it honestly, because doing the job well is the cover. Ten years later each organisation works out it has a mole, and each man is given the job of finding the other.
Why it works, mechanically
The symmetry is not decoration. Almost every scene has a mirror somewhere else in the movie, and the pleasure of watching it is recognising which one you are in. Both men have a superior who trusts them. Both have a therapist or a partner who half-knows. Both spend the movie performing competence at a job they are betraying, and both are genuinely good at it.
It is also unusually short. At 101 minutes there is no subplot to pad it out, no romance that stops the clock. Directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak cut almost everything that is not the two men closing on each other, which is why a movie built almost entirely from conversations plays like a chase.
The performances are built the same way. Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Andy Lau are both playing men whose whole job is not reacting, and the movie is largely a study of two faces deciding, in real time, how much to let show.
What happened next
Two more movies followed in 2003 — a prequel and a sequel — which fill in the decade the first movie skips. Neither is as tight, and the prequel is the better of the two.
In 2006 Martin Scorsese remade it as The Departed, moved to Boston, and won the Academy Award for Best Picture with it. The remake is looser, longer by nearly an hour, and considerably more violent. Which version is better is a real argument rather than a settled one; what is not in dispute is that the structure both movies run on was built here.
If you liked it
Johnnie To's Election movies cover the same triad world with the tension moved from identity to succession. For the other side of Hong Kong cinema in the same era — same city, same decade, opposite register — Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love is the movie to follow it with.