A look at some of the highlights from last November's Torino Film Festival, with a special focus on far-eastern features...

Yesterday Once More [5/10] China (Hong Kong) 2004 : TO Johnnie : 99 mins
Left Hand  [6/10] Jiang Hu : China (Hong Kong) 2004 : WONG Ching Po : 83 mins
Dead End Run [5/10] Japan 2003 : ISHII Sogo : 60 mins
Able Edwards [8/10] USA 2004 : Graham ROBERTSON : 85 mins

There was a distinct Hong Kong flavour to November's Torino Film Festival (TFF): unspooling in the city (aka Turin) where films as diverse as Dario Argento's Deep Red and Peter Collinson's The Italian Job were lensed, the TFF has grown over its 22 editions to rival the Rotterdam's festival not only as Europe's hippest major movie event but also as the continent's most valuable window on the east. The prestigious closing-night slot went to Benny Chan's acclaimed New Police Story starring Jackie Chan (no relation) - who also popped up in a cameo alongside his newcomer son Jaycee Chan (relation!) for the widely panned Huadu Chronicles: Blade of the Rose (aka Twins Effect II), co-directed by Benny Chan's former assistant Patrick Leung and Transporter helmer Cory Yuen.

Audiences were on safer ground with established fest favourite Johnnie To (Fulltime Killer, PTU, etc) who sent not one but two features. Michael Mann-influenced media-satire Breaking News (reckoned "a first-class action movie" by esteemed Slovenian critic Ales Blatnik) continued its tour of the world's film festivals, but Torino provided Yesterday Once More [5/10] with its 'international' premiere. Fans of The Carpenters, however, shouldn't allow their expectations to be raised by that title: the song is conspicuous by its absence from the film's soundtrack. Fans of To's trademark larkish high-jinks will probably be more satisfied by the picture - certainly for the first hour.

In what often feels like an extended audition for the next 007 directing job, To stylishly pulls out all the stops as he follows stars Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng (as a divorced pair of jewel thieves who may or may not be getting back together) around HK's most photogenic and opulent locales. The script - credited to Au Kin Yee and someone (or something?) credited as 'The Hermit' - barrels along nicely on a string of crosses and double-crosses, until fizzling out disappointingly in the closing third all the way to a baffling coda.

A not-dissimilar last-act problem afflicted another Hong Kong director, relative newcomer Wong Ching Po - but his Left Hand [6/10] was still the most kinetic and accomplished of the half-dozen far-east titles competing for the festival's main prize. Despite it having come away empty-handed (ahem) at the awards ceremony, there's an lot to like about the lean, 80-minute Left Hand - which showcases the many talents of the tireless Lau no less effectively than Yesterday Once More, despite according him much less screen-time. He exudes his usual feline charisma as suave triad-boss Hung, who wants to leave "the life" and settle down with his wife and newborn child. This decision goes down like a ton of mouldy dumplings with his doltish underlings Figo, Tall Guy and Big Lungs, who hatch a plot to prevent Hung's volatile second-in-command Lefty (Jacky Cheung) from taking power.

Complications rapidly ensue, given a violent twist by the fact that rising young hood Yik (Shawn Yue) has been contracted to bump off he hapless Hung - Yik is "aided" by his hot-headed pal Turbo (Edison Chen), and we slowly realise that the relationship between this pair is an exact parallel of the one between Hung and Lefty in their younger days. These parallels bloodily converge when all the main characters are involved in a shootout on a flight of concrete steps during a torrential downpour. This is a tour-de-force, highly atmospheric, slomo action-sequence which, like several others before it, confirms Ching Po as a name to watch among the newer generation of HK directors - all of whom will, by the law of averages, end up making at least one picture with Andy Lau.

Among Lau's few current rivals for front-of-camera work-rate is Japanese superstar Tadanobu Asano, now established as a regular presence in far-eastern titles at Euro festivals. In Torino 04 his appearances were frustratingly fleeting - he was the lead in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 15-minute short Soul Dancing, and wasn't around much longer in Ishii Sogo's sixty-minute Dead End Run [5/10]. Though billed as a feature, Sogo's film is in effect a compilation of three shorts around a similar theme: a fleeing criminal is chased into a downtown dead end, where odd things then happen.

The first and second take place at street level in an urban nightscape: in 'Last Song' a hoodlum accidentally kills a beautiful young passer-by, who proceeds to rise from the dead to perform a series of cheesy musical numbers. An amusing squib, 'Last Song' doesn't really go anywhere but is much more watchable than the middle section: 'Shadows' is a pretentious, nigh-dialogue-free affair in which a gangster engages in a Mexican stand-off with what appears to be his own doppelganger. The tediousness of this segment is thankfully offset by the energetic shenanigans of the last bit, 'Fly', in which Asano comes to the film's rescue - pursued by clumsy cops, he takes a young woman hostage at the top of a multi-storey car park. The resulting tense standoff concludes with an absurdist bit of humour that's the niftiest thing in the entire hour-long picture.

The main Competition featured a Japanese entry at the opposite end of the length scale from Sogo's miniature - Kiriya Kazuaki's 142-minute anime-manga-saga Casshern, which has reportedly been picked up for UK distribution by Momentum Pictures. Casshern's plentiful use of 'greenscreen' technology - in which backgrounds and sets are inserted behind 'live' actors in post-production - mirrored that deployed by Graham Robertson on his sci-fi tale Able Edwards [8/10].

Tucked away in the 'Americana' section of the programme, Able Edwards (co-produced by no less an eminence than Steven Soderbergh) easily trumped anything on show in the Competition* in terms of conception, execution and ambition - and indeed went on to win the top prize at the Trieste 'Scienceplusfiction' SF film-festival which ran concurrently with the Torino event. Told in the flashback-structured style of Citizen Kane - which Robertson, in a stunning example of youthful chutzpah - the monochrome Able Edwards takes place in near-future whose Earth has been ravaged by a lethal virus.

The survivors have taken refuge in an orbiting 'Civilization Pod' where technological advances have continued apace - the leading provider of the pod's many robots is the Edwards Corporation (EC), originally founded in the mid-20th century by visionary, multi-talented animator Abel 'Able' Edwards (Scott Kelly Galbreath). When EC runs into trouble, the board hit on a radical solution: clone the long-dead Edwards. Whereas the first Edwards is clearly modelled on Walt Disney, 'Edwards Beta' emerges more like Howard Hughes - though both have aspects of Orson Welles' Charles Foster Kane.

Even leaving aside the technologically innovative aspects of Able Edwards - and they are notable enough in themselves - this is a striking debut from 31-year-old Robertson, who has been employed as a set-dresser on many blockbusting Hollywood productions including Pirates of the Caribbean and Joss Whedon's upcoming Serenity. Though as much of a construct as its cloned hero - the film is cobbled together from a dozen precursors of which Kane is only the most obvious - Able Edwards does have a distinctive, and unexpectedly tragic, character of its own. This gradually, enthrallingly emerges as the film steadily builds to a final shot which, as well as nimbly referencing Tarkovsky's Solaris, is perhaps the most resonant, complex, moving and beautiful in recent American cinema. Orson would surely have approved.

25th November, 2004

(revised version [27th December] of article written for January 2005 edition of Impact magazine)

* Competition won by Lisandro Alonso's Los Muertos

Yesterday Once More seen 17th November, Empire cinema, Turin/Torino
Left Hand seen 18th November, Lux cinema, Turin/Torino
Dead End Run seen 19th November, Romano cinema, Turin/Torino
Able Edwards seen 19th November, Massimo cinema, Turin/Torino

click here for full list of reviews from the 22nd Torino Film Festival