1987’s China Girl is usually described as a reworking of the Romeo and Juliet plot, or as a song-free update on West Side Story (which is a reworking of the Romeo and Juliet plot). But that’s to fall for the elaborate feint of director Abel Ferrara and writer/frequent collaborator Nicholas St John.
Yes, there are star-crossed lovers meeting across an unbreachable divide – ethnicity in 1980s New York – but Ferrara and St John are not that interested in handsome Tony (Richard Panebianco) and sweet Tye (Sari Chang), the Romeo update from Little Italy and the reconditioned Juliet from Chinatown. Instead, flipping the dynamic, their focus is on the modern-day Montagues and Capulets, rival gangs of badass Italian Americans and Chinese Americans whose refusal to brook any deviation from “the way”, as laid down by elders steeped in the old country, drives them on towards a bloody reckoning with fate.
Why Ferrara and St John feel the need to pretend it’s about doomed young love is obvious from this distance. It’s the 1980s and we’re in the middle of the era of the New York gang movie. So who needs another one gumming up the works, even one with something new to say? So let’s pretend it’s something else. I’ll just point out that Martin Scorsese’s parents turn up in this movie, just for a second, as a couple glimpsed working behind a bar their characters are probably meant to own. They are the film’s “tell”, a glimpse of a corner of a playing card that reveals a hand’s true value.
So while we start with cocksure Tony and cute Tye dancing in a club together and earning the ire of her gangbanger family, within a few scenes the lovers have become little more than symbolic. Up front, instead, the story is with would-be big man Alby (James Russo) and his lieutenant Mercury (David Caruso). And on the Chinese side there’s leader-in-waiting Yung (Russell Wong) and right-hand-man Tsu (Joey Chin).
Ferrara opens with a shot of an old Italian bakery being taken over by a new Chinese restaurant. And that’s the direction of travel here, the Italians giving ground to the Chinese, but not without a fight.
St John’s screenplay is particularly interested in who plays the race game and how seriously they do it. At the top of the hierarchy, respective gang bosses Enrico Perito (Robert Miano) and Gung Tu (James Hong) meet regularly to discuss business, in a dispassionate, even respectful way over a nice dinner and a few raised glasses. They are rivals in the extortion game with business models built on squeezing money out of their respective ethnic clienteles. But they clearly understand they are in business. The last thing they want is a blood feud. Below them, less certain of the ground they’re on but largely trying to keep a lid on things, Alby and Yung. And, twitching away powerlessly below them, Mercury and Tsu (updates on Shakespeare’s Mercutio and Tybalt), the guys who properly play the race card and buy wholesale the line handed down from on high.
It’s the vitriolic outbursts by Mercury and Tsu that give this fitfully brilliant movie its wings, plus the moments of almost stunningly brutal violence, which Ferrara did better than almost anyone else for a while. King of New York would follow three years later, Bad Lieutenant a couple of years after that.
To run through the actors. Panebianco and Sari Chang are convincing as the young buck and the demure flower, James Russo is oddly underpowered as Alby – partly also down to the fact that his role is underwritten. Caruso excellent as Mercury, a nasty ball of spite. Meanwhile Russell Wong and Joey Chin carve out enough space to suggest that Ferrara and St John actually want the film to be about them.
Ferrara directs it with the speed and the choppy fluidity of a Hong Kong actioner and his DP, Bojan Bazelli – recruited straight from film school by Ferrara – lights it that way too, with dark pools of shadow and shafts of blue light studded with neon reflected in wet streets. The synth-drum-heavy soundtrack also gives it a HK feel.
Does it all work? Yes. Is it brilliant? Yes… but. You could remove Romeo and Juliet and the film would carry on without them. In fact it would probably be better. Do they both die in the end? Possibly. Is the David Bowie/Iggy Pop song feature in any way? No.
China Girl – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
