Johnnie To – Man Tam AKA Blind Detective (2013)

Quote:
Blind Detective, the latest film from Johnnie To, could also be described as a movie about movies, specifically movie-making—not that you would know it from its set-up, however. As the title suggests, the film centers around the exploits of Chong (Andy Lau), a former detective forced into early retirement as a result of retinal damage that left him permanently blind. He’s approached by Ho (Sammi Cheng), a cop who displays brilliant physical prowess in combat situations but lacks Chong’s astonishing intuitive abilities, which she hopes to learn from him directly through hiring him to solve the case of a disappearance of a dear friend of hers back in 1997.

Obviously, Chong’s disability has a profound effect on his sleuthing methods—but the nature of his methods, especially as To presents them in the film, are fascinating in their thematic implications. Certainly, his lack of sight has forced him to rely on his other senses to pick up the slack, as the film’s opening sequence attests. But then, at a morgue, Chong gives Ho her first lesson in his investigative tactics, methods reliant less on simply utilizing his other senses and more on using one’s “imagination”—which, in this case, is akin to the kind of leaps of empathy that actors regularly make in approaching a character. But the filmmaking comparisons don’t stop there: Many other episodes of the film involve what are essentially role-playing scenarios, as Chong directs Ho to put herself in the mental spaces of various victims and killers. Such scenarios become increasingly violent and perverse; at one point, Ho assumes the roles of various heartbroken women, opening herself up to getting slapped multiple times in the throes of angry passion. For To, the creation of great art requires its artists to be open to walking along the precipice of madness without falling over the edge.

Unlike, say, Darren Aronofsky’s feverish horror antics in his own art-making allegory Black Swan, To’s tone remains lighthearted throughout, though rarely to the point of diminishing the serious emotions underneath the surface frivolity. And if nothing else, Blind Detective is distinguished by its freewheeling playfulness and To’s ability to skillfully sustain the tone of a broad (maybe too broad for some tastes) live-action cartoon, right down to Andy Lau’s Bugs Bunny-like consumption of a carrot in one especially life-threatening situation. Blind Detective, though, is also something of a love story, in which Ho finds herself falling for Chong, even though Chong initially has his mind dead-set on the last woman he remembers seeing before he became blind. It turns out, though, that, as brilliant an investigator as he claims to be, he has his, well, blind spots when it comes to matters of the heart.

Blind Detective (Johnnie To, 2013).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2h 9mn
Size: 	5.46 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1280x536 
Aspect ratio:  	2.40:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	4 746 Kbps
BPP: 	0.288
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 640 Kbps (Cantonese)
#2:  	Chinese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 640 Kbps (Mandarin)

https://nitro.download/view/753187AF9263905/Blind_Detective_(Johnnie_To,_2013).mkv

Language(s):Cantonese, Mandarin
Subtitles:None