A Tale In Two Cities

Two factions battle for supremacy guided by competing moral codes. A notorious gangster places a mole among the ranks of the police officers tasked with his arrest, while the police embed a man of their own within the criminal organization. When both groups “smell a rat,” a game of cat and mouse ensues. Such is the plot of Andrew

Lau and Alan Mak’s Hong Kong crime epic, Infernal Affairs (2002).

Martin Scorsese gave the story a new lease on life in his 2006 remake, The Departed, this time set in Boston.

At the outset of both films, the principal antagonist poses a question to his duplicitous protégé, clearly differentiating the identical sequence of events in each film. Infernal Affairs: “What thousands must die so that Caesar can become great?”

Lau and Mak’s film is economical and dense in its storytelling. The characters are studied and psychologically complex which lends itself well to the film’s moralizing tone and subject matter. The original title of this film translates to “The Neverending Way’’ relating to the story’s underlying theme of spiritual suffering caused by a life of deceit. Its tone is contemplative and intellectual. At the same time, Infernal Affairs draws from a noticeable heritage of Eastern action films. Its cuts are slick, its camera work highly-produced, its fight scenes imbued with palpable kinetic energy. The jittery stop-and-go of intense action and emotional contemplation makes for a strangely immersive experience - one in which the audience feels the intermittent stress of the film’s tortured characters.

The Departed: “Wecanbecomecopsorcriminals,butwhen you’re facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?”

Scorsese’s remake is best understood through an analysis of its antagonist, Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Crass and cynical, Costello expresses nihilism through acts of unfettered brutality and indulgence. Through his eyes, members of a broken society are no longer answerable to moral values. Because of the spooky similarities between his dialogue and Trump-era taglines, one can almost picture Costello as a real person, making Nicholson’s performance feel all the more gritty, authentic, and topical.

Despite the religious connotations of the film’s title, its Irish-Catholic-American characters have lost their capacity for religious thought. Instead, they focus on the immediacy of this world - choosing to ignore the ambiguous and uncertain divine consequences. The once puritanical ‘City on The Hill’ which they inhabit has become similarly depraved and corrupt. It’s theocratic and moralizing colonial ethos has been replaced with a primal will to survive. The Departed drowns out the contempletive tone of its foreign predecessor with animalistic stress, brutal violence, and laconic dialogue.

The endings of each movie expresses differing notions of justice. For Lau and Mak initially, justice is karmic. In the mainland China cut of Lau and Mak’s film, the ending was instead changed to reflect the orderly and bureaucratic ethos of the Beijing regime. The Western ending reframes justice as personal, tangible, and delivered unrepentantly by human hands reflecting the individualist ethos of its audience. - Seamus Conlon