In the Flesh: Limbo

The Hong Kong of director Soi Cheang's Limbo is half a step from an open sewer the size of a city, its alleyways choked with garbage, its buildings looming dead and abandoned over filthy streets. Its police are burned-out, grieving wrecks like Cham Lau (Gordon Lam) or fresh-faced young fusspots with mouths full of rotting teeth, like Will Yam (Mason Lee). Everything’s wet. Everything’s dirty. And down in the filth, down where rotting corpses mingle with everyday waste and broken mannequins grin mindlessly up out of trash compactors, a hungry ghost stalks the city’s weakest and most vulnerable. Akira (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi) is a clear reminder of Japanese occupation, maiming and raping his victims with single-minded fanaticism, physically worming his way into the fabric of the city in a labyrinthine lair like something you might find down one of Shelob’s tunnels. He’s one of the better noir villains in recent memory, for all that his homelessness is perhaps a bit under-contextualized, a writhing snarl of Oedipal barbarism and perverse stamina.

More than any of its excellent central cast or the details of its relatively straightforward plot, though, it’s the atmosphere that cements Limbo as something truly great. Is Hong Kong dead, or is it alive? Do the vacant eye sockets of its buildings still see? Like Cham’s comatose wife, it’s both living and dead, lost in a twilight world of waking dreams. Every shot, masterfully composed by cinematographer Cheng Siu-Keung, reflects this unnerving state. Brackish puddles capture passing figures in faceless, murky non-specificity. Doorways bracket and isolate the bodies of the fragile characters, dwarfed by the city around them. There’s a riveting sequence in which Wong To (Cya Liu) sits battered and half-crazed with fear inside a cabinet, which is relegated to the shot’s lower right corner, with the rest of the frame solid black. The distant cutaway manages to express a diametrically opposed sense of claustrophobic dread, a remarkable visual feat.

Garbage is central to the film’s thesis, perhaps most poignantly expressed in disabled drug dealer Coco’s (Fish Liew) defense of her having allowed her lover to amputate her hand for his own sexual gratification. “Yes, we’re garbage,” she tells Cham defiantly. “So what? You’ll never know what it’s like. Nobody wants us.” It’s a desperate speech, a codependent addict’s rationalization of her own self-perpetuating misery, but it flows from truth. There’s a dark appeal to those cast aside by society in a man who finds release and beauty in their desecration and disfigurement, who embraces and accelerates their self-destruction. To be garbage is to be caught between worlds, not yet returned to the earth, but of no more use to the living. Akira offers these people something else, and if it’s terrible, perverse, and vicious, it’s still more than the cops or the straight world they protect — all but unseen for the film’s entire runtime — can scrape together for the people living in their filth.