The career of Alan Mak makes for an interesting case study. Apart from the Infernal Affairs trilogy, which he co-directed with Andrew Lau (and was later remade by Martin Scorsese as The Departed), his filmography has been a bit lackluster. If it weren’t for the trilogy—and particularly the first film, what some consider the concluding film of the Hong Kong New Wave—he would, at best, be a mostly unknown name among globetrotting cinephiles; at worst, he would be a Chinese parallel to some studio soldier like Martin Campbell or a more prolific Josh Trank. (Campbell might even be too generous.) But… neither Campbell nor Trank ever made one of the defining films of their time, and neither inspired Scorsese to remake The Mask of Zorro or Fantastic Four. 

The Procurator, Mak’s 2023 crime mystery-thriller with a dash of comedy and an even lighter dash of romance, is a statement of populist filmmaking if there ever was one. The film’s beats and movements appear designed to appeal to one type of moviegoer and then another, checking off all the potential audience types like clockwork. In the middle of an otherwise serious mystery moment, we’re introduced to a new character whose main schtick is comedically and ignorantly repeating his name and graduation class before listing his hobbies. For myself, the inconsistent tone destroyed the momentum of the mystery. That’s not to say it’s an altogether bad film; I don’t think that’s the case. Since it appeals to all, there is a tone, a character, a scene perhaps for everyone. 

The crime that concerns the procurator, Huang Jingyu / Johnny Huang as Li Rui (who, in this case, is a prosecutor) begins as a rape investigation into the wealthy businessman Chen Xin (Bao Bei’er) but evolves into a murder of him. This murder, lest anyone gets confused, has nothing to do with the original violent sex crime, but instead with a decades-old feud over archeological tomb raiding. Presented somewhat loosely as a courtroom drama, the film begins and ends with the trial of the local university archeologist Xia Wei (Wang Likun) for the murder of the squeaky, annoying, and sadistic Chen, who raped one of her students. Different days of the trial work as extremely detailed chapter titles, or maybe even scattered visual epigraphs: what we see in between is the past; the crime, and its defendant, are transparent.

But things are a bit more complicated than that. Like most mysteries, the filmmakers obscure confidence in the identity of the murderer until the film’s conclusion. The weapon of choice, according to the police reports, is a bit funky too: a Tang dynasty elegy stone, the mere possession of which, we are told,  is enough to implicate a person in grave robbery. The biggest mystery about Chen’s murder is that the weapon was originally located inside a large fish tank that the murderer had to smash with an ashtray to obtain. Why not just kill him with the ashtray? 

Mak’s genius still teases itself out a few times, even if it’s on a much more infrequent level than Infernal Affairs. The court trials frame the film like an archeological dig, slowly uncovering small details about the past before interpreting the whole artifact. Written by Zhao Peng (Court Battle) and edited by Curran Pang (Infernal Affairs), past events in The Procurator come to determine future ones. Whom one loves may determine who lives and who dies; only the young are presumed still innocent, still untouched by the pangs of terrible sin that accompany the experienced. The very murderer, avoiding spoilers, admits to their murder only when the memory of the past—as presented through the meandering uncovering of evidence—ruptures into the present, emotionally and ethically rationalizing the violence. Mak then breaks the TV-looking visuals utilized for the first two acts of the film with the breakthrough and final key piece of evidence, or rather, the confession, with his old-school step-printing and formal inventiveness. In a film of standard visuals, the climax refuses standardization.

The genius of Mak’s storytelling is still there—one just has to be willing to do a little archeology to uncover it.

The Procurator
2023
dir. Alan Mak
100 mins

Now playing at the AMC Boston Common.