Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Mission
1999 · Johnnie To · The Mission on Sightlines
Five men in a shopping mall, standing still. That is the image people carry out of The Mission. The bodyguards have stopped where they are, guns raised, each facing a different way. Somewhere out of sight, the attackers are waiting too. Nobody moves more than he must. The camera doesn't move either.
Johnnie To made the film in 1999 at Milkyway Image, the company he had founded with Wai Ka-fai a few years earlier. It was made fast and cheap, in a bad stretch for the Hong Kong industry. The premise fits in a sentence. Lung, a triad boss, survives an attempt on his life, and five hired men are put together to keep him alive. Curtis is the senior one, quiet and watchful. Roy is prickly. Mike is hard and competent. James is the odd man out and the funny one. Shin is the youngest. They are strangers to one another. The film runs about seventy minutes, and most of that time they are waiting.
That waiting is where Deleuze earns his place beside the film. He describes the classical action film as a circuit: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it. He takes the next idea from the philosopher Henri Bergson. A stone that is struck reacts at once. A living creature takes in what is happening, hesitates, and then chooses what to do. Deleuze calls that pause the interval, and he calls the creature that holds it a center of indetermination. Most action films hurry through the interval: you see the threat and you shoot. A bodyguard's job is to hold it. He has to watch everything and not act yet. To's invention was to make a gunfight out of that pause.
Look at how the mall scene is built. Cheng Siu-Keung, To's longtime cinematographer, frames it wide and almost locked off, so we always know where each man is standing and which way he is facing. The men become points on a grid. Deleuze calls the frame a closed set, a composition you read as a system of parts and the relations between them. Here the system is a map of sightlines and cover, and every line in it points out of the picture. Each gun covers a space just past the edge of the frame. Deleuze's term for this is the relative out-of-field: the frame suggesting the space next to it. The suspense lives in those neighboring spaces, the ones the men are covering and we never see.
Then comes the cutting, or the lack of it. Hong Kong gunfights of the 1990s were cut quickly and smoothly. To holds his shots well past the point of comfort and doesn't cut until something on screen moves. Chung Chi-Wing's lazy, jazzy guitar theme gives way to near silence, so the first shot cracks it open. Violence doesn't flow here. It breaks out of the stillness, and the stillness has been the drama all along.
André Bazin, the great French critic of realism, argued that some scenes need to be shown in one unbroken view. If what matters is how things stand in space relative to each other, cutting that space into pieces falsifies it. The Mission applies his argument to the shootout. Where each man stands is the whole story, so To keeps them in a single frame long enough for us to read their positions.
The quiet stretches matter as much as the standoffs. In one famous scene the men are stuck in an office with nothing to do. Someone crumples a sheet of paper, and soon they are playing soccer with it. It has nothing to do with the plot, but it tells us more about them than any line of dialogue. We see how each man plays. Deleuze calls these moments dead time (temps mort): stretches where nothing moves the action forward and ordinary life is simply allowed to go on. The modern cinema he admired lived in dead time. To stays in the world of action, because these men still have to act when the moment comes. But he gives the waiting its own weight. The brotherhood forms in it.
What carries all this is the actors' bodies. Deleuze writes about a cinema of attitudes and postures, in which the way a body stands, holds itself, or waits shows a relationship between people. To's actors have very little dialogue. They work in glances, posture, and small shifts of weight, and the long takes give each small gesture room to land. You can read the pecking order of the five from how they stand. Anthony Wong's Curtis is so still that the others seem to set their own stillness by his.
None of this came from nowhere. Seven Samurai gave To the hired crew of protectors who become a moral unit. Melville gave him two things. Le Samouraï showed how to portray a professional through economy and a flat surface. Le Cercle Rouge showed how to build a wordless set piece from real-time blocking and cuts held back. Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West supplied the architecture: bodies fixed at measured distances, held wide frames, silence. The film also argues with its neighbors. John Woo's The Killer had defined the Hong Kong gunfight through multiplied motion, slow-motion bullet hits, and a dancing camera, and To takes the motion away. Ringo Lam's City on Fire gave him a sweaty, handheld world of loyalty among criminals. To shoots that same world coolly, from a locked-off camera.
What the film changed was the idea of what an action scene runs on. It showed that suspense can come from holding back, and that a firefight can be staged as a diagram. It became the film most often used to define the Milkyway style and To's mature work, and nearly a decade later he brought several of the same actors back for a companion piece. The story stays deliberately thin, closer to a hangout film broken up by gunfire than to a thriller. Underneath it the film keeps asking what holds these men together: the job, the boss's rules, or each other.
So watch it for the interval. In each standoff, notice which way every man is facing and what he must be seeing that you can't. Count how long To waits before he cuts. And ask the question the film leaves open: when these men hold still under fire, is that courage, discipline, or simply the job? To leaves you to decide.
Concepts in play
- the interval (center of indetermination) — The bodyguards' job is to perceive and hold back from acting. In the mall ambush they freeze with guns raised, and the scene plays out in small adjustments and held breath.
- the closed set (cadre) — Cheng Siu-Keung's wide, nearly locked frames turn the men into points on a grid, so we read the firefight as a diagram of sightlines and cover.
- relative out-of-field — In the mall standoff each guard covers a different angle, aiming at threats in spaces just beyond the frame.
- dead time (temps mort) — While waiting in an office, the men kick a crumpled ball of paper around like a soccer ball. The scene does nothing for the plot and a great deal for character.
- the gest (attitudes and postures) — The performances run on glances, posture, and small shifts of weight inside long-held frames. The group's relationships show in how the men stand and wait.
- the movement-image (stretched) — Shots are held past comfort and the cut is withheld until motion forces it, so violence breaks out of stillness. The film stays within the action regime but makes the pause before action its substance.