In 2007, Johnnie To directed a film called Mad Detective about a cop (Lau Ching-wan) who solves mysteries in unexpected ways partially due to a demented connection to his dead wife. The reason for mentioning this six-year-old film is not because of the title similarity to To’s latest film Blind Detective, but because this screwy combination of romantic comedy and crime movie is so off-the-wall that it feels like it was directed by the Mad Detective himself!
There’s something here to offend everyone.
Blind Detective features Andy Lau as Johnston, an ex-cop who having been deprived of his vision, uses his other senses to solve crimes for the reward money to supplement his inadequate disability pension. A long-time fan of Johnston’s crime-busting, Officer Ho (Sammi Cheng) asks the visually impaired detective to help her track down a childhood friend who disappeared just before Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. Johnston takes the case because Ho is clearly wealthy (in a wonderful scene he rolls a ping pong ball across the wooden floor to gauge her apartment’s considerable width) but they both keep getting sidetracked by other murder cases before they can begin their main investigation. During this circuitous process, Ho falls in love with Johnston, but because he’s blind he doesn’t realise how beautiful she is and gives Ho the cold shoulder.
Most of the film’s blind jokes are darker still. Johnston often walks into doors or trees and there’s a merciless moment where he desperately needs to urinate but can’t find the toilet in Ho’s expansive apartment. These moments are uneasily situated alongside flashbacks of Ho’s childhood friend slicing her arms with a knife, and a man flicking sulphuric acid at his pursuers. Add comical drunkenness, three vomiting scenes, some bloody deaths, a feral murderer in a tennis skirt and several shots of food obsessed Johnston eating with his mouth open, and you have a film where sometimes you don’t know where to look, let alone what to think.
There’s something here to offend everyone, but Lau, one of Hong Kong’s biggest stars, is clearly enjoying himself in this role. His blind schtick is well researched and much closer to absurd reality than Al Pacino’s Oscar-rewarded caricature in Scent of a Woman. To match Lau, Cheng is endearingly funny and the pair look comfortable in their first movie together since To’s 2004 romcom Yesterday Once More.
To’s international fan base largely circles around Triad films like The Mission, Full-time Killer, and Election. While those films are excellent, To’s Western fans struggle to accept the fact that there’s another Johnnie To who is irreverent, silly and in Hong Kong cinema’s great tradition, truly grotesque.
Here in the madcap (and loud) Blind Detective, with its characters constantly yelling at each other in often, unsuccessful attempts to generate laughter, this 'other" To is in full, unbridled flight. Despite some compelling moments – some comic, some dramatic - this film never really coheres as it tests the limits of good taste and auteur loyalty. It shouldn’t be anybody’s entry point for To’s oeuvre, but it never sits in one style long enough to let audiences become bored.
