In the year of the dragon

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Movie
German title In the year of the dragon
Original title Year of the Dragon
Country of production United States
original language English , Cantonese , Polish
Publishing year 1985
length 129 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Michael Cimino
script Oliver Stone ,
Michael Cimino
production Dino De Laurentiis
music David Mansfield
camera Alex Thomson
cut Noëlle Boisson ,
Françoise Bonnot
occupation

In the year of the dragon (original title: Year of the Dragon , alternatively: Manhattan Massaker , also Chinatown Mafia ) is an American thriller by Michael Cimino from 1985 . It is a film adaptation of a crime novel by Robert Daley . The director wrote the script together with Oliver Stone , the producer was Dino De Laurentiis . The core of the plot is the bitter argument between the newly appointed, lonely police captain Stanley White ( Mickey Rourke ) and the smart businessman Joey Tai ( John Lone ), who has come to the head of New York's Chinese mafia through brutal power struggles .

action

The Polish-born Captain Stanley White takes over the Chinatown Chinese district in New York City . He has been prejudiced against Asians since serving in the Vietnam War. Whether it is Vietnamese or Chinese is not important to him. At the beginning of the film, a Chinese mafia boss is the victim of an assassination attempt. Initially, White's superiors wanted him to get results quickly because of the looming wars of succession . From day one, the prematurely gray, highly decorated policeman in the city goes on the streets “like a steamroller”.

As a result of the generational conflict, the young Joey Tai, also not squeamish in his choice of methods, becomes the new head of the Chinese triads in New York. Tai appears to be a modern businessman ("attractive, cultivated, charismatic") who is starting to attract media interest. He campaigns for his compatriots and the neighborhood in a financially strong way, his gang members are not only pretending to be charitable . In the course of the film, however, it becomes clear that the initial murder of the old godfather (also known as the “mayor”) was carried out on the orders of Tai, who wanted to free himself up at the top.

White turns out to be not for sale . He single-handedly terminates the convenient, informal agreements between the triads and the prosecutors. This despite the fact that the "old men" of the 60 families assure him that "we Chinese have not gone to the police for 2000 years". Tai's rise in the organization also results from the longing for a strong hand in the face of the new pressure to be persecuted by the police. For his part, as soon as he came to power, Tai broke the old agreements with the Italian and Korean gangs. The fronts are hardening accordingly.

White and an attractive television journalist of Sino-Japanese origin, Tracy Tzu, are caught in a machine gun massacre in a Chinese restaurant . Captain White even takes his wife, Connie, to a business lunch with Tai. He tries to instrumentalize television for his own purposes through Tracy. White cheats on his wife with Tracy, who throws him out of the shared apartment, which was about to happen anyway. Connie thinks he's disgusted, he's on duty 24 hours a day; her menopause is imminent and she wants another child from him. As one of his first activities as the new head of the Chinese mafia, Tai flies to the Golden Triangle to negotiate new prices for heroin . In Thailand he first kills the opposing gang leader White Powder Ma , in order to be able to lower the price of his supplier, the general of a jungle army in Burma , by eliminating this other main customer.

At the same time, White uses all the resources of his turf to turn Chinatown upside down on an unprecedented scale, swears his people and runs on to his own doom. Tracy calls White, b. Wizynski, a long time racist . His supervisor Lou, a fatherly friend of White and his wife Connie, his supervisor and the entire city council are under immense pressure from the continued bloodbath. With his kamikaze-like methods, White is too much in the public eye to undo the personnel decision. Tai eventually has White's wife killed and Tracy raped. At the funeral, one of the "old men" paid his respects to his wife's coffin. White is finally being transferred to a criminal offense - it becomes vigilante justice . He still sacrifices the life of a Chinese-born officer candidate who was able to break into Tai's environment as an undercover agent . From the dying man, however, he learns the name of a Polish freighter loaded with drugs.

In the New York harbor there is finally a direct confrontation between White and Tai and a bitter chase through the harbor area. White brings down Tai in a showdown on a railroad bridge in the backlight. The badly injured Tai demands White's pistol and shoots himself to avoid the threatened loss of face due to trial and prison. In the epilogue, White bursts into the procession to Tai's funeral. As a dreaded law-and-order man in Chinatown, he stirs up the grieving relatives there. In the midst of hundreds of Chinese, he falls into Tracy's arms, in front of the cameras, wounded and exhausted.

reception

Dave Kehr wrote in the Chicago Reader that the film bears the personal touch of Michael Cimino. This would include “typical weaknesses” such as the “sloppy narrative” and the “wooden dialogues”. The film contains too much plot and too many details, but it stands in contrast to the "flat aesthetics of television" that dominate Hollywood films.

Chinese living in the USA criticized the film as " racist " and "dangerously clichéd". In the USA the criticism covered a spectrum from racist to sexist to glorifying violence.

The lexicon of international film spoke of a film that was as pathetic as it was violent and spectacular. The negative impression whether the hero was “inappropriately glorified” would outweigh the “directorial qualities”.

Overall, the criticism in the New York Times 1985 was not very pleased about why the hair color of the leading actor fluctuated from scene to scene and about other connection errors , about unsuitable characterization and was bothered by Cimino's drastic: “To show that someone is a general then you really have to set up a disproportionately large army around him ”. Ariane Koizumi is also so unsuitable as an actress that she is even outshone in a nude scene by the panorama of the Brooklyn Bridge .

The Cahiers du cinéma in France, however, liked the film and its leading actor in 1985.

  • "Alex Thomson's camera work is consistently stunning" (DVD Times)
  • "The lavish film [...] paints a fascinating, colorful, shimmering picture of this strange world in the middle of America's largest city and shows an interesting foray into Chinese culture, rituals and customs [...]" The year of the dragon has lost none of its magic because detail-obsessed observation and stylization rub against each other; because it is a war film, a western and a police film at the same time; because one was touched and spellbound for two hours in another world '( Süddeutsche Zeitung ). ”( Sönke Krüger : Das Großes Film-Lexikon: all top films from A – Z, 1995)
  • “Almost a truism, the more complex and even more reprehensible the main character, the greater the art. In theater or in literature we accept [...] one of the most ambitious and most rewarding American mainstream films of the eighties "(rec.arts.movies.reviews)

Robert G. Lee sees the film around the Vietnam trauma and explains the post-Fordist class struggle that is carried into sexuality: “an implicit homoerotic, sadomasochistic relationship between the two men” with androgynous women / men, feminists and machos : “Both, Joey Tai like Stanley White, rebel against their elders [...] White was in Vietnam, Tracy Tzu on the other hand at the university ”.

Urs Jenny wrote in the Spiegel in 1985 about the “nightmarish […] obsession with death in the context of Cimino's subliminal [m] nihilism ”.

eFilmCritic.com speculated in 2007: "If you listen carefully to the people here talking to Stanley White, you can hear the studio managers at Heaven's Gate appealing to Cimino [...]".

Quentin Tarantino described the showdown on the railway bridge as breathtaking and as one of his all-time favorite killer movie moments .

Awards and nominations

Michael Cimino was nominated in 1986 for the César and in 1987 for the Premios Sant Jordi . David Mansfield and John Lone were nominated for the 1986 Golden Globe Award . The film won the Belgian Joseph Plateau-filmprijzen for Best Film in 1986 .

The five nominations for the Anti- Golden Raspberry Award in 1986 included two for Ariane Koizumi (worst actress and worst newcomer), one for the direction of Michael Cimino, one for the worst film category and one for the screenplay.

background

The film was shot in New York City , North Carolina and Thailand . It cost approximately $ 24 million and grossed $ 18.7 million in US cinemas.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dragan Antulov: Year of the Dragon (1985). In: rec.arts.movies.reviews. Retrieved on February 8, 2009 (English, at IMDb ): "handsome, cultivated, charismatic"
  2. ↑ a b c Urs Jenny: In the cinema thicket of Chinatown . In: Der Spiegel . No. 45 , 1985 ( online ).
  3. ↑ Dave Kehr: Criticism
  4. ↑ filmstarts.de
  5. ↑ Selma Siew Li Bidlingmaier: The Spectacle of the Other: Representations of Chinatown in Michael Cimino's Year of the Dragon (1985) and John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China (1986). (No longer available online.) In: COPAS Vol. 8 (2007). 2007, archived from the original on September 2, 2011 ; accessed on February 8, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www-copas.uni-regensburg.de
  6. ↑ cf. Pollard.
  7. ↑ In the year of the dragon. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  8. ↑ "mood hair" ( Pauline Kael ) Scott B .: Featured Filmmaker: Michael Cimino. (No longer available online.) In: IGN Entertainment . August 26, 2002, formerly in the original ; accessed on February 8, 2009 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / uk.movies.ign.com  
  9. ↑ cf. John Simon: Year of the dragon. In: National Review. September 20, 1985, accessed February 8, 2009 (BNET).
  10. ↑ Janet Maslin : Year of the Dragon (1985). In: The New York Times . August 16, 1985, accessed on February 8, 2009 (English): "Changes color from scene to scene [...] To show that someone is a general, he must - and does, in one particularly overscaled sequence here - surround him with an entire army [...] she is even upstaged, in a nude scene, by a glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge "
  11. ↑ Alessandra Stanley: Can 50 Million Frenchmen Be Wrong? In: The New York Times . October 21, 1990, accessed on February 8, 2009 (English): “Les Cahiers du Cinema […] discovered Mickey Rourke in 1985 in“ Year of the Dragon ”, […] It was touted in France as the latest masterpiece by the director of "Heaven's Gate" "
  12. ↑ Eric C. Johnson: Cahiers du Cinema. (No longer available online.) In: alumnus.caltech.edu/~ejohnson/. Archived from the original on March 25, 2012 ; accessed on February 8, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / alumnus.caltech.edu
  13. ↑ Sönke Krüger in: Dirk Manthey, Jörg Altendorf, Willy Loderhose (eds.): Das große Film-Lexikon. All top films from A-Z . Second edition, revised and expanded new edition. Verlagsgruppe Milchstraße, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-89324-126-4 , p. 1402 f .
  14. ^ Gary Pollard: Year of the Dragon (1985). In: rec.arts.movies.reviews. Retrieved on February 8, 2009 (English, at IMDb ): “It is almost a truism that the more complex, and even flawed the central figure, the greater the work of art. We accept this in theater or literature [...] one of the most ambitious and worthwhile American mainstream films of the eighties "
  15. ↑ Lee, pp. 199 ff., P. Literature.
  16. ^ Rob Gonsalves: Year of the Dragon. In: efilmcritic.com. March 2, 2007, accessed on February 8, 2009 (English): "if you listen carefully you can hear studio executives saying the same things to Cimino on the set of Heaven's Gate"
  17. ^ Mary Kaye Schilling: The Second Coming . In: Entertainment Weekly, April 16, 2004
  18. ↑ Filming locations for Year of the Dragon
  19. ^ Business Data for Year of the Dragon