In Johnnie To’s extensive filmography, the majority of works are clearly mob films – in fact, he’ll soon be shooting a remake of Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle) starring Orlando Bloom and Alain Delon. But the Hong Kong filmmaker has proven over and over his talent for romance, science fiction, martial arts and even cartoons. Sparrow belongs to this broader tendency, which has included the charming Yesterday Once More and the lighthearted Running on Karma.
The plotline is simple: a young Taiwanese woman is married to a powerful man who keeps her hostage by stealing her passport. She hires four pickpockets who steal it back in an extremely beautiful final sequence that is a throwback to Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). The cinematic references do not stop there. Johnnie To’s increasing passion for French cinema radiates throughout the entire film and gives it a nostalgic feel. Kei, the main character, played by the Clooney-like Simon Yam, wanders the streets of the old town center on an antiquated bicycle armed with a vintage camera. Sparrow thus offers us pure documents of the city, a striking change of pace for To, who is usually known for his aerial shots that bring everything, including still objects, into majestic movement. This documentary slant is a new approach for Johnnie To, who is likewise working on a project for an historic film with Jia Zhang-ke, a filmmaker who would ordinarily appear to be an unlikely choice for collaboration.
The levity of the film is hence called into question – or rather, one cannot speak of levity here precisely because the film itself plays with the concept. Since “sparrow” is local slang for pickpocket, the viewer may see metaphors throughout: photos snapped on the fly from a bicycle, a beautiful woman kept in a cage with a passport symbolizing a key, … But only one metaphor is truly important: Johnny To offers a bird’s eye view of the town. While action has been shown horizontally for the last decade (e.g., the bullet-time shots of Matrix or the lateral tracking shots of Old Boy), To returns to verticality, filming streets from the rooftop and vice versa, as his characters scramble up buildings, heels are broken and bicycles navigate the steepest routes.
In fact, more than To’s previous works and probably more than his future movies, Sparrow affirms the filmmaker’s attachment to his city and his desire to define its final image. The city has been in transition since 1997, when it was granted a fifty-year reprieve before total retrocession to China. Until 2046, Hong Kong will be free to do as it likes. Screenplays may very well become simpler: what matters is to inhabit the city, to film it before it disappears. From now to 2046 represents a long grace period, and To’s light approach to filmmaking may provide the best image of this suspended time.

Bastien Hader