I'm off to the post office to beat up a thousand people
(门前宝地
Men Qian Bao Di)
dirs: Xu Junfeng & Xu Haofeng
2023
100 Yards is unlike anything I’ve seen for a long time. I mean, they used to make 5 of these a week back in the 1990s out of Hong Kong, but that industry died in the arse a long while ago.
Plus it’s set in Tianjin in the 1920s. I don’t remember anything from back in the day being set in Tianjin. There’s probably reasons, even though none of this feels like even vaguely being based on a true story. But colonialism does play a big part in the story, so there’s that.
There’s a martial arts academy. The master of the academy is dying. He has a son, Shen An (Jacky Heung), but he doesn’t want his son to follow in his footsteps. He has a top student Qi Quan (Andy On), and everyone seems happier with him getting the top gig.
They are meant to duel, and they do, but the only one watching is the master.
These aren’t epic, fully choreographed fights. They’re brief flurries of action; they’re not looking to wound each other (yet), just to prove who’s better, who knows more, and who is awesomest.
The dying master tells his brightest pupil to just do the thing already that he’s been taught that the son doesn’t know, to show how outclassed he is; the student does it, the son takes a tumble, the master dies.
Thus Qi Quan is the new leader of the school / dojo / academy whatever the fuck it is. There is a whole cabal of old people who are like, the board of old people directors or something. But there’s the real person who’s in charge, who everyone else listens to, being Chairman Meng (Yuan Li) who is, um, presenting as male, I think is the contemporary terminology. She’s not a trans man, as far as I can figure out, because she keeps referring to how much this world refuses to accept strong women, but it’s hard to tell. I think her clothing choices, like all the clothing choices for most of the cast, are for particularly sharp tailored suits just because she likes them, as opposed to a statement about gender fluidity or the patriarchy.
Because of certain battles, wars, incursions by the European powers, large swathes of Tianjin, in Northern China, in this era have “concessions”, which means they have areas of the city which they treat as colonies, essentially. And it’s not just the English, there’s French people all over the place as well doing their thing in entirely French ways.
This era, other than the snazzy suits, also has a loosely defined political structure, with the old Imperial dynasty having collapsed but before the Japanese armies march in and make everything infinitely worse. So this martial arts academy isn’t just a place where people take their kids after school to kill time and fill out the ‘extracurricular activities’ space on their college applications: they are seen as a moral bastion, a maintainer of the peace in that area of the city, or at least for 100 yards around the building, hence the (baffling) title.
You might think, as the viewer, as Qi Quan has everything explained to him about how the town works and who the powers behind the throne are, that he is the main character, and that he is a good kinda chap. And Shen An, whose pride seems wounded, who refuses to accept the outcome of the duel, who demands a rematch, seems like an antagonist, and like an enemy for Qi Quan.
I was mistaken, because despite having seen a million of these kinds of flicks, since succession, people scrambling over inheritances, who wants to be top dog etc is as old as stories and movies, and especially this subset of Chinese movies that we (being me, no-one else calls them this anymore) call martial arts movies, nothing in this flick was predictable or followed any path that I could guess.
Just when she’s explaining to Qi Quan about how to really maintain power in his new position, she’s killed by someone, shot in fact, from some distance. Guns, such a Western thing, snuff people out, but no-one is accused, no one is revealed. Another chap, the leader of some street thugs, who use slingshots with dirt if they’re feeling feisty, and metal balls if they’re feeling murderous, gets shot too, when he’s standing against Our Hero, and it’s never referred to again.
I mean, someone does come along at the end, who slyly implies that they may know someone who did something, all because of love for Qi Quan, but really, you’d think it would matter.
The film manages these shifts, these strong shifts in how we see the protagonists, because in truth Qi Quan and Shen An are both main characters who refuse to cede any of the stage to their competitor, which is why everything turns to shit in the first place.
These two men, really, neither of them wants “it”, whatever it is, until someone angles to take it away from them. Shen An especially has a path laid out for him by his father, which is an education and a career in banking that would take him far from the fist foot world, and yet even there the staggering racism of his employers means he’s seen as little more than a performing monkey.
His father, the great big martial arts master, clearly didn’t know shit about the colonial world or Shen An. So what if he tells Shen An that he shouldn’t follow in his footsteps – no-one listens to their dads anyway. Nothing now matters as much as now becoming the head of the place he can’t stand anymore.
Qi Quan, who we thought was a decent guy, shows himself to be somewhat less so. He becomes obsessed with some secret technique, some style that he hadn’t been taught by his master, one that would mean he could vanquish anyone. He becomes obsessed with it, and insists on using that style when he has a rematch with Shen An, and loses, perplexed, and decides “fuck everything”, and decides he’s boss of a crew of mostly Westerners, and in the immortal words of Homelander from The Boys “I can do whatever the fuck I want”.
Where this story goes is bizarre, but it’s all well filmed and nicely set up, and it conjures up a world that probably never existed but at least seems to have strong colours, the sensibilities of western movies (in the cowboy sense, not the non-Asian sense), and a soundtrack to match.
I can’t really say that I enjoyed the movie that much, but I did marvel at it as I watched it. I couldn’t believe just how specific, brief and sporadic the fight scenes were. The climax of the movie involves Shen An fighting something like a hundred people, over the course of twenty minutes, maybe, fighting them individually for only a couple of seconds at a time, for no other reason than that his pride demands it, but even then none of this is to the death. Other than the two people I mentioned earlier getting shot, no one kills anyone. The climax of the flick is not who lives and who dies out of Qi Quan and Shen An: one of them wins, but then it never matters, because it never mattered, and no-one else had to die (they did get a bit fucked up, though).
All that, then everyone walks away, more loser than winner. What does any of this mean? I have no idea. I’m tempted to think that the specific department that goes over scripts and decides what survives and what doesn’t censored the ever-living fuck out of the flick, but I have no idea. Maybe this is exact flick they wanted to make, a mostly bloodless but also not big on personality kind of flick about specific group dynamics, social cohesion, people obeying their betters etc etc
Maybe Qi Quan is the villain because he gets helps from foreigners, from the vile gweilos from elsewhere, which makes him a traitor, but then again maybe it’s just his pride that fucks him up in the end.
Shen An, well, at least he comes back, not for pride, not for power, but for a woman with a postman fetish who really loved him and tried to save him in the end. Maybe he is the better man, but he’s certainly not the better actor. If he varied facial expression more than once I didn’t see it.
It was all quite baffling but I didn’t mind. Sometimes it’s nice to see things done a bit (a lot) differently than before. No wire-work, no long sequences, minimal choreography, hopefully no-one got sacrificed like used to be mandatory on the sets of Jackie Chan’s films, but that means no jaw-dropping stunts, either, no wonder, no awe.
That’s okay. I settle for okay sometimes.
6 times this won’t be the last time I watch a baffling, gorgeous film from Tianjin out of 10
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“Was there ever a fifth style in the family?”
- “Not their family. In mine.” – well that explains everything - 100 Yards
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