"Foolproof": John Woo's choreographed violence

When John Woo's films began to be discovered in France in the early 1990s, some time after they had been made, there was a sense of witnessing a new variation on what had already been perceived as a kind of Copernican revolution. Asia had become the center of an aesthetic renewal of cinema. There were the Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang , and the Japanese Takeshi Kitano .

All of them gently disrupted the relationship to the frame, to time, to composition, and to improvisation. In contrast, John Woo's cinema imposed itself with fury, in a novel way of depicting violence and of making the rhetoric of a certain type of cinema that had suddenly become obsolete overflow from its framework. Another formal revolution was taking place.

Having long been invisible, like most of John Woo's films, due to legal obstacles, Hardly Anything is being re-released in theaters in a restored version. Good news, then. Shot in 1991, the film would be the filmmaker's last effort in Hong Kong before his departure for Hollywood. It marks the end of a journey, a first stage destined to give way to a second, at the heart of an American cinema whose successes made us wonder how it could face such a challenge.

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