Project Gutenberg

The Hong Kong police are after a counterfeiting ring. The man at its head is known by the code name Painter; nobody has seen his face. He has the means to print dollars of very high quality. The police arrest a man in Thailand: Lee Man is a painter, he does not print money, but he was inside the ring. He is brought to Hong Kong and gives a statement. The story he tells is shown in flashback: how he met the Painter, how the press was set up, where the ink and the paper came from. But there is no reason to believe everything Lee Man says is true. Felix Chong writes and directs. Chow Yun-Fat and Aaron Kwok are in the cast. It is a Hong Kong and Chinese co-production. It won awards including best film at the Hong Kong Film Awards. Its form is the unreliable narrator; the man giving the statement builds the story and the film reveals this at the end. The counterfeiting process is shown in detail; the plates, the ink, the fibre of the paper and the serial numbers are the narrative's material. Chow Yun-Fat's character refers directly to Hong Kong action cinema of the eighties, and it is deliberate. Its limit is structure; the turn in the last section will feel strained to some viewers and the consistency in retrospect is not complete. Another limit is length; the narrative is long and its middle stretch grows heavy. Who it is for: viewers who like Hong Kong crime films and games with structure. Who it is not for: the turn is strained, the violence explicit, and the narrative explains too much.