Wayne Wang was perhaps the wrong man to handle the hot potato of Hong Kong in 1997. On evidence of the two films contained on Lions Gate's new Signature Series DVD of Chinese Box, the place is an overcrowded madhouse teeming with complexity, torn between a British colonial past and a future dominated by a mainland China whose intentions were at best suspect. To adequately describe the years leading up to repatriation and do justice to the island's atavistic commercial free-for-all, you need someone who can make quick connections and let the chips fall where they may, but Wang is unfortunately not that someone. In both Chinese Box and Life Is Cheap...But Toilet Paper is Expensive, he tries to wrap the entirety of the island around the head of one passive spectator, denying multiple entry points and causing unnecessary confusion.

Chinese Box is the less interesting of the two films, largely because it's the most conventional and overwritten. Set in the months leading up to the Chinese takeover, it covers as much terrain as it possibly can: reporter/leading man Jeremy Irons serves as entry point to a many levels of HK society, from his ex-prostitute ex-lover (Gong Li) and her married business-leader boyfriend to a Yank photojournalist (Ruben Blades) with chronic housing problems--with occasional detours involving a facially scarred street waif (Maggie Cheung) who represents to Irons the "real" Hong Kong, though he never gets around to elaborating why. In between tête-à-têtes with these and other characters, Irons and Blades roam the streets with video cameras, shooting whorehouses and fight-dog training rooms and anything else that will evoke the island's seedy underbelly.

It's a big drink of water for one movie. Wang is going for some definitive statement on the changeover, and he tries to tie all sorts of disparate elements into one über-analysis that will encapsulate everything. But he's formally tied his own hands: there's no way that all elements of Hong Kong can come together in a conventional narrative linked to one man--especially the passive observer that Irons turns out to be. The subject cries out for some Balzac acolyte to find the patterns swirling in Hong Kong society, but the conventional protagonist-driven narrative ensures that such patterns are never truly examined. The results are a frustrating blur of bits and pieces glimpsed while rushing past; we don't get a time to think about what's happening because the hero can't be everywhere at once.

This wouldn't have been such a problem if the film had been more impressionistic: the film could have given the feeling of being trapped on by a teeming city on one side and a looming authoritarian regime on the other. But we have to contend with all this plot--including Irons' somehow-metaphorical brain disease and some tediousness with Gong's lover--and even more exposition, which stuffs our ears full of words that do no good in explaining the chaos hitting Irons (and Wang's) lens. It's a tasteful but stultifying approach that wastes a beautifully modulated performance by Irons (and a fierce and spiky one by Cheung) on something that doesn't do much more than a handsomely mounted cable movie.

Where Chinese Box is doggedly realistic, and thus hard to differentiate from other prosaic issue-oriented dramas, there's no mistaking 1989's "prequel" Life Is Cheap...But Toilet Paper is Expensive for anything other than itself. If it's not really successful, it's at least playful enough to keep you watching. Quietly slipped onto a second platter of the Signature DVD as a "bonus feature," it deals with a US-based courier hired to deliver a briefcase to an HK mobster; as such it ricochets from encounter to impressionistic encounter--all of them highlighting some effervescent personality and generally distracting from the narrative throughline. The film fragments into stand-up monologues from the various thugs, renegades, prostitutes and ex-Red Guards who create the levels of the Hong Kong underworld while placing them next to the fresh slaughter of animals and the looming Chinese takeover. It doesn't try to master the island as Chinese Box does, it just tries to capture its awesome complexity, which will raise the eyebrows of non-residents but likely provoke nods of recognition among insiders.

Alas, Wang doesn't have the killer instinct to push it over the top. For the film to work, the director himself should be as ready for anything as his subject, but Wang is far too polite: his lead (blank John K. Chan) is too distanced from the craziness to make much of a dent on either his surroundings or our consciousness (a problem the film shares with Chinese Box). In the end, we get a guided tour but no real participation--even our hero's final act of heroism is largely a passive, self-effacing one. The possibility of action is pretty much pre-empted by the pervasiveness of corruption, and no major blows can be struck for the home team. Again one leaves the film with a sense of nothing having been achieved, despite the sound and fury of individual parts. Still, I have lingering affection for Life Is Cheap...But Toilet Paper is Expensive, because some of those parts are evocative.

At least the transfer of both films is creditable. Chinese Box (disc one), presented in an "unrated director's cut,"has a slight edge on Life Is Cheap (disc two)--the later film's teeming, detail-crammed mise-en-scène perhaps required more attention than the more austere (and more obscure) B feature. As such, the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen image offers good definition and clarity, though it's slightly muted in its colours (skin tones especially). The stereo sound is similarly good, with small details like cell-phone beeping sometimes upstaging the dialogue track. Life Is Cheap..., also in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, doesn't disgrace itself, however: it's mildly but not detrimentally flat in the colour department, and definition is more than adequate. Bearing in mind that the extremely low-budget production didn't have much of a complex sound design to begin with, its stereo track is strictly utility.

The commentaries for Chinese Box and Life Is Cheap...But Toilet Paper Is Expensive are superior, in each case, to the film in question. Wang--accompanied on Chinese Box by critic Roger Garcia--points out small social details that breathe new life into the films. He reveals, for instance, that natives never eat frozen food, requiring the proliferation of storefront slaughter that marks both films; that certain neighbourhoods used in Chinese Box have been torn down to make way for towers; and that the contents of the Life is Cheap... briefcase are all American items frequently latched onto by Hong Kong tourists--in short, giving the background that the films themselves can't or don't provide.

As for additional extras, there is a 44-minute featurette on Disc One called Home Movies '97, a collection of video footage shot by Box DP Vilko Filac of various Hong Kong locations. One could have used a commentary here as well, as it's mostly long unbroken shots of environments that are as lacking in evocation here as they are in the film. Both platters include trailers--Chinese Box and Amores Perros on the first, Adrian Lyne's Lolita and Eve's Bayou on the second--poorly concealed by a studio-logo Easter egg, one of Lions Gate's more inexplicable DVD traditions.-Travis Hoover