Closing this years Terracotta Far East Film festival, Sparrow is a light and madcap buddy movie in which a group of petty thieves come to the rescue of a woman in the clutches of a rival gang. Cartoonish characterisations and a lack of cohesion in tone and pacing don't deter, imbuing the movie with a fun and freakish quality that's frequently engrossing.
Directed by the ever prolific Johnnie To, who here eschews his more typical violent gangster films for a foray into calmer territory, Sparrow was a personal project that was shot on and off over a couple of years in between other films. It's evident that To is deeply attached to the fast developing Hong Kong that serves as the setting, the shooting of the film acting less as a way for him to tell a story than as a means for him to document and preserve a city as it fades from being the recognisable home he once knew.
A sparrow is both a slang term for a pickpocket and a symbol of bad luck, so it's unsurprising that soon after one flies into and then settles in pickpocket Kei's living room, a series of unfortunate events unfold for him and his friends that make up the criminal gang. They each become seduced by the charms of the same woman, finding themselves inexplicably drawn to her, and ending up with a whole host of injuries, faces bandaged and arms broken. It turns out that she's desperate to escape the clutches of her lover Mr Fu, the head of a rival pickpocket group, and the plot proceeds to a showdown between them. For large patches the film proceeds without dialogue and tends to opt for fun slapstick scenarios, most notably a series of chase scenes, one of which culminates with all parties trapped in a lift, playing hide and seek amongst a bystander carrying a precariously balanced fish tank.
Key to the film's success is the score by Fred Avril and Xavier Jamaux in which they provide a swooning jazzy soundtrack that sustains itself throughout the whole picture. Sparrow contains a nod to Umbrellas of Cherbourg in its final sequence, and it too feels like a musical, not just by virtue of the ever present soundtrack, but also thanks to the insistent rhythms to which the characters shuffle. In the extended final showdown between the two groups, the action is slowed down and edited to make the characters glide across the rain soaked streets in time to the score.
It's very easy to get immersed in To's world thanks to his inventive and highly charming style that tends to successfully smother the paper thin characters and run of the mill plot. Sparrow is a fun and dreamy ride, albeit a forgettable one.
