The Unexpected Encounter of Two Parallel Lines: Urban ... in Asian Cinema/4.pdf · Panicked, one calls the member of their group who’s still in the apartment, telling him to escape

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 46.1 March 2020: 59-81 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.202003_46(1).0004

The Unexpected Encounter of Two Parallel Lines:

Urban Space in the Films of Johnnie To*

William Carroll

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Indiana University Bloomington, USA

Abstract In this paper the author compares Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To’s (杜琪峯) formal articulation of urban space in his internationally celebrated crime

films with that in his locally popular romantic comedies. Drawing from recent

scholarship on urban space in Hong Kong, Chinese, and broader East Asian

cinema, he establishes that To’s films in both genres hinge on spatial

relationships that are specific to rapidly forming metropolises. However,

through close analyses of the crime films Expect the Unexpected (非常突然

Feichang turan, 1998) and Breaking News (大事件 Da shijian, 2004) and the

romantic comedies Turn Left, Turn Right (向左走‧向右走 Xiangzuo zou,

xiangyou zou, 2003) and Don't Go Breaking My Heart (單身男女 Danshen

nannu, 2011), he contends that To’s crime films depict these spatial

relationships within a framework of spatial continuity, while his romantic

comedies do so within a framework of spatial fragmentation. These two

frameworks play into the two genres’ separate dramatic needs: fatalistic

confrontation for the crime films vs. delayed reconciliation in the romantic

comedies. However, To uses these spatial frameworks within the two genres

to explore the ways that urban design can either thwart or facilitate encounters

between the inhabitants of a global city.

Keywords

urban space, industrial genres, film genre, romantic comedies, crime films,

spatial continuity, spatial fragmentation, fate, global cities

* The author wishes to thank Matt Hubbell, Yueling Ji, Gary Kafer, Katerina Korola, Mikki

Kressbach, David Krolokoski, Cooper Long, Nicole Morse, Jordan Schonig, H.S. Sum Cheuk Shing, Pao-Chen Tang, Alec Wang, Yuqian Yan, and his peer reviewers for their invaluable feedback.

60 Concentric 46.1 March 2020

The 1998 Hong Kong crime film Expect the Unexpected (非常突然 Feichang

turan) follows the unplanned crisscrossings of two groups of criminals (one

bumbling and incompetent, the other brutal and efficient) with a special unit of

Hong Kong’s police force. The film opens with the incompetent criminals

executing a jewelry store robbery as their counterparts watch with amusement from

a café across the street. As the police arrive, the incompetent thieves scatter before

they can collect any loot. A glass window provides a frame for the efficient

criminals to watch the event through, seeming to transform the event into a film or

television program for them: the camera pans back and forth from inside the café as

one thief tries to escape, realizes the police are closing in on one side, tries to

escape in the other direction, realizes they are also closing in there, and apparently

forgetting what he has just seen, again attempts to escape on the first side. From the

three men in the café’s reaction shots, there is little sense that they are in any

physical danger.

This changes very suddenly when they see the thief run into another building

across the way, and the police follow him. Suddenly, we learn that these three men

have invaded one of the apartments in the same building, kidnapped and sexually

assaulted the two women living there, and used the apartment as a base of

operations for a more elaborate heist scheme. Panicked, one calls the member of

their group who’s still in the apartment, telling him to escape before the police

arrive. In pursuit of the bumbling criminal, the police accidentally encounter the

brutal one.

This kind of confused, unexpected encounter facilitated by space is a common

feature of Milkyway crime films helmed by Johnnie To (杜琪峯).1 David Bordwell

has discussed the parallelism between the two groups of criminals as an example of

To’s use of doubles in his narrative structures (Planet Hong Kong 256-59), while

others, like Stephen Teo and Michael Ingham, have related the frequent

coincidental encounters that drive the narratives of many of his films, including

PTU (2003) and Breaking News (大事件 Da shijian, 2004). Different theorists

attribute this to different reasons: Bordwell identifies these tendencies as stemming

from a narrative structure that depends heavily on coincidence (Planet Hong Kong

259), while Teo and Ingham use them as evidence of the filmmaker’s fatalistic

1 Though the directorial credit is given to Patrick Yau (游達志) with Johnnie To and Wai Ka-

fai (韋家輝) credited as producers, To allegedly took over filmmaking during production and the film is now conventionally considered part of To’s filmography (cf. Bordwell; Ingham; Teo), to the point that in a recent retrospective of To’s work at the Toronto International Film Festival, To was not only credited singularly as the director, but the entire retrospective of his work was named for this film.

William Carroll 61

worldview (Teo 8; Ingham 11). However, I would like to focus on the spatial

relationships of the opening sequence of the film: the apparent boundary between

the two groups of criminals that quickly becomes shattered, and the buildings where

the two criminals crisscross, causing one to lead the police to the other. This latter

plot point becomes central to To’s later Breaking News, whose narrative covers the

span of a police stakeout of an apartment where some robbers have holed up after a

heist, unaware of the fact that a group of contract killers is staying in the same

building.2 Though the apparently random encounter in each film can certainly be

read as driven by either coincidence or fate, I consider them from the perspective of

space: in particular, the space of a certain kind of rapidly developing, and thus

rapidly transforming, modern metropolis; what Saskia Sassen calls the “global

city.” Ackbar Abbas has argued that Hong Kong, both because of its rapid

development and unresolved political status, has a unique identity in this framework

(Abbas, Hong Kong) and To’s roots in the Hong Kong film industry may help to

explain his interest in the subject. However, as we will see, To also explores similar

spatial relationships in other major cities that are in the process of constant

transformation in China, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. Considered from this

perspective, there are two additional films from To’s filmography that both hinge

on coincidental encounters (or non-encounters) that are facilitated by similar spatial

arrangements: the romantic comedies Turn Left, Turn Right (向左走‧向右走

Xiangzuo zou, xiangyou zou, 2003) and Don’t Go Breaking My Heart (單身男女

Danshen nannu, 2011). Each of these films adopts a conception of space that

Yingjin Zhang calls “space as productive,” in which “space becomes a dynamic

force that generates changes, shapes experiences, and demands narratives” (Cinema

1).

The way that To’s films hinge on encounters facilitated by urban spatial

arrangements, I argue, articulates the way that spatial development and

transformation affects human relationships in the global city. To’s crime films

operate within a framework of spatial continuity: the action is confined to small

spaces, like a single building or city block, and their narratives are driven by the

way that these spaces force characters, or groups, to collide with one another.

Though these collisions are partly driven by the genre’s needs for direct conflict,

To’s films articulate the way that the global city, by virtue of its dense population

and architectural organization, can facilitate unexpected, and perhaps unwanted,

2 Teo also notes the similarity between the opening of Expect the Unexpected and the

overarching narrative structure of Breaking News, and asks To about it in an interview. To denies that the similarity was a conscious decision on his part (Teo 232).


encounters between its residents and passers-through. To’s romantic comedies, by

contrast, operate within a framework of spatial fragmentation: they explore the way

that relationships between people within a small geographic area are divided by the

space of the global city. These divisions are partly driven by the genre’s need for a

delayed union of their central romantic couple, but To maps this need onto the

design of the city. Further, rather than confining their action to a single area, the

romantic comedies show the same spatial relationship in different locations across

one city, or even across multiple cities, revealing a uniformity of design and

development in the global city. Though To uses both spatial continuity and spatial

fragmentation to serve the purposes of their respective genres, his films ultimately

articulate the ways that the design of the global city can thwart encounters just as

easily as they can facilitate them.

Milkyway Image and Genre Filmmaking

To analyze the implications of genre on To’s depiction of urban space, we

must begin by analyzing the differences between the two primary genres in which

To operates. The implications of breaking To’s filmography into “crime films” and

“romantic comedies” may seem straightforward, particularly if we only define the

genres as a function of the film’s narratives. The crime films are about the criminal

underworld, hinge on the violent confrontation between rival criminals and/or the

police, and deliver action. The romantic comedies are lighthearted films about

romance, hinge on the delayed union of a romantic couple, and deliver laughs.

However, strictly focusing on the narrative content of the films misses several other

differences between the genres. Specifically, the two genres have separate channels

of distribution that engender different intended audiences. Alex Zahlten has

advocated for analyzing the industrial features of genres that inform “the

supposedly bounded feature film textuality,” arguing that in many cases specific

genres are associated with specific modes of financing, production, distribution, and

exhibition, and that these features can determine their content (2). By understanding

genre as both a textual and industrial function, as Zahlten suggests, we can better

understand why To’s use of space differs by genre.

Since co-founding Milkyway Image in the late 1990s with Wai Ka-fai, To has

had a well-balanced filmography alternating between action-packed crime films and

delirious, frenetic romantic comedies. Though employing much of the same crew

and supporting cast, the films of these two genres differ not only in subject matter,

but also in their audiences and channels of distribution. The romantic comedies play

William Carroll 63

as popular films across Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and

other parts of Asia. The crime films, on the other hand, play to local audiences in

Hong Kong, but have often been banned, or at least heavily censored, within the

PRC, limiting their play within the popular cinema market in Asia.3

Auteurist accounts of To’s career published in English have tended to focus

on the latter while ignoring, or even spurning, the former. At worst, these accounts

consider the rom-coms mere concessions to popular audiences that subsidize the

crime films, and are said to indulge generic tropes lazily rather than interrogate

them like the crime films. “We should not be led into thinking that all Milkyway

Films are genre deconstructions or ironic gestures,” writes Katherine Spring, “for

many, such as Help!!! (辣手回春 Lashou huichun, 2000) and Needing You . . . (孤男寡女 Gunan guanu, 2000) are standard generic fare” (140). Stephen Teo, in the

most extensive auteurist study on To to date, calls the comedies “essentially

hurriedly conceived projects put through the motions to meet predetermined release

schedules” (146). Strangely, no one seems to hold the hurried production schedules

of some of To’s crime films against them. Bordwell has been more generous to the

comedies, and has acknowledged the more complex plotting of the cycle of rom-

coms beginning in the 2000s (Planet Hong Kong 233) as well as similarities in plot

architecture to the crime films;4 however, he still focuses on the action movies and

their reworkings of norms set out by filmmakers like John Woo (吳宇森) and Ringo

Lam (林嶺東 ). The critical dismissal of To’s comedies is also related to the

comparative lack of interest by English-language scholars in Hong Kong comedy,

particularly in comparison to its martial arts and contemporary crime films, in spite

of the fact that comedy has had an enormous commercial significance within Hong

Kong since the 1980s (Lau).

Another complication arises from the role of To’s frequent collaborator Wai

Ka-fai. A co-founder of Milkyway Image, Wai is a frequent screenwriter and

3 For example, Breaking News was released in the PRC in a censored version removing the

famous six-minute long take that opens the film and replacing it with a more conventionally staged shootout. This was apparently because the original opening suggested the thieves’ escape at the beginning of the film was the result of the incompetence of the police who were pursuing them, and making a version of the scene that did not suggest it was the police’s fault necessitated reshooting the whole sequence (Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong 195). To has subsequently directed two crime films that were PRC-coproductions and opened successfully in the PRC market: Drug War (毒戰 Du zhan, 2012) and Three (三人行 Sanren xing, 2016). However, these films postdate the films considered in this paper.

4 Bordwell has also discussed the narrative structure of Don’t Go Breaking My Heart (“Milkyway’s Fine Romance” n. pag.).


periodic co-director of To’s films. 5 Teo has suggested that Wai is in fact the

primary creative force behind their co-directed films, writing that “To’s task was a

glorified metteur-en-scène, making sure that whatever Wai wrote would be filmable

within the allocated budget” (146). Granting their collaborations somewhat more

interest than Teo, Ingham nevertheless concludes that “Wai Ka-fai’s involvement in

co-directed projects may enhance for some filmgoers the fantastical comic-book

side of To’s cinema persona, but there is little doubt that his [Wai’s] absence on

films such as PTU, Election, and Exiled guarantees greater rigor and intensity” (31).

Like Teo, Ingham ultimately considers To’s collaborations with Wai to hold a lesser

place in To’s filmography. However, as we will see, the formal articulation of

spatial relationships in To’s collaborations with Wai in romantic comedies bears an

interesting relationship to those seen in the crime films which are not Wai

collaborations; where they differ has more to do with the nature of the spatial

relationships that they articulate than they do with Wai’s presence as collaborator.

The critical bias in favor of To’s crime films has had implications for the

films’ distribution. Many of To’s crime films have premiered at prestigious film

festivals in Europe, including Berlin (PTU and Sparrow [文雀 Wenque, 2008]),

Venice (Throw Down [柔道龍虎榜 Roudao longhu bang, 2004], Exiled [放‧逐

Fang‧zhu, 2006], Mad Detective, and Life without Principle [奪命金 Duoming jin,

2011]), Rome (Drug War), and Cannes (Breaking News, Election [黑社會

Heishehui, 2005], Triad Election [黑社會：以和為貴 Heishehui: yiheweigui,

2006], and Vengeance). Many have also been picked up by prestigious distributors

in the US, France, and other Western countries, including Pathé (PTU and Breaking

News), Celluloid Dreams (Election and Triad Election), Magnolia Pictures (Exiled),

IFC (Mad Detective and Vengeance), and Films sans Frontières (Life without

Principle). To date, none of Milkyway’s romantic comedies has either premiered at

5 To date, Wai is credited as co-director of the romantic comedies Needing You . . . , Help!!!,

Love on a Diet (瘦身男女 Shoushen nannu, 2001), Wu Yen (鍾無豔 Zhong Wu Yan, 2001), Fat Choi Spirit (嚦咕嚦咕新年財 Ligu ligu xinnian cai, 2002), My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (我左眼見到鬼 Wo zuoyan jiandao gui, 2002), Love for All Seasons (百年好合 Bainian haohe, 2003), and Turn Left, Turn Right, as well as the crime films Fulltime Killer (全職殺手 Quanzhi shashou, 2001) and Mad Detective (神探 Shen tan, 2007), as well as the genre-blending Running on Karma (大隻佬 Dazhi lao, 2003). His screenwriting credits include all of the above as well as The Story of My Son (愛的世界 Ai de shijie, 1990), Where a Good Man Goes (再見阿郎 Zaijian A Lang, 1999), Yesterday Once More (龍鳳鬥 Longfeng dou, 2004, under pseudonym “The Hermit”), Vengeance (復仇 Fu chou, 2009), Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, Romancing in Thin Air (高海拔之戀 II Gao haiba zhi lian II, 2012), Drug War, Blind Detective (盲探 Mang tan, 2013), Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2 (單身男女 Danshen nannu 2, 2014), and Chasing Dream (我的拳王男友 Wo de quanwang nanyou, 2019).

William Carroll 65

a prestigious festival or been picked up by a theatrical distributor—prestigious or

otherwise—in North America.

But while To’s romantic comedies have been ignored by prestigious film

festivals and boutique labels in Europe and North America, they have been

enormously popular with mainstream audiences throughout Asia since the early

2000s. Beginning with the back-to-back box office success of Needing You . . . and

Love on a Diet in the early 2000s,6 To has consistently found box office success

with mainstream audiences across Asia with his romantic comedies. To and Wai

reuse and rework a variety of elements from their first successful films in the genre,

including the cast and plot devices, but one unusual element of these films that may

help to explain their success across Asia is their split location shooting. Needing

You . . . split its location shooting between Hong Kong and the neighboring city of

Shenzhen within the boundaries of the PRC; Love on a Diet between Hong Kong

and Japan; Turn Left, Turn Right between Hong Kong and Taiwan; and Love for All

Seasons, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, Romancing in Thin Air, and Don’t Go

Breaking My Heart 2 again between Hong Kong and the PRC. The locations of

these films’ shooting correspond to the places where they find popular appeal with

audiences, but they also present To with the opportunity to set up visual parallels

between scenes set in the different cities, which draw attention to similarities in

their urban development. By contrast, the smaller number of To’s crime films that

were filmed in multiple countries and territories across Asia, such as A Hero Never

Dies (真心英雄 Zhen xin yingxiong, 1998), filmed in Hong Kong and Thailand,

tend to contrast the two locations.

Zahlten’s framework of industrial genres can help us understand the

difference between the spatial deployments in these two genres. The crime films,

which play to local audiences in Hong Kong as well as Western cult and festival

circuits, are more frequently confined to specific neighborhoods or buildings within

Hong Kong or Macau. The romantic comedies, by contrast, are filmed in multiple

disparate locations across Hong Kong, the PRC, Taiwan, and elsewhere. While To

consistently demonstrates an interest in the formal representation of spatial

relationships across both genres, this distinction manifests itself in the ways that To

explores spatial relationships in the global city in each genre.

6 Yingjin Zhang reports that Needing You . . . grossed HK$32.5 million and that Love on a Diet

grossed HK$40.4 million (Chinese National Cinema 271), making the former the highest grossing Hong Kong film of 2000 (Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong 191), and the latter one of the highest grossing films in the Hong Kong industry’s history.


The Metropolis in Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong Cinema

The focus on urban space both as a driver of narrative and as a source of

visual motifs in To’s films puts them into dialogue with much recent scholarship on

the cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. These writings range in the subject

of study from 1930s Shanghai cinema (Bao) to the subgenre of “urban films” of the

PRC starting from the 1980s (Braester). James Tweedie has suggested that the focus

on the space of the city in recent Chinese language films and scholarship about

these films “betrays an awareness that the experience of urban life has changed

remarkably under the multiple pressures of globalization and with the emergence of

the expansive and almost limitless megacities currently under construction

throughout Asia” (Tweedie 179). Yingjin Zhang has observed that the rapid

modernization of these cities has resulted “on the one hand, in the widespread

demolition of old neighborhoods in developing cities like Beijing and Shanghai . . .

and, on the other, in the proliferation of serialized, ahistorical, and acultural

architectural projects” (Cinema 5). This tendency towards the homogenization of

architecture across cities can make it difficult to distinguish one city from another,

and it also means that specific types of social interactions facilitated by spatial

relationships are replicated across these historically distinct cities. As Sheldon Lu

writes, “the formation of identities and relationships goes hand in hand with the

transformation of the spatial fabric of Chinese cities. Subjectivity is created and

destroyed with the appearance and disappearance of new forms of space” (176). As

we will see, To’s films in both the crime and romantic comedy genres are also

driven by this assumption.

Even as his films have moved between Hong Kong and other parts of Asia,

To’s roots as a filmmaker are within the Hong Kong film industry. After the arrival

of filmmakers and stars from the Shanghai-based Chinese film industry in the 1930s

and 1940s, Hong Kong’s film industry arguably functioned as a kind of Chinese-

National-Cinema-in-exile for many decades, particularly as seen in the famous

Shaw Brothers costume dramas and martial arts films set in historical China.

However, many Hong Kong filmmakers, particularly beginning in the 1970s and

1980s, become more interested in exploring Hong Kong: both the urban space itself

and its unique and precarious political status. Abbas has analyzed Hong Kong

cinema’s relation to the space and architecture of Hong Kong itself. Though he

acknowledges that architecture is, with cinema, one of “the two most developed

cultural forms in Hong Kong,” he suggests that it “constructs a visual space that to a

large extent resists critical dismantling” (Hong Kong 65). He observes that in the

William Carroll 67

city’s development (and many redevelopments), Hong Kong’s skyline has changed

too frequently to allow an establishing wide shot of the city to project a stable

identity, in the way that an establishing shot including the Eiffel Tower projects a

stable identity for Paris or an establishing shot including the Empire State building

projects a stable identity for New York. He argues that “the city can no longer be

represented through a coherent image or set of images, but only presented or

projected through the affective responses of its inhabitants” (Abbas, “Affective

Spaces” 25; emphases in original). In his analyses of Hong Kong cinema, he has

emphasized the way that individual filmmakers have grappled with the theme of

“déjà disparu” (that which is “already gone”) (Hong Kong 16-47). Since To grew

out of this industry, it is perhaps unsurprising his films would grapple with these

same themes.

In his crime films shot in Hong Kong, To commits to a thorough, accurate,

and continuous use of space, particularly as compared to other filmmakers working

in the same genre. In his book-length study of PTU, Ingham contrasts To’s

approach to Hong Kong’s geography with that of most other Hong Kong

filmmakers: “Experience tells us not to believe the evidence of our eyes when we

watch any Hong Kong film set in Hong Kong. Jackie Chan’s Police Story IV would

have us believe that the young criminals can abseil down buildings in Tsim Sha

Tsui and land on terra firma in Central in time for a shoot-out in front of the

Legislative Council Building. . . . By contrast, we can expect a more authentic

depiction of Hong Kong (or indeed Macau) from Johnnie To” (Ingham 36-37).

Ingham then proceeds to analyze the function of the narrow space of the Tsim Sha

Tsui neighborhood in which the entirety of PTU’s action is confined. Like PTU, the

action of Expect the Unexpected and Breaking News is confined not just to the city

of Hong Kong, but to a relatively small area within Hong Kong. The action of

Expect the Unexpected takes place almost exclusively within the city block where

its opening scene is set, giving the action a straightforward geography and allowing

To to flesh out details about the various residents in the neighborhoods and its

businesses, many of which, like street food vendors and a racetrack, later play into

the action, as the criminals attempt to rob the racetrack, and the members of the

police unit pose as workers and customers at the food vendors to stake them out.

Breaking News takes this a step further, limiting the film’s primary action to a

single building and its exterior. As with Expect the Unexpected, details of the

immediate environment are fleshed out as well when both the police and thieves

buy grilled yams from the same street food vendor minutes apart.


While the framework of spatial continuity seen in Expect the Unexpected and

Breaking News lends the films a specific local flavor, the framework of spatial

fragmentation seen in Turn Left, Turn Right and Don’t Go Breaking My Heart

speaks to a more general condition about the rapidly changing urban environment

of the global city, emphasizing that the ways spatial and social relationships

between characters within them are repeated across different immediate settings,

and even temporalities. By multiplying the same spatial formulations across

multiple cities, To’s romantic comedies suggest that these experiences of rapidly

transforming urban space and unstable local identity extend past Hong Kong to

other emerging cities in Asia. In so doing, To echoes some spatial formulations, and

relationships set up by them, seen in classic romance films of 1930s Shanghai.

Whether by direct influence or not,7 filmmakers in the 1930s Shanghai industry

were articulating a similar experience of a rapidly shifting urban environment.

Weihong Bao has discussed the prominence of high-density housing, particularly

the shikumen, in these films. These not only serve as distinct locations for the films,

but are a distinct formal feature, recurring theme, and central driver of narratives for

films (213). Many romances of the 1930s Shanghai cinema focus on the way that

the cramped space and lack of privacy in these units force their inhabitants into

interactions with their neighbors. For example, Shen Xiling’s (沈西苓) Crossroads

(十字街頭 Shizi jietou, 1937) focuses on a romance between two young people who

meet in public without realizing that they live in neighboring units; at home, they

have an antagonistic relationship with one another because the thin wall between

their rooms makes it easy for them to annoy each other.8 In Yuan Muzhi’s (袁牧之)

Street Angel (馬路天使 Malu tianshi), from the same year, the central romantic

7 Leung Ping-kwan argues that several aspects of 1930s leftist films carry over into Hong Kong

cinema (239): another technique from these earlier films that To frequently uses is the narrative structure with multiple protagonists used to explore different milieus of urban life, a strategy that To uses most notably in Life without Principle to explore the effects of the 2008 financial crisis on a wider range of people.

8 Crossroads shares its central spatial conceit with Paul Fejos’s 1928 Hollywood film Lonesome, which is also about a romance between two people who meet in a public space without realizing that they are neighbors. Lonesome and Crossroads thus similarly explore the way that the space of the global city both provides opportunities of meeting, drives people apart, and causes people not to notice each other in their immediate surroundings. For a more detailed discussion of the overlapping themes of 1920s/1930s Hollywood and 1930s Shanghai cinema, see Hansen. Tsui Hark’s (徐克) Shanghai Blues (上海之夜 Shanghai zhi ye, 1984) adapts many aspects of the plot of Crossroads, including its central spatial relationship, but the historical setting of Hark’s film does not update the spatial relationship in the same way that Turn Left, Turn Right does. It does, however, demonstrate the continued influence of classic 1930s Shanghai cinema on contemporary filmmakers who grew out of the Hong Kong industry.

William Carroll 69

couple lives in adjacent buildings and build their relationship by interacting with

each other through their windows. Though it would be easy to dismiss these as plot

contrivances for setting up a romance, or to read them as fatalistic or coincidental, it

is the way that the urban space developed that facilitates the contrivance, fate, or

coincidence. The relationships in each case are demonstrated by both the density of

modern urban space and the architecture that determines which spatial relationships

are visible and which ones are not.

The experience of space articulated by these films bears a striking

resemblance to that articulated by the To films. Like Crossroads, Turn Left, Turn

Right is about a romantic couple who meet in public without realizing that they live

in adjacent apartments. The experience of coexisting anonymously in the same

space without realizing it, and only finally crossing paths seemingly by chance, at

once placed in proximity and nevertheless separated by the architecture, is one that

the modernized urban space has continued to facilitate. Likewise, Don’t Go

Breaking My Heart explores the relationships that occur across windows, similarly

to Street Angel, but now amplified by the seeming ubiquity of office buildings with

all-window exteriors.

Curiously, in spite of the similarity of plot formations, most scholarship on To

and Wai’s romances has analyzed them through the framework of destiny, fatalism,

or plot contrivance, while most scholarship focusing on the romance films of 1930s

Shanghai cinema has focused on the framework of architecture and urban

development. While I do not claim a direct link between Crossroads and Street

Angel on the one hand and Turn Left, Turn Right and Don’t Go Breaking My Heart

on the other, I argue that observing the narrative and formal similarities between

these films allows us to consider the ways that some of the concerns scholars like

Bao have raised about the 1930s films can also be used to analyze To’s films. To’s

romantic comedies can be seen in a lineage of urban-set romances that use

coincidental encounter, or non-encounter, to articulate the effect of urban

development on the social relationships that take place within these cities. By

placing To’s films within this lineage, we can see that his romantic comedies are as

committed to exploring urban space as his crime films, even as they lack the same

sense of continuous space in their dramatic action.


Suffocating Proximity and Blocked Vantage Points:

Turn Left, Turn Right and Breaking News

Made within a year of each other, the narratives of Turn Left, Turn Right and

Breaking News hinge on a nearly identical type of spatial confusion: that of

characters in adjacent apartments who fail to observe each other because the

building’s architecture obscures their proximity. This has different implications in

the two films: in the romance Turn Left, Turn Right, it impedes the reunion of a

young couple who meet at a park, but are unable to find each other again, not

recognizing that they are, in fact, neighbors; in the crime film Breaking News, two

groups of criminals are hiding out in the same building, and misinterpret the actions

of the police and other apartment residents because they are not initially aware of

each others’ presence. The two films also articulate this spatial relationship

differently: Turn Left, Turn Right develops a motif of a frame split perfectly in half

by a divider (such as a wall or curtain) with compositions that mirror each other on

either side of the divider, literally fragmenting the space; Breaking News, by

contrast, uses compositions that are confined, often closed-in on all sides by walls,

but glides between the spaces with tracking and crane movements, emphasizing the

continuity of space with the moving camera while still reinforcing the presence of

the concrete wall boundaries that divide them. Finally, while Breaking News limits

its primary action to a single building, the action of Turn Left, Turn Right moves

freely through the city of Taipei in locations whose exact relationship to each other

is never precisely defined.

The Taipei of Turn Left, Turn Right does not limit itself to a narrowly defined

region of the city in the way that Expect the Unexpected, PTU, or Breaking News

depict small, well-defined neighborhoods or buildings in Hong Kong. Rather, the

Taipei of this film is set in multiple disconnected places across Taipei; further, its

Taipei is actually a hybrid of exterior locations shot in Taipei and interior sets

filmed in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, the film is centrally concerned with immediate

spatial relationships. Its premise, taken directly from a popular graphic novel by

Jimmy Liao (幾米),9 is that 763092 (Takeshi Kaneshiro [金城武]) and 784533

9 The film and the book have the same name in Chinese, but the book is known as A Chance of

Sunshine in English. To and Wai replicate each picture from Liao’s book in the film; however, it is telling how To and Wai replicate different images. Liao frequently uses parallel frames between the two protagonists on opposite pages to show them in their adjacent apartments, which To and Wai not only replicate, but also multiply by repeating variations on this composition in many other locations in the film. Many frames from Liao’s book that do not exhibit this parallel imagery appear in the film for a much shorter period of time, such as in the “surveillance

William Carroll 71

(Gigi Leung [梁詠琪]) live in adjacent apartments but never cross paths because

763092 lives on the right side and always turns right out of his apartment, while

784533 lives on the left side and always turns left out of her apartment. They meet

by chance at a park one day, fall instantly in love, and exchange phone numbers,

but their numbers are washed out by the rain. Each one desperately wants to find

the other, but are unable to until fate brings them together at the end.

To and Wai flesh out the graphic novel’s premise into a feature film mainly

by multiplying the number of parallels between the two lead characters. Each has a

separate landlord, and these pair off near the beginning of the film. Each gets sick

and visits the hospital after the rainstorm that washes out their phone numbers, and

their hospital beds are also adjacent, though they are both too sick to notice. Each

also has a potential suitor who enters midway through the film and discovers the

fact that the two are neighbors before the protagonists themselves do; the suitors

then concoct elaborate plans to prevent the two from ever meeting before pairing

off themselves. Finally, in the film the two characters share a back-story that

parallels their current predicament: they encountered each other as children on a

field trip and exchanged phone numbers, but lose them on the way home, failing to

reconnect until their fateful day at the park. The film’s use of parallelism as a visual

motif extends into their shared flashback of a childhood encounter.

In spite of taking its premise from a graphic novel, the central theme of the

film—how human relationships in the global city are facilitated or thwarted by its

design in close quarters—is one that recurs throughout To’s filmography. Further,

the fact that it shares its premise with both Paul Fejos’s Lonesome and Shen

Xiling’s Crossroads demonstrates the continued relevance of the theme from 1920s

New York to 1930s Shanghai to late 1990s/early 2000s Taipei. Moreover, the film’s

central visual motif, a composition split down the middle by a thin wall with the

two protagonists on either side of it, comes directly out of Liao’s book, but it also

bears a curious resemblance to a prominent visual motif in Hong Kong action

movies similarly showing parallel characters on either side of a wall. John Woo

used this composition regularly starting with A Better Tomorrow II (英雄本色 II

Yingxiong bense II, 1987), and fleshed it out into the central visual motif of his

Hollywood film Face/Off (1997); To’s crime film A Hero Never Dies also uses it in

a central shootout scene. In spite of the fatalistic themes that are played up not only

in these movies, but also in the dialogue of Turn Left, Turn Right, we can also see

photographs” by a private detective that trails 784533 and accidentally picks up 763092 in each image.


an inheritance from the earlier set of films and their interest in spatial relations in

urban space.

To the film’s central visual motif of mirrored compositions, To and Wai add

the motif of parallel editing, cutting between the two protagonists performing the

same actions in their apartments, visiting the same landmarks one after another, and

performing parallel actions in different locations. Because the film consistently cuts

between the two characters performing the same actions one after another, it is

often impossible to tell what temporal relationship the sequences being intercut

have with one another. This is particularly true of a sequence near the end of the

film where each one unknowingly calls the other and leaves a message at their

answering machine, and each character then listens to the message, frantically

trying to ascertain how to call the other person back. The scene cuts between the

two characters calling and receiving each other’s messages within the same

sequence; logically, these events could not be happening simultaneously, or else the

characters would simply pick up the other’s call, but it is never clarified who calls

or listens to the other first. The parallel editing reinforces the film’s sense of spatial

fragmentation and expands it to a temporal fragmentation.

As the film continues and the characters struggle but fail to find each other,

they collect visual reminders of their relationship to decorate their apartments,

multiplying the elements of set design that parallel each other between the two

apartments as the film continues. Ultimately, the characters are only reunited when

an earthquake strikes, collapsing the wall between the two apartments: in other

words, when the spatial design of the city itself falls apart.

Made the year after Turn Left, Turn Right, the crime film Breaking News

plays on a similar spatial confusion caused by proximity and blocked vantage points

within a single apartment building. Though the building’s layout is extensively

diagrammed by both the thieves and police officers, and though the police conduct

a systematic floor-by-floor, room-by-room search and evacuation of the building,

the plot is ultimately driven by a similar spatial coincidence and confusion: two

hitmen have holed up in the same building as the thieves and mistake the police

operation to mean that they have been discovered. As the group of thieves gets

separated, two invade a family’s apartment and attempt to rescue their partners as

the police conduct their operations; in the process, they accidentally rescue the

hitmen instead.

In spite of the similarities, To’s formal articulation of this same spatial

relationship is quite different in Breaking News. Unlike Turn Left, Turn Right, shots

in Breaking News never show both sides of a wall simultaneously: inside the

William Carroll 73

building, the long, narrow corridors tighten the composition and block vision

beyond their boundaries. This technique begins with the elaborate, 6-minute-long

crane shot at the beginning of the film, and continues through sequences inside the

building. Shots moving between the police and criminals, and between different

factions of each group, never show two spaces at once, but instead use dolly, crane,

and panning camera movements that move between spaces within the building,

emphasizing both the proximity and divisions between spaces at once. Even at

moments where To cuts between spaces, or uses split-screens, the actions that carry

across cuts or across the two images sharing the screen emphasize their simultaneity

and proximity to each other. To most frequently uses these techniques during

explosions to show the same explosion from the inside and outside of the building

either in quick succession or at the same time, emphasizing the shared space. In

Breaking News, even the visual fragmentations serve to reinforce the sense of

spatial continuity.

The film’s spatial configurations are further compounded by omnipresent

media that cuts across them. The direct interaction between the police and criminals,

particularly between the thieves’ mastermind Yuen (Richie Jen [任賢齊]) and the

police’s head strategist Rebecca (Kelly Chen [陳慧琳]) is mediated as the two

communicate over a computer and through messages they send to each other by

what they show to the media, notably when the two groups attempt to taunt each

other by showing themselves eating peacefully so that the other can watch it on

television. When the spatial boundaries are transgressed or cease to hold, it results

in either mistakes, as in the fumbling of the initial attempt to catch the thieves and

the rescue of the wrong group of criminals, or in violent confrontations, as when

Rebecca and Yuen finally meet face-to-face at the end of the film.

For all their apparent differences in subject matter, Turn Left, Turn Right and

Breaking News each articulates a similar experience of space in the global city: the

coincidental encounters brought on by proximity and the divisions despite

proximity brought about by architecture. The differences between them relate to

both the intended generic effects: repeating the same spatial configuration across

multiple locations in Turn Left, Turn Right comes across as comically contrived,

while confining the action of Breaking News to a single building heightens the

sense of suffocating proximity, building tension to a final showdown. We may

conclude that whether To’s plot architecture seems fatalistic or coincidental breaks

down along generic lines: the constant reinforcement of spatial continuity in

Breaking News makes its final confrontation seem inevitable, while the fragmented

space of Turn Left, Turn Right makes the film’s conclusion reuniting the two


protagonists in the same space seem more dependent on luck, and a deus ex

machina in the form of an earthquake. In each case, however, the final reunion of

the characters, violent or romantic, is determined by the force of the space itself,

rather than the action or prerogative of any character.

The Limits of Lateral Transparency:

Don’t Go Breaking My Heart

Where Turn Left, Turn Right and Breaking News hinge on spatial

relationships that are invisible to the characters within them, the 2011 romantic

comedy Don’t Go Breaking My Heart focuses on relationships whose apparent

visibility obscures the limitations of that visibility. Specifically, it focuses on

relationships between characters who can see each other through framed windows,

which obscures their inability to see outside of those frames, leading repeatedly to

comic misunderstanding and confusion. This central relationship of characters

seeing each other through glass frames is repeated across multiple locations in

Hong Kong and Suzhou.

Like Needing You . . . and Love for All Seasons, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart

splits its setting and production location between Hong Kong and the PRC.

However, Don't Go Breaking My Hear differs from these earlier To rom-coms in

two important respects. In Needing You . . . and Love for All Seasons, both of the

romantic leads were played by famous Hong Kong actors: Sammi Cheng (鄭秀文)

opposite Andy Lau (劉德華) in the former, and Cheng opposite Louis Koo (古天樂)

in the latter. In Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, Zixin (子欣, Gao Yuanyuan [高圓圓]) is a Mainlander, one of her suitors, Shenran (申然, Louis Koo), is from Hong

Kong, while the other, Qihong (啟宏, Daniel Wu [吳彥祖]) is Chinese Canadian.

Further, though they included scenes filmed in the PRC, most of the scenes in

Needing You . . . and Love for All Seasons are set in Hong Kong; Don’t Go Breaking

My Heart splits its action more evenly between Hong Kong and Suzhou in the PRC.

Another important difference emerges when we consider the specific urban

locations of Needing You . . . versus Don’t Go Breaking My Heart. In Needing

You . . . , the setting and location shooting within Mainland China is in Shenzhen, a

parallel city to Hong Kong not just because of their close location, but because

Shenzhen, like Hong Kong, was a small village that grew into a major metropolis

nearly overnight; its growth was even faster and more recent than that of Hong

Kong. By contrast, the Mainland setting and location shooting in Don’t Go

Breaking My Heart is in Suzhou, which is Zixin’s hometown and one of Qihong’s

William Carroll 75

building projects. Suzhou is a city with a somewhat longer history than either Hong

Kong or Shenzhen. Founded around 514 BCE (Milburn xiii), the city’s historical

consciousness has led to strict building codes: within the city’s “old town,” no

building can be built taller than Beisi Pagoda (about 9 stories tall), preventing the

construction of modern skyscrapers. The city is further associated with Suzhou-

style gardens, which were designed by the guiding principle that there is no position

from which a visitor can see the entire garden at once: various dividers partition the

gardens into sections and provide frames (each with a unique design) to peer into

other sections of the garden (Liu 118-19). Circuitous by design, Suzhou’s classical

gardens prevent the existence of a privileged vantage point; one can only view the

garden from within the garden, and one’s experience of the garden is contingent

upon one’s place within it at any given moment.

On the surface, the design principle would appear to be the antithesis of the

anonymous, rigid, grid-like structures of the global city, and its skyscrapers with

glass walls that allow inhabitants to see everything on the outside. Indeed, as

Suzhou has itself grown into a modern metropolis, a new city (“Suzhou New

District”) has been built in parallel to the historic Suzhou, allowing the latter to

maintain its historic identity. Both old and new Suzhou make appearances in Don’t

Go Breaking My Heart: the building Qihong designs is in Suzhou New District,

while Zixin visits her mother and grandmother in Suzhou’s old town to mull over

which of her prospective suitors she decides to wed. Though Suzhou New District

as depicted in the film is very much a city in development (indicative of the speed

of its growth, Suzhou New District has far more skyscrapers by the time of the

film’s 2014 sequel), the two skyscrapers that stand out in the middle allow an

important parallel with the spatial relationship between two key buildings in Hong

Kong.

The film begins simply enough: while on the bus to work one day, Zixin

awkwardly comes across her ex-boyfriend, whom she came with from Suzhou to

Hong Kong, along with his pregnant wife. Zixin asks her ex to retrieve his pet frog

from her apartment, but his wife instantly suspects them and begins an argument.

As the three argue on the bus, To introduces the film’s central structural motif in its

simplest form as Shenran drives next to the bus in his Mercedes and looks in

through the window. In a simple shot/reverse shot pattern, the argument playing out

in the bus (unheard and framed by the bus window) is transformed into a silent

movie that Shenran watches from the outside. On the narrative level, the scene is

significant because it allows Shenran to ascertain that Zixin has recently been jilted


and is now single, but it also introduces the visual framing motif with windows and

the act of looking through them.

Each of the film’s key scenes play with this visual motif, but as the film

continues the motif becomes more convoluted. In the first scene, the acts of framing

and watching are unidirectional, and uncomplicated: Shenran sees the argument in

its entirety and correctly understands what has taken place. As the motif reappears

later in the film, characters become framed and watched as they frame and watch

other characters, and the acts of framing and watching within apparently simple

spatial setups multiply from there. In later scenes, significant information is

frequently left “out-of-frame,” causing characters to misinterpret what they see. As

the characters attempt to resolve this by moving between spaces and frames to look

through, the new views only lead to new obstructions.

This visual motif principally plays out between two adjacent skyscrapers in

Hong Kong. Far from establishing a specific neighborhood or sense of place within

Hong Kong that we can see in To’s crime films, the two buildings are so

anonymous that they are difficult to distinguish, either from each other or from

other buildings on Hong Kong’s skyline. Their generic nature allows To to create a

parallel spatial relationship between the two skyscrapers in Suzhou New District

later in the film. Surrounded by glass windows on all sides, the buildings’ design

allows the occupants to peer across the way. The occupants of each building, and

their relationships with each other, shift multiple times over the course of the film,

as does the nature of the multi-directional acts of framing and looking.

At first, Zixin and Shenran are placed in offices in the two adjacent buildings.

Shenran begins to arrange post-it notes on his window, making flowers and emoji

faces for Zixin to see. She responds by making post-it note designs in her own

window to make a pot for the flower that Shenran has created. From post-it note

designs, the two expand their flirtations across the windows by pantomiming for

each other, acting in silent films for the other to enjoy.10 At first, it seems that the

transformation from a unidirectional frame and look in the earlier scene to a two-

directional one simply allows the prospective lovers to reciprocate each other’s

look; in an inverse of the lover’s relationship in Turn Left, Turn Right, a

relationship seems to be made possible by two-way visibility. Zixin and Shenran

begin to interact more directly in their pantomimes: as Shenran mimes playing an

instrument, Zixin mimes dancing to his music. However, a slightly longer shot from

the position of Shenran introduces a new, chaotic element: in the office immediately

10 The connection to silent cinema is strengthened by Zixin’s reenacting the dinner-roll-feet

dance from Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925).

William Carroll 77

below Zixin’s, another woman is also dancing to the music that Shenran mimes

playing. While the glass panes allow for easy visibility between adjacent buildings,

the visibility makes Zixin (and until this shot, the audience) forget about the

structures that block visibility in other directions: Zixin can see Shenran across

from her, but she cannot see below her. Shenran can see both Zixin and the woman

immediately beneath her, and although they can both see him, the fact that they

cannot see what he can see introduces the possibility that one or both is

misinterpreting his actions: which of the two women is he miming playing music

for? The confusion comes to a head when Shenran uses pantomime to ask one of

the women on a date and both respond, setting up dates with two different women

with a single pantomime action.

Several years later, after the visual confusion and Shenran’s inability to

commit to either woman have left Zixin resentful toward (but still attracted to) him,

Shenran has become Zixin’s boss, and has moved into her building. Shenran’s old

office is bought out by the architect Qihong, who becomes Shenran’s rival for

Zixin’s affection. Again, relationships are constituted, confused, and destroyed by

the visual interactions that take place between the two adjacent offices. After Zixin

rejects Shenran, he begins flirting with Qihong’s female assistant across the way by

repeating many of the same pantomimes from the earlier part of the film; he thus

performs flirtatiously for Qihong’s assistant across the way as a roundabout way of

performing for Zixin, in the same office, to make the latter jealous. However, by

making Zixin look at him and at the woman looking at him, he inadvertently causes

Zixin to notice Qihong in the office across the way as well. This provokes yet

another shift in the relationship across the offices: on one day, Shenran invites

Qihong’s assistant to a lunch date at his office, while Qihong invites Zixin on a

lunch date to his office the same day. Both lunch dates take place in offices next to

windows, allowing Zixin and Shenran to see each other’s lunch dates, and to

perform to attempt to provoke the other’s jealousy. Whatever the advantages of

mutual visibility are, however, they mainly serve to prevent either Shenran or Zixin

from enjoying the company of their ostensible dates, as they are constantly looking

through the window at what the other is doing, as well as the other’s reactions to

what they are doing. Even when Zixin retreats to her mother’s house in Suzhou’s

old town, ostensibly removed from the space of the global city, her coworkers

continue to send videos of the interactions between her two suitors, now doubly

framed by both the window and the camera phone.11 The distant framing and spatial

11 To withholds exploring Suzhou’s old town in any extended way: we primarily only see the

interior of Zixin’s family’s home, and can catch a brief glimpse of the adjacent street when she


relationships it sets up again cause confusion when Zixin’s coworkers mistake the

spot from a crushed frog on the floor as blood.

The film’s finale literalizes the relationship between architecture in the global

city and the relationships between the characters, as Qihong and Shenran both

follow Zixin to Suzhou to make proposals to her. Their simultaneous proposals take

place across the two adjacent skyscrapers. Qihong takes Zixin to dinner at the

Shangri-La across from the building that he designed after her, using lights in the

unfinished structure to spell out the words “Marry Me.” Meanwhile, Shenran climbs

to the top of Qihong’s building and attempts to co-opt it, making a banner with the

same message that he hangs across the top of the structure. The two “Marry Me”

signs share the same vertical relationship that the two women opposite Shenran had

at the beginning of the film. Though the film’s ending apparently resolves the issue

when Zixin chooses Qihong, we cannot let ourselves become too invested in this

outcome: when she’s faced with the choice between the same two suitors at the end

of the film’s sequel, she makes the opposite decision.

The apparent resolution at the end of the film does not solve the architectural

dilemmas that the film establishes. The anonymous, interchangeable architecture of

the global city gives the illusion of omniscience with its giant glass windows

looking out from skyscrapers onto the city. The ability to look necessitates the

possibility of being looked at, but the film goes further: the apparent ability to see

masks frames that prevent characters from seeing in other directions. Even when we

can see others from across the way, our inability to see what they can see can cause

us to misinterpret their reactions. The multidirectional frames and looks may seem

like a panopticon, but are in fact closer to a Suzhou garden: lacking a privileged

omniscient viewpoint, different and incomplete no matter where one looks from, or

which frame one looks through.

(and later Shenran) appear at the front door. Dudley Andrew has observed the way that “image-conscious chambers of commerce have managed to erect signature buildings” (or, in the case of Suzhou, preserve an “old town” alongside the emerging global city as a UNESCO world heritage site and tourist destination), but “life in the cities themselves . . . has become homogenous and flat: cities, like airports, are places of anonymous passage and convenient connection” (38). By withholding glamorizing images of Suzhou’s old town and instead stressing the visual parallels of its “New District,” Don’t Go Breaking My Heart stresses this homogeneity and the visual similarities between Hong Kong and the emerging new Suzhou.

William Carroll 79

Conclusion

In spite of the disinterest in To’s romantic comedies by Western scholars,

distributors, and film festival programmers in comparison to his crime films,

observing the similar preoccupation with urban space that cuts across To’s films in

both genres reveals a close connection between his films in these two genres.

Though the visual motifs articulating space differ by film, To exhibits a formal

ingenuity in creating these motifs that makes it difficult to justify the often

dismissive treatment of his romantic comedies. It is certainly true that the

commitment to spatial continuity seen in To’s crime films lends those films a very

specific sense of place even as they explore spatial relationships that are more

generally experienced by similarly rapidly transforming urban environments across

the globe. At the same time, the spatial fragmentation exhibited by To’s romantic

comedies, born as it may be out of industrial necessity, arguably takes To’s

observations of spatial relations further, making the confusions that arise from

space inescapable as characters move from Hong Kong to Taipei to Suzhou. By

reworking variations on similar spatial conceits within the framework of the crime

and romantic comedy genres, To uses each genre to explore a different element of

the effects of spatial design in the global city on its inhabitants. Whether we

conclude that the characters’ separations, reunions, and confrontations are the result

of either fate or coincidence, we must observe that they would not have been

possible in the first place if not for the spatial relations facilitated by the global city.

Works Cited

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Urban Networks in East Asia. Hong Kong UP, 2010.

Da shijian 大事件 (Breaking News). Directed by Johnnie To 杜琪峯, performances

by Richie Jen 任賢齊, Kelly Chen 陳慧琳, Nick Cheung 張家輝, Eddie

Cheung 張兆輝, Simon Yam 任達華, and Maggie Shiu 邵美琪, Media Asia,

2004.

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杜琪峯, performances by Louis Koo 古天樂, Daniel Wu 吳彥祖, and Gao

Yuanyuan 高圓圓, Media Asia, 2011.

Feichang turan 非常突然 (Expect the Unexpected). Directed by Patrick Yau 游達志 (and Johnnie To 杜琪峯), performances by Lau Ching-wan 劉青雲, Simon

Yam 任達華, Ruby Wong 黃卓玲, Hui Shiu-hung 許紹雄, Yoyo Mung 蒙嘉慧, and Lam Suet 林雪, Milkyway Image, 1998.

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William Carroll 81

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About the Author William Carroll is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages

and Cultures at Indiana University Bloomington. He received a PhD in Cinema and Media

Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2019

for his dissertation, “The Depth of Flatness and the Voice of Silence: Suzuki Seijun and

1960s Japanese Film Theory.” His work has been published in Journal of Japanese and

Korean Cinema and Cinéma&Cie.

[Received 9 August 2019; accepted 3 January 2020]

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