Films I Watched This Week — Apr 14–20, 2025
Infernal Affairs (2002)
Infernal Affairs is about a cop who is actually a gangster, and a gangster who is actually a cop. The beginning scenes show the both of them placed undercover, a young criminal assigned by their triad boss to enter the police academy, the other an academy graduate thrown off the force to work undercover as a criminal by his police superintendent. Sound familiar? Director Martin Scorsese remade this story years later titled The Departed in 2006, a film which won much acclaim by critics and winning an Academy Award for Best Picture. And still, even today, the original Hong Kong original remains the superior picture. It possesses the heart, the soul and the essence of what the story was trying to express, perfectly capturing the inner turmoil, the anguish and the suffering of having to live a lie. The title cards in the intro which states "Endless Purgatory Road,” is a Chinese philosophy which reflects the idea that characters are trapped in a cycle of conflict, deception, and moral ambiguity, unable to escape their roles as "rats" in a dangerous game. This state of perpetual struggle and uncertainty is what the "Endless Purgatory Road" represents. This is exactly the essence of what was missing from Scorsese’s American adaptation. How must one feel to live a double live, continuously pretending to everyone you are somebody you are not? After enough time would both the original persona and the one that is the façade unenviably merge into one? Does the mask someone wears come to embody the person you been masquerading? If everyone you know and everything you do for 10 years indicates you are one kind of person, and you know you are another, how do you live with that?
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