CRITIC’S NOTES : CIMINO’S BACK, WITH A FIERY ‘YEAR OF DRAGON’

From the first second of “Year of the Dragon” it is clear that Michael Cimino is one of the great, operatic film makers. His credits are his overture, blood-red lettering against a black screen; thunderous drumming filling the theater. Then the first explosive images hurl us into the midst of a Chinatown New Year’s parade.

There are only a handful of directors who fill their screens in this particular and consciously grandiloquent scale and their first rank includes Francis Coppola, Sergio Leone, Federico Fellini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Lucino Visconti, the Lina Wertmuller of “Seven Beauties,” the Brian De Palma of “Scarface.” (If this sounds too Mediterranean, you might add Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Max Ophuls, Abel Gance, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk, Josef von Sternberg and Sergei Eisenstein. You may have other likely candidates.)

The natural habitat for many if not most of these directors is the eye of the storm. They are galvanic, Napoleonic, as often as not excessive; you can read accounts of them commanding a movie crew as one would command a battle. You may like their films or hate them; you may disagree violently with what they say as well as the way they say it, but they all make films that cannot be ignored.

This will hardly be the season to ignore Michael Cimino, either as a central player of “Final Cut,” Steven Bach’s jaw-dropping account of the making of “Heaven’s Gate” (see Page 2), or after “The Year of the Dragon” has its chance with the public. Lushly melodramatic, visually electrifying, as violent as its subject--the heroin wars in New York’s Chinatown--it is, among other things, an extraordinary re-entry card.

In “The Deer Hunter” and “Heaven’s Gate” Cimino constructed fantasias upon the real facts; the quote which dogged him then was his airy, “One uses history in a very free way.” In “Year of the Dragon” two histories obsess him, Vietnam (again, always, a bloody stain he must somehow scrub away) and the story of the Chinese in America. In telling this story, Cimino sticks pretty close to the facts, which are quite dramatic enough.

The director, with screenwriter Oliver Stone (“Scarface”), fills in the background of “Year of the Dragon” with a primer on Chinese-American history. As machine gun bullets spray the foreground and a dangerous love triangle unfolds before our eyes, the characters become charmingly didactic. The new police captain of New York’s Chinatown (Mickey Rourke), dining with an American-born Chinese television newscaster (ex-model Ariane), hauls along his stack of books on Chinese history and culture and lectures her (us) about her people’s contributions to America.

Rourke points out their invisibility in group pictures celebrating the finishing of the railroad when it was the Chinese whose labor had built them. Presumably she would know that Chinese were denied U.S. citizenship until 1943, and that for generations, Chinese women were barred by quotas from emigrating, forcing the laboring men to go back to China to establish, and then leave, their families. We in the audience are the ones to whom these sorry accounts may be news.

Then, as the tempo of the drama steps up, we are given a searing tour through a Chinatown that few non-Asians will ever see: steaming, overcrowded restaurant kitchens, swampy subterranean soybean factories, gambling houses, sweat shops and fetid tenement warrens. This is film making as brilliant, depressing, undeniable, contemporary history, and Cimino has not exaggerated his milieu.

Do these disturbing scenes; the deadly teen-age gangsters, or the character of Joey Tai, the elegant young Chinatown leader who is also a major drug trafficker, give “Year of the Dragon” a racist bias? Possibly only to the same minds who considered “The Godfathers” a racist view of Italian-Americans. (Tai is played by the charismatic, Peking Opera-trained John Lone, an actor/director/choreographer/musician whose first film role was the Neanderthal in “Iceman.”) Ariane’s character is there to fulfill all Oriental-woman fantasies: the Mandarin aristocrat, beautiful, selective, amazingly rich and, of course, susceptible to Rourke’s rough-cut, driven charm. But writer Stone includes hard-working, ordinary Chinese as well, in nicely drawn sketches: the angry, eloquent rookie cop (Dennis Dun) and the worker in a soybean factory (Steven Chen) who discovers two murders and, contrary to the accepted practice, reports them. He will reappear as a figure of firm, moral support at Rourke’s darkest personal hour.

Cimino sees Chinatown as a microcosm that flourishes within a larger world but remains separated from it as if by glass. His metaphor is the fish tank. We begin to notice them everywhere: in the Chinese social club, meeting place of the family elders; in the police commissioner’s office where Rourke turns his back on the camera to study the silent, perfectly contained world of the commissioner’s aquarium. And as mayhem breaks loose in an elaborate red-and-gold Chinatown restaurant, twin fish tanks at the front of the Shanghai Palace burst, flooding everything, spilling their slippery occupants out into the street.

The script doesn’t quite deliver the last push the film needs to take it from arresting and absorbing to great. Rourke’s character is not, ultimately, able to transcend the limits of who he is. There is a buoyant uplift about that final shot that also feels deeply wrong; the film cries for a darker tone at its close, since, clearly, the old men of the story, the old Chinese, the old Italians, the old policemen have prevailed against both young Turks. Yet, throughout, “Year of the Dragon” is filled with a sense of immense, perfectly channeled energy.

There are no flights of self-indulgence this time, and not a second’s hesitation in the forward thrust of the narrative. Scenes whirl up like dust-devils; the action has a furious, high voltage crackle, which is Cimino working at his very best. One suspects that, in addition to the film’s consummate technicians and performers, the firm presence of producer Dino De Laurentiis may have made the difference in the economy of this film. Certainly someone has finally given measure and shape to Cimino’s inescapable sense of grand opera.