A Better Tomorrow III: Love & Death in Saigon

An origin story that forgets its origins, but finds its own voice in the ruins of war…

Saigon, 1974. The war is closing in, the city is a pressure cooker of desperation and opportunism, and a young Mark (Chow Yun-fat) arrives to bring his uncle and cousin back to Hong Kong. Along the way he falls into the orbit of Ying-Kit (Anita Mui), a mysterious and fearsome gang leader. She becomes his protector, his teacher and eventually his ruin, entangled as she is with Mark’s cousin Cheung Chi-Mun (Tony Leung Ka-fai) and her former lover, the arms dealer Sam Ho (Saburo Tokito).

By the time A Better Tomorrow III: Love & Death in Saigon arrived in 1989, the heroic bloodshed genre was already firmly established. John Woo’s first two chapters had set its conventions in stone. This third film, directed not by Woo but by Tsui Hark, takes a sharp turn instead of following them. It is still set in the same universe, still stars Chow Yun-fat as Mark, but in almost every other respect it is a different creature entirely. That is not a problem in itself; the film is a strong one. It becomes a problem only when set against the legacy left by the first two chapters.

Tsui Hark had initially approached John Woo to direct a prequel exploring Mark’s backstory. Woo wrote a screenplay for a third instalment but never got to direct it, owing to artistic differences with his co-producer that had already surfaced during the making of the second film. That original screenplay became Bullet in the Head instead, and Tsui Hark took the director’s chair for his own version of Mark’s origin story. The two films share little beyond a setting: where Woo’s Bullet in the Head is about brotherhood destroyed by historical catastrophe, Tsui’s prequel is a melodrama about love as the last refuge in a world that has run out of hope.

Something is inevitably lost in the transition. The Mark of the first film is less familiar here, and not just because it’s his origin story; much of what makes him recognisable is Chow Yun-fat’s performance and the nods to his iconic image — the coat, the toothpick, the sunglasses — rather than anything the screenplay actually builds around him. What the film is really about, and what carries it for two hours, is romantic melodrama, and its true engine is Ying-Kit. Where Woo’s films keep women at the margins and place brotherhood at the centre, Tsui inverts the formula entirely. Ying-Kit is the pivot on which the whole plot turns: the figure who sets events in motion, and the apex of a love triangle that binds her to both Mark and his cousin Cheung Chi-Mun — a triangle that is, in truth, closer to a love harem, since Sam Ho, the gang boss who was once her lover, is drawn to her as well. Anita Mui’s Ying-Kit is, by far, the most complex, forceful and intelligent character in the film; a genuine breath of fresh air in a series that had, until now, kept women firmly at the margins.

Anita Mui in dark glasses in A Better Tomorrow III

A Better Tomorrow III is, as a result, far less heroic bloodshed than it is a drama in search of love as an antidote to a hopeless tomorrow. Beginning in the final months of the Vietnam War and closing amid the chaos of the Fall of Saigon, the film places its characters inside a historical moment defined by violence, resignation and despair; a world with no room left for heroism. The setting is one of the film’s most interesting choices, and offers a rare perspective on the Vietnam War: not through an American lens, but from the point of view of the Chinese community in Saigon, caught between the corruption of the South Vietnamese state and the impending collapse that would send millions fleeing as refugees. Nobody here dies a hero.

The film is markedly unwilling to romanticise its violence. The choreography is cruder, more brutal — not more realistic, exactly, but harsher in how it stages combat — and this shows even in small mechanical details: the myth of Woo’s inexhaustible gunfighters dissolves with Tsui, whose characters regularly find themselves out of bullets. The contrast also highlights the deeper divergence between this film and its predecessors. Woo’s stories are built on codes of honour among men, and on the tragedy of those codes’ final incompatibility with the amorality of modern Hong Kong: a city of nihilistic, pitiless gangsters who abandon honour to prosper at the expense of the weak. Tsui offers no codes and no honour, because in a war neither side fights with either, and those caught in between simply suffer the consequences. The love at the centre of his film is, in the end, something elemental: unadorned, the thing that lets these characters keep going, and also the thing that destroys them. Nobody here is truly a hero or a villain. Everyone is a grey figure doing what they do for love and survival. The tragic finale does not feel forced; it is the natural endpoint of everything before it. Ying-Kit’s destiny at the end of the film, accompanied by the notes of Anita Mui’s own extraordinary voice, closes a circle the film opens in its first act and pursues in a mostly linear, mostly coherent line. It is Ying-Kit, ultimately, who shapes Mark; who turns him into the figure he will become in A Better Tomorrow.

This is, without question, a good film: its ideas are interesting and well developed, its historical backdrop strong, its narrative confident enough to work entirely on its own terms. And this may be its biggest limitation. So much of A Better Tomorrow III departs from what came before that, were it not for the name Mark, nothing would identify it as a prequel at all. Which raises the question: did it need to be called this, and sold as a prequel, in the first place? It is a shame that the film has always sat somewhat in the shadow of its predecessors, weighed down by a name it neither fully lives up to nor fully needs. Whether it would have been received differently as a standalone film, we will probably never know.

Watching the trilogy in sequence, however, one can trace a quiet undertone that makes that shared title feel, finally, earned. The first film reflects Hong Kong’s excessive 1980s prosperity shadowed by the looming 1997 handover; the second deals with emigration to America and the failure of that dream; the third, set in war-torn Saigon, is about the impossibility of returning home and the refugee crisis that would follow, reflecting the fears of 1989. These three films map the anxieties of their respective moments, and that is why they remain so powerful. All three are somehow anchored to their English title: their characters each searching, in their own way, for a better tomorrow.

A Better Tomorrow III: Love & Death in Saigon is available as a limited edition 4K UHD + Blu-ray from Imprint Films (Imprint Asia #44), as part of the A Better Tomorrow Trilogy hardbox collection alongside A Better Tomorrow (#45) and A Better Tomorrow III: Love & Death in Saigon (#46). Limited to 1,500 copies.

About the author

Sara Domenicano
Sara is MA student researching Chinese culture, history and society through cinema; but in her heart she has a soft spot for ghost stories and low budget martial art period pieces.
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