Adapted from the film Infernal Affairs, screenplay by Felix Chong and Alan Mak
This is the story of two moles: a cop undercover as a mobster, and a mobster undercover as a cop. Each finds out that the other exists, and must now discover the other's identity before he himself is exposed.
Infernal Affairs is the English language title of a Cantonese film made and set in Hong Kong. The Departed moves the setting to Boston. As one might expect, several cultural changes accompany this change in setting. Several details regarding both the police force and the mob were altered, but the overall story remained fairly consistent. The American version is about a half hour longer and much cruder. One of the main things I noticed when I watched The Departed for my Best Picture project was all the profanity, so I was surprised that there was hardly any in Infernal Affairs. The mob boss is also significantly more perverted in the remake, in so many ways. I'm not positive that these particular changes were necessarily to reflect cultural differences, but it makes me sad to think that the defining traits of American culture are profanity and objectification of women.
Both stories are mostly centered around male characters, but Infernal Affairs has three relatively important female characters: the undercover mobster's fiancee, the psychiatrist that the undercover cop is required to see after getting out of jail, and an ex-girlfriend of the undercover cop who has a child that is implied to be his. All three of these women are combined into one character in the remake: the undercover mobster becomes engaged to the undercover cop's psychiatrist, who reveals she is pregnant after having a one-night stand with the undercover cop. I have mixed feelings about this change: on the one hand, none of the three women in the original had a very well developed personality, so combining them into one person gave more opportunities to flesh out her character. On the other hand, that meant the remake had literally one important female character, apart from the women the mob boss slept with, which is kind of irritating. But since both moles were living essentially the same lives in reverse, it was interesting to have them both attracted to the same woman.
The other major changes are pretty spoilery, so I don't want to go into too much detail, since both films are well worth watching, despite their poor female representation. I will say that The Departed has a significantly higher body count, which should surprise no one. Also it seemed to me that the characters in Infernal Affairs had basically good intentions, but circumstances often turned them into bad people, whereas in The Departed, the characters seemed to have basically selfish intentions, which occasionally led them to do good things. The mobster who's undercover in the police force in particular does pretty much the same actions in both versions, but in the original it's at least partly because he's trying to turn over a new leaf and actually become a good cop, whereas in the remake it's entirely out of self-preservation. Fascinatingly, his story ends up completely differently, mostly because of a character who was added to the remake.
I liked The Departed better with this viewing than when I watched it for my Best Picture blog, but I definitely think Infernal Affairs is a better movie. I'm glad that this project gave me an excuse to watch a very good Hong Kong-made film that I probably wouldn't have otherwise heard of. Apparently there's a trilogy, and I'm kind of tempted to track down the sequels, although the first one is a pretty good stand-alone story.
After the first, and so far only, remake of a feature film to win this award, I'm headed back to movies based on novels, starting with No Country for Old Men, a movie that I notoriously loathed when I did my Best Picture project. I'm interested to see if reading the novel changes my opinion, although I've started reading it, and so far, not so much.
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