“Time is luck.”
One of these mornings
It won’t be very long
They will look for me
And I’ll be gone
How the blue of the sky and the blue of the water meet in the distance so you can’t tell one from the other, up from down. Heading into the unknown. Taking a chance.
“Time is luck,” says Isabella (Gong Li), and Miami Vice is largely about how time is always running out. It’s a deliberately disorienting film in which the moment keeps slipping away. Neither the characters nor the viewer can fully inhabit a moment before it’s gone. In his piece Gravity of the Flux, Jean-Baptiste Thoret says:
The opening ten minutes are enough for Mann to fix the rhythmic rules of Miami Vice: the event taking place will always matter more than the one that follows, whence the strange feeling of a film in pursuit of itself, obsessed by the next job, the action that follows. Filming with the camera on the shoulder gives the feeling, new in Mann, of a constant fragility of shots and, therefore, of what they show. It is as if each shot were thinking of two things at once – the event taking place (a deal, an arrest) and the event to come (the same over again) – and that the best way to not collapse consists of never staying still. In Miami Vice, it’s to be physically there, here and now, because mentally one is always and already elsewhere.
The jerky and convulsive narrative unfolds less according to a classical logic of development of sequences than of rampant compilation and short-circuits. The speed of the linking of the actions, their extreme compression, thus prevents the emergence of the feeling of a time that disappears, of a length that takes hold, in favour of a constant and monotonous topicality subservient to the law of “the here and now” – “Right now” the characters do not cease repeating throughout the film. But topicality is the opposite of time and the excess (of actions, of characters, of ramifications, of narrative lines, of narrative forks, etc.) is the mask of an omnipresent lack – lack of space, lack of the Other, lack of time, above all.








Some people get time and some don’t.
For some, life never waits. For others, life is nothing but waiting.
As if balance is being restored to the world, when Sonny’s forbidden romance with Isabella comes to an end, Ricardo’s connection with Trudy–a love that is “appropriate,” a love that is meant to be–is restored.
















When I searched on Youtube for “Miami Vice time is luck,” I found this clip from the Miami Vice TV series, of a band covering the Rod Stewart single “Some Guys Have All the Luck."
If, as Isabella says, time is luck, then some guys (and gals) have all the time, and some have none of it.
Notes
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