Wei Shujun’s new film, adapted from a novella by Yu Hua, is a deadpan existential riddle presenting as noir crime, set in provincial China and taking its cue from Albert Camus’s Caligula: “There’s no understanding fate, therefore I choose to play the part of fate …” It’s a movie that wryly questions the thriller genre’s assumptions about the essential knowability of motive and agency; the idea that people commit crimes for clear reasons and their means and opportunity are governed by the equally explicable conditions of the physical world. But in this drama, chaos and meaninglessness keep peeping through – I can imagine David Lynch directing an alternative version. (There is also the plot-muddle tradition of classic Hollywood noir that sometimes uses China as a somewhat racist trope for exotically opaque murkiness, as in The Lady from Shanghai or Chinatown.)
Zhu Yilong plays Captain Ma, a smart and ambitious young officer brought in to solve the murder of a woman whose corpse has been found by a riverbank, and his superiors set up an incident centre in – of all the postmodern places – a disused cinema. Interrogations take place in the projection room, as two more people are killed and a secondary suspect takes his own life. Overworked Capt Ma falls asleep at one stage and his dreams about the crimes are projected on to the screen; later events may or may not be more cinematic dreams or hallucinations. Continue reading...
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