In classical Hollywood cinema, a rainy night rendezvous at a train station is made of shadows and cigarette smoke and romance. But times and movies have changed.
The opening scene of “The Wild Goose Lake,” a new crime thriller directed by Diao Yinan, is indeed wet and dark. Our ostensible hero is a downcast young man with a near-fresh laceration on his cheek and bruised knuckles. The young woman asking for a cigarette — not the woman he is expecting, but someone he’ll have to deal with — doesn’t approach him with any pretext of seduction.
And the train station is all concrete slabs and neon and fluorescent lights, nothing like the chiaroscuro of noir as we knew it. Such is the world Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge) and Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun Mei) inhabit. Zhou is a gang leader whose attempt to squash a turf war among motorcycle thieves ends in some bloody deaths (one lifts a gory beheading gag from either Fellini’s “Toby Dammit” or Herschell Gordon Lewis’s “She-Devils on Wheels,” or both). Zhou has also (inadvertently, he insists) killed a cop. A dragnet is tightening around him.
Liu is one of the “bathing beauties” who frequents the title lake, an area replete with rickety cabins that is depicted as a bedraggled center for prostitution. (The movie is set and shot in Wuhan, a city with many lakes, and the characters speak its dialect.) Liu is the keeper of two keys: She can reunite Zhou with his long-estranged wife, or she can collect a large reward by turning him in to the police, some of whom surpass the standard level of corruption.
But what Liu thinks she knows and what’s actually true start to deviate as the two characters seek to strike a bargain. The movie juggles flashbacks to the recent past with several cleverly constructed set pieces in which Zhou meets escape challenges with deadpan ingenuity. As for Liu, the core material of her heart will not, of course, be fully revealed until the last minutes — seconds, even.
This movie doesn’t recycle film noir conventions so much as contrive — with a genuine sense of discovery — to locate these conventions in a realistic contemporary context. The economic impoverishment of its principals is a key motivating factor; there’s a strong implication that it steered Zhou into criminality, while Liu’s matter-of-fact approach to prostitution (revealed in a “love” scene that begins with notes of tenderness and ends with blunt retching) carries a near-tragic resignation. Diao can rev up the octane in chase and action sequences, but the movie almost always stays grounded in the physically plausible. When it doesn’t, his directorial inventiveness steps in to make us feel as if the film hasn’t strayed.
One way in which Diao’s vision hews to classicism is in accepting the inexorability of fate, as film noir requires. Once we understand the full extent of Zhou’s transgressions, we know that, in the end, for him, it is what it is” Nevertheless, the movie exhilarates.
The Wild Goose Lake
Not rated. In Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
