Vivian Qu is the Chinese film-maker who has directed three features and also produced the noir drama Black Coal, Thin Ice which in 2014 won Berlin’s Golden Bear. Now she brings this crime melodrama to Berlin, an engaging if tonally uncertain high-wire adventure that satirises China’s hopeless addiction to gangster capitalism. It is also acidly unsentimental about the bread-and-circuses escapism of the country’s booming film and TV industry with all its period-costume wuxia nostalgia. It’s an appealing film, though it contains some strangely broad comedy and is also, in a couple of violent moments, a bit naive about exactly how easy it is for a young woman physically to fight off a big strong guy.
Above all, Qu gives us a rather amazing set-piece scene on the set of a wire-fu action movie, a scene that feels real in a way that the rest of the film really doesn’t, for all that it is watchable. Fang Di (Wen Qi) is a tough woman employed as a stunt double on a movie set, playing the black clad, sword-wielding ninja bouncing over terracotta rooftops and whizzing through the air in long shot. For the closeup, the preening star in the same outfit steps in while Fang Di staggers over to get a coffee at the craft table. The work is exhausting and dangerous and Fang Di is doing it to pay off her family debts to mob matriarch Madame Wang.
Desperate for more cash, she takes on a gruelling night shoot in which, attached to a wire harness, she has to be submerged under murky water to fly up into the air. The callous director demands this shot to be repeated endlessly, despite Fang Di’s obvious distress – and seeing that there are too many ripples from the last take, he commands she stay under the water for 15 seconds before the camera rolls, instead of the almost-safe three.
Just at this unimaginably low point in Fang Di’s life, her long estranged cousin Tian Tian (Liu Haocun) appears; she is being pursued by the mob, having fallen into debt and drug addiction at the hands of the same criminals who supplied drugs to Tian Tian’s notoriously parasitic and waster dad, the source of all the family’s despair. Now Fang Di and Tian Tian have to evade the same duo of hatchet-faced tough guys, as well as a local cafe owner from their home town who the mobsters have bullied into joining them.
There are entertaining, incidental scenes mocking the craziness of show business; looking to graduate away from stunt work, Fang Di auditions for a drama, doing an absurdly written scene, and bursts out laughing in the middle of the dialogue, to the director’s outrage. And there is a moment of pure (and implausible) farce when the gangster tough guys, taking a wrong turn in the movie studio, are inveigled into taking part in a hospital drama and a war epic. It’s amusing, but the silliness doesn’t entirely work. All this is interspersed with flashbacks showing the two young women’s former intimacy and the painful anguish of their family dysfunction, establishing a mood of sadness that is underscored by the final, desolate scene of their early childhood. A flawed, but involving spectacle.
Source: theguardian.com
