In classic Hollywood cinema, a rainy night meeting 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 thriller thriller directed by Diao Yinan, is indeed damp and dark. Our conspicuous hero is a young man shot dead with an almost fresh laceration on his cheek and bruised knuckles. The young woman who asks for a cigarette – not the woman he expects, but someone with whom he will have to deal – does not address him under any pretext of seduction.
And the station is all in concrete slabs and neon lights and fluorescent lamps, nothing like the chiaroscuro of black as we know it. This is the world that Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge) and Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun Mei) live in. Zhou is a gang leader whose attempt to crush a war between motorcycle thieves ends in bloody deaths (one raises a bloody beheading gag from Fellini’s “Toby Dammit” or “She-Devils on Wheels” by Herschell Gordon Lewis, or both). Zhou also (inadvertently, he insists) killed a cop. A dragnet tightens around him.
Liu is one of the “bathing beauties” that frequents Title Lake, an area filled with rickety shacks that is described as a dilapidated prostitution center. (The film is shot and shot 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-distant wife, or she can collect a large reward by handing him over to the police, some exceeding the standard level of corruption.
But what Liu thinks he knows and what is really true begins to deviate as the two characters seek to close a deal. The film juggles flashbacks from the recent past with several cleverly constructed sets in which Zhou takes up the challenges of escape with impassive ingenuity. As for Liu, the core material of his heart will of course not be fully revealed until the last few minutes, even the seconds.
This film does not recycle the conventions of film noir as much as it invents – with a real sense of discovery – to situate these conventions in a realistic contemporary context. The economic impoverishment of its constituents is a key motivating factor; there is a strong implication that he led Zhou in crime, while Liu’s factual approach to prostitution (revealed in a “love” scene that begins with notes of tenderness and ends with vomiting brutal) carries an almost tragic resignation. Diao can boost the octane rating in chase and action sequences, but the film almost always remains grounded in the physically plausible. When this is not the case, his inventiveness as a director intervenes to give us the impression that the film has not gone astray.
One of the ways in which Diao’s vision evolves towards classicism is to accept the inexorability of fate, as required by the film noir. Once we understand the full extent of Zhou’s transgressions, we know that in the end, for him, that is what it is. However, the film is exhilarating.
Wild goose lake
Unclassified. In Chinese, with subtitles. Duration: 1 hour 53 minutes.
