Review - Saturday Fiction

August 7, 2023
 
Saturday Fiction – China, 2019

There was a time when a new Gong Li film was cause for playing hooky. One year, I even missed the first day of the fall semester because I simply had to see The Story of Qiu Ju on its opening day, and it was opening in San Francisco at a time when I lived in Sacramento. In other words, in my mind, one of her films was such an important experience that I was willing to pay for two Greyhound bus tickets, transportation in San Francisco, plus a ticket and snacks at the concession stand. That’s how big of a fan I was. This was during the first half of Gong Li’s career, when she worked with Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige in their prime and when her choice of roles seemed daring. In those days, a Gong Li movie was as important as it was entertaining. The same cannot be said of most of her films post-2000.

Lou Ye’s Saturday Fiction is not a return to form necessarily, but it may be the first movie in a long time in which the legendary actress gets to really sink her teeth into a role. In the movie, she plays Jean Yu, a popular actress returning to Shanghai ostensibly to return to the stage after a three-year absence. To say the timing is peculiar would be an understatement. Shanghai in 1941 was under Japanese occupation, home to thousands of Jewish refugees from Germany, and mired in poverty. It had two areas that were considered safe – the French Concession (now, the Luwan and Xuhui Districts) and the English Concession. Upon her arrival, Miss Yu goes from the airport directly to the French Concession, where she checks in at an upscale hotel operated by an eager fan who has bugged her phone and wants to be to be told the moment she makes an international call, actions that make less sense as the film progresses.

The first half of the film is devoted to creating a sense of mystery regarding Yu’s motives for returning. While she says she has returned to do a play, there’s talk of the peril her ex-husband is in and whether Yu has returned to help him flee the country. This is brought up by an obsessed fan who follows Miss Yu’s car and impresses her by demonstrating her knowledge of all of her lines from her current stage production, a la All About Eve, as well as hinting that she knows the whereabouts of her ex. We also learn Yu may be trying to rekindle her romance with Tan Na, the director of the play, with whom she apparently had an affair before she disappeared, and then there’s the attention the film gives to a Japanese official sent to Japan to inform government workers of changes in the country’s secret codes. Could Yu’s return somehow be connected to him?
 
The problem with such a set-up is obvious. Instead of characters talking to each other directly, they have to tiptoe around key topics and words. Say too much and the mystery is revealed. This results in a series of cryptic scenes that don’t ring as truthful as they need to and culminate in an outbreak of gunfire and violence that ends with dead bodies lining a busy street, several people with severe bullet wounds, and a character incredulously declaring that everything has gone as planned.
 
Fortunately, this scene announces the start of the film’s second half, which, now able to dispense with cryptic phrases, kicks into gear and delivers a series of exciting and tense scenes, each with real stakes and a growing sense of hazard. In these scenes, Yu sheds all pretenses and displays a ruthlessness that is both shocking and logical. It makes you wonder why Gong Li has never made a true action film – she clearly has the chops for it. (Full disclosure: I have not seen Operation Cougar, an early Zhang Yimou film about an airplane hijacking in which Gong Li plays a stewardess.)
 
The film is shot in black and white, likely to give it a noir-like feeling, and for the most part, it works. Scenes of rain-soaked sidewalks and Shanghai residents huddled around makeshift fires contrast impressively with the bright and clean atmosphere of the French Concession, establishing the existence of two Shanghais. There are also quieter moments during which the connection between Yu and Na is firmly established. You may wonder whether such strong feelings would still exist after such an extended absence, but the human heart can confound by suppressing feelings and desires for the one that got away and then allowing them to rise to the surface so suddenly that not to act of them seems a sin.
 
Unfortunately, writers Yingli Ma, Hong Ying, and Riichi Yokomitsu have injected the film with a plot device that is all too common in film and which never fails to lessen the amount of suspense a film can truly create. Like James Cagney’s 1945 film Blood on the Sun and Gong Li’s own 2010 thriller Shanghai, the film uses real historical events to build tension, but since audience already know how history unfolded, the outcome is never really in doubt. The question is not Will they succeed? but rather Will they get away?
 
Saturday Fiction is therefore a mixed bag. It is well made, has terrific performances from Gong Li, Mark Chao, and Tom Wlaschiha, and one of the best second halves that I’ve seen recently. However, it’s first half is clunky and hindered by its own plot structure. Among Gong Li films, it sits comfortable in the middle – not as good as some of those masterful early collaborations, yet not nearly as exhausting as some of her latter productions, such as Miami Vice, Hannibal Rising, and the overly long What Women Want. I’m glad I saw it. (on DVD in Region 1)
 
2 and a half stars
 
*Shanghai Fiction is in Chinese, Japanese, English, and French.