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.

Review - Black & White: The Dawn of Justice - 2014

August 25, 2016

Black & White: The Dawn of Justice – Taiwan, 2014

The circumstances that Black & White: The Dawn of Justice lays out are indeed frightening – ten missing criminals, all of whom appear in a cryptic video that eerily resembles the kind associated with a suicide bomber’s last testament; a series of explosions, each one designed to bring a part of Kaohsiung to its knees; and rumors of chemical warfare. Into this brewing catastrophe steps Wu Ying-Hsiung (Mark Chao), the central character from the first Black & White film, as well as the television show that the films serve as prequel to, and, as the first scene attests, he is a man who has not mellowed one iota. In the scene, we watch as he almost single-handedly fends off a series of terrorists intent on getting their hands on a high-ranking military official who has access to an important code. It’s an exciting scene, and it stands up there with the more memorable intros from the Bond series or Mission Impossible films, yet it’s almost all down hill from there.

Part of the problem with Tsai Yueh-Hsun's The Dawn of Justice is that savvy viewers will quickly notice uncanny similarities to other (and better) films. Stop me if you’ve heard these before – a villain with a deep bass voice, a secret society intent of destroying a city and then rebuilding it from scratch, a detonator and a choice of who lives and dies. In other words, the film borrows extensively from both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises. Other elements seem taken from the Mission Impossible films, and, oddly enough, shoot-em-up video games. For example, in one scene, our heroes find a secret path, go up a long ladder, and turn around to find a villain for each of them to take out. Then once they have vanquished these foes, a new and more powerful one emerges, one that will take their combined efforts to defeat. Later they have to climb all the way up to the top of a building where their final opponent is causally waiting for them. I half expected them to pick up a more powerful weapon along the way and to eat a berry for extra energy.

Like the previous film, The Dawn of Justice never lets up, jumping from one action scene to another, with only a few down moments thrown in to explain just what the heck is going on and just who everyone is. It helps if you have an encyclopedic knowledge of the first film, for Dawn of Justice doesn’t bother to explain who most of the characters are. However, if you can remember the characters from 24, you’ll be familiar with these character types. There’s the police chief who wants to ground Wu. Think the head of CTU in any season in which Tony Almeida or Michelle Dressler aren’t in charge. There’s the computer expert trying to ascertain the villains’ whereabouts with very little help from his superiors. Think Chloe O’Brian. And there are a few female colleagues on the case as well. They could easily be any of the one-season CTU agents who are pulled into action after receiving a clue and not being able to communicate with Jack. Then of course there’s the reluctant partner who at first dislikes or don’t trust Jack. Here, think Chase Edmunds. Like Jack’s, we have a feeling that Wu’s doubters will eventually come around, too.

The film is helped greatly by the all-too brief appearance of Xu Da Fu (Bo Huang), the criminal turned hero from the first film. He shows up as the tenth suicide bomber, yet his involvement is anything but voluntary. Xu is every bit as energetic as Wu is staid, and Huang and Chao make the most of their limited screen time together. In fact, Xu’s storyline also gives the film its emotional depth, which is more than a little strange given how many lives are at stake if all goes according to the terrorists’ plans. However, most of Kaohsiung’s civilians remain background figures and are not given much screen time to develop a connection with the audience. In an interesting move thematically, what screen time they do receive features mobs of them ransacking stores and doing snatch-and-grabs - not necessarily the kinds of deeds that would endear them to the audience. Even when Wu runs in the middle of a panicked mob and saves a young child from being trampled, the scene fails. It’s a near carbon copy of Katie Holmes’s heroics in Batman Begins.

When the film does devote time to a new character, the results are hit and miss. A fellow police officer named Chen Zhen (Lin Gengxin) makes his grand entrance just as Wu is dangling perilously from a freeway overpass. What should be a heroic moment is used instead to establish the character’s oddball personality – instead of helping Wu, Chen snaps a selfie with him and then complains about the placement of Wu’s hand. The moment plays worse than it reads. Another character, Huang Shi-Kai (Shiou Chieh Kai), a member of an elite military unit known as the Black Hawks, fares much better. We get a clear sense of just how he skilled and principled he is, and everything he attempts to do later on in the film is completely believable.

Unfortunately, too little of the film feels original. From its use of plot points from Christopher Nolen’s Batman trilogy to its many clichéd supporting characters, there’s just never a sense that we’re seeing anything new, and no amount of energy and action can make up for this. Wu, Huang, and Xu are all intriguing characters, yet they’re stuck in a movie made by a studio too afraid to venture outside of established action-film norms. The film didn’t need strained attempts at comedy or action scenes exaggerated to the point of being parody; what it needed was to trust that audiences would invest in the film’s characters and willingly go wherever the ride took them. They needed to take a chance. That they didn’t is obvious, and the result is a film that is watchable, yet ultimately forgettable. (on DVD and Blu-ray)

2 stars

*Black & White: The Dawn of Justice is in Mandarin with English subtitles.