Cock and Bull

追凶者也

China, 2016, colour, 2.35:1, 113 mins.

Director: Cao Baoping 曹保平.

Rating: 7/10.

Entertaining rural black comedy finds director Cao Baoping back on familiar ground.

STORY

A village in Yunnan province, near the border with Guizhou province, southwest China, the present day. 1. Han Bao 憨包. Despite offers of money, auto mechanic Song Lao’er (Liu Ye) refuses to move his family’s ancestral graves, which include that of his wife, so that an important mining operation can proceed. His friend Qian Guixing (Wang Yanhui), captain of the law and order joint defence team, tells him that Liu (Yan Bei), captain of the county’s CID, wants to see him. Song Lao’er discovers that he’s accused of murdering a fellow villager, Brother Cat, by the latter’s widow, even though she has no proof beyond the fact that the two men once argued and had a fight. Brother Cat was found stabbed by the side of a road, his money and motorbike stolen. Song Lao’er denies everything and is released, but gossip spreads through the village, affecting both him and his son Song Tao, who is about to enter high school. One day, seeing young delinquent Wang Youquan (Duan Bowen) riding Brother Cat’s motorbike, Song Lao’er follows him to a village where he sees Wang Youquan trying to sell the motorbike. Wang Youquan runs off but the police then arrive and question the villagers. Later, Brother Cat’s wife runs away with her young son, and in compensation for her defamation Song Lao’er steals the family’s pig. Song Lao’er is tipped off by a friend that Wang Youquan has a girlfriend, Yang Shuhua (Wang Ziwen), who works at a hotel in the county town of Shuicheng, in neighbouring Guizhou province. He visits her but she refuses to talk about Wang Youquan. 2. Xiao Lan Shi 小烂屎. While riding on a new motorbike, Wang Youquan tells Yang Shuhua that he’s leaving to take up a job in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. He goes to Brother Cat’s village and tries to raise money for the long-distance bus ticket by selling the motobike; when he sees Song Lao’er, he runs away. Yang Shuhua gives him the money for the ticket but he gets off the bus when she calls him to say that Song Lao’er has come by, accusing him of murdering Brother Cat for the motorbike. Back in Shuicheng, Wang Youquan tells Song Lao’er he simply found the motorbike by the side of the road; he then shows Song Lao’er some documents that implicate Dong Xiaofeng (Zhang Yi), owner of the Victoria nightclub, in the murder. 3. Tu Zei 土贼. Dong Xiaofeng tells his girlfriend Xiaoping (Tan Zhuo) that he’ll soon have the necessary money so they can both move to Kunming, the provincial capital. He goes to Song Lao’er’s workshop but mistakes Brother Cat for him, with tragic consequences that he tries to fix later, with an escalating lack of success. 4. Luan Pi Ma Ma 乱屁麻麻. After learning the truth from Qian Guixing about Brother Cat’s death, Song Lao’er hears his son has been kidnapped. 5. Ji Zong 鸡枞. Song Lao’er tidies up some loose ends.

REVIEW

Following his offbeat coming-of-age movie, Einstein and Einstein 狗13 (2013, scarcely released in China), and his box-office breakthrough with the unconventional crime drama The Dead End 烈日灼心 (2015), maverick writer-director Cao Baoping 曹保平, 48, makes a return to the type of film with which he first made his name on the big screen – rural black comedies in which people’s lives and the social order spiral out of control. Like his first two solo features, Trouble Makers 光荣的愤怒 (2006) and The Equation of Love and Death 李米的猜想 (2008), Cock and Bull 追凶者也 is also set in the southwest province of Yunnan and makes extensive play with the local dialect, even down to paragraphing the film with titles derived from southwest swear-words. In overall form the tale – of a simple auto mechanic hunting down a murderer to clear his own name and pride – is the least subtexty of the Yunnan trio. Cock and Bull takes its cue more from manic crime comedies like the labyrinthine Crazy Stone 疯狂的石头 (2006) or those, like Green Hat 绿帽子 (2004), that keep changing the audience’s perspective.

It’s been a popular genre in Mainland cinema during the past decade or so, generally revolving round a feverish search for money. But these corkscrew rural comedies are not so easy to bring off – as the artier The Coffin in the Mountain 殡棺 (2014) recently showed – and require clever writing as well as casting. Though Cock and Bull was not Cao’s original idea, the screenplay, which went through multiple revisions, shows his long experience as a TV writer prior to concentrating on movies and until, like his protagonists’ grip on reality, the film finally loses control, it’s an entertaining and inventive ride sustained by good performances and smart construction.

Adopting a Yunnan accent and a bozo-like stare, versatile star Liu Ye 刘烨 (City of Life and Death 南京！南京！, 2009; Driverless 无人驾驶, 2010) plays Song Lao’er, a widower with a young son and a small car-repair business, who finds himself accused of the murder of a fellow villager by the man’s wife. He’s freed for lack of any evidence, but sets out to find the real culprit to erase the social stigma. Liu, who’s particularly good at straight-faced comedy (The Underdog Knight 硬汉, 2008; the chef in The Chef The Actor The Scoundrel 厨子戏子痞子, 2013), underplays Song Lao’er’s rural stubbornness: he’s refused to move his family’s ancentral graves to make room for a mining project but kidnaps the dead man’s family pig as compensation for his loss of face. Just when he’s hit a brick wall, he gets a tip-off about the whereabouts of the man he suspects is the murderer – which then tips the story-telling to the perspective of the latter and later to that of the real murderer.

The script, initiated by writer-director Zhang Tianhui 张天辉 back in 2009 (and inspired by the same real-life murder as People Mountain People Sea 人山人海, 2011), doubles back on itself at the start of each new section before continuing the narrative from a different character’s perspective. As such, the three male leads each get their time in the sun – Liu as the mechanic, Duan Bowen 段博文 as an untrustworthy young delinquent, Zhang Yi 张译 as a sleazy nightclub owner – before their stories gradually come together. With the entrance of Zhang around the 50-minute mark, the black comedy becomes more exaggerated but in an acceptable way; only near the end, in the fourth and fifth sections, does the film overstep the mark – though it’s a common fault in Mainland black comedies.

Duan, who played the central character in Beijing Flickers 有种 (2013) and the sleazy Heiren in The Left Ear 左耳 (2015), is fine as the initial suspect, especially in a scene where he has to convince Liu’s character that he’s innocent; much more playful, and triggering the switch to broader comedy, is Zhang (the cocky businessman in Mountains May Depart 山河故人, 2015) as a nightclub owner who sells himself as a “five-star assassin” and is fanatical about his clothing. Among the supports, character actor Wang Yanhui 王砚辉 (a Cao regular) is strongly grounded in a crucial role as one of Song Lao’er’s friends. The female players make less of a mark: Wang Ziwen 王子文, better known for her TV work (such as in recent hit Ode to Joy 欢乐颂, 2016), has brief moments as the wounded girlfriend of Duan’s character but is later elbowed out of the plot, while the under-rated Tan Zhuo 谭卓 (so good in The Mahjong Box 三缺一, 2016) is wasted in a small role as the nightclub owner’s floozie.

Production values are high, with the widescreen photography by Yang Shu 杨述 (The Equation of Love and Death) making the most of Yunnan’s less verdant scenery in backgrounds, while remaining close to the actors when necessary. The real-life murder that inspired the script was in Guizhou province, though the film is largely set in Yunnan, seemingly near the border with Guizhou. The film’s Chinese title roughly means “Hunting the Murderer”. The deliberately rude chapter headings roughly mean “idiot” 憨包 (presumably referring to Song Lao’er), “filthy slag(s)” 小烂屎 (a term of abuse for women), “pig” 土贼 (seemingly referring to the nightclub owner), “effing chaos” 乱屁麻麻, and “dick” (or “WTF”) 鸡枞. They’re used more for comic effect than anything more specific, and for most Chinese outside the southwest are not easily intelligible.

The film grossed a fairly modest RMB136 million – less than half of Dead End‘s take of some RMB300 million but still the second biggest earner of Cao’s five solo features to date.

CREDITS

Presented by Hehe (Shanghai) Pictures (CN), Dream Sky Entertainment (CN), Shanghai Qianyi Zhicheng Culture & Media (CN), Maxtimes Culture Films (CN), Beijing Biaozhun Yingxiang Cultural Communication (CN), Lianrui (Shanghai) Pictures (CN), Black Ant (Shanghai) Film (CN), Hangzhou Aurora Multimedia Technology (CN).

Script: Zhang Tianhui, Yang Jianjun, Cao Baoping. Photography: Yang Shu. Editing: Li Yongyi. Music: Deng Ouge, Wang Tonghua. Styling: Ding Yiyan. Sound: Dukar Tserang.

Cast: Liu Ye (Song Lao’er), Zhang Yi (Dong Xiaofeng), Duan Bowen (Wang Youquan), Wang Ziwen (Yang Shuhua), Tan Zhuo (Xiaoping), Wang Yanhui (Qian Guixing), Yan Bei (Liu, policeman), Sun Lei (He Qingyong).

Premiere: Shanghai Film Festival (Competition), 17 Jun 2016.

Release: China, 14 Sep 2016.