Hidden Man

邪不压正

China/Hong Kong, 2018, colour, 2.35:1, 136 mins.

Director: Jiang Wen 姜文.

Rating: 7/10.

Final tale in Jiang Wen’s Republican trilogy has a lighter, more absurdist tone, but is weakened by a discursive script and one major piece of miscasting.

STORY

North of Beijing, northern China, 1922, winter. A land-owning master (Liu Xiaoning) officially betrothes his 18-year-old daughter (Yuan Shanghan) to his 13-year-old pupil Li Tianran (Zhao Jiale). Two men – elder pupil Zhu Qianlong (Liao Fan) and his Japanese friend Nemoto Ichiro (Sawada Kenya) – arrive at the master’s home and present him with a contract to sign over his land for the cultivation of opium by the Japanese. The master refuses and he, his wife (Ding Jiali) and daughter are murdered and their home set on fire. Li Tianran escapes from the blaze and is saved by an American doctor, Wallace Handler (Andy Friend), who is passing in his car. San Francisco, 15 years later. Li Tianran (Peng Yuyan), aka Bruce, who was sent to the US by Wallace Handler, his adoptive father, to study medicine and is now a qualified obstetrician, has been trained as a special agent by a wealthy American with shadowy political connections (Steven Schwankert). He sends Li Tianran back to China to fight against the Japanese, who have already occupied the northeast and will soon be at the gates of Beijing (now renamed Beiping). Though his mission must come first, Li Tianran will finally have a chance to exact revenge on Zhu Qianlong and Nemoto Ichiro. Beiping, winter 1936-37. Li Tianran arrives by train and is met by Wallace Handler, who tells him that Zhu Qianlong is now deputy head of the city’s police force and Nemoto Ichiro is Japan’s chief agent, with hundreds of assassins. Wallace Handler, who is planning to leave for the US, is annoyed at Li Tianran’s plan to kill the two men but cannot change his mind. After seeing Li Tianran arrive, Wallace Handler’s longtime landlord, powerful businessman Lan Qingfeng (Jiang Wen), dines with Zhu Qianlong and says he’ll give him Li Tianran if Zhu Qianlong agrees to kill Nemoto Ichiro. On the way home, Lan Qingfeng and Zhu Qianlong bump into Li Tianran and Wallace Handler in the dark, but no one reveals his hand. Spring arrives and Wallace Handler arranges for Li Tianran, who has still not been contacted by his secret handler, to work alongside him at Concord Hospital, where the mutilated body of an American woman is brought for a post mortem. Wallace Handler tries to keep Li Tianran away from Zhu Qianlong, and Li Tianran ends up giving Zhu Qianlong’s woman, Tang Fengyi (Xu Qing), her weekly injection of a stimulant. As a publicity stunt, Zhu Qianlong publicly executes some Japanese and Koreans for the murder and mutilation of the American woman, declaring “evil will not prevail over righteousness” 邪不压正. In the summer, while out riding, Wallace Handler and Li Tianran meet a small Japanese tank battalion, and the former refuses to give way, brandishing his US passport. While chasing an opium-addict thief (Bo Chen), Li Tianran gets to know a lame dressmaker, Guan Qiaohong (Zhou Yun). She humours him, and challenges him to burn down the teaching academy of Nemoto Ichiro where opium is stored. Instead, he steals Nemoto Ichiro’s sword and personal seal, using the latter to stamp the buttocks of Tang Fengyi who comes on to him at home. When Zhu Qianlong sees what Li Tianran has done, he contacts Nemoto Ichiro, who offers a bribe to Lan Qingfeng to kill Li Tianran. In turn, Lan Qingfeng tells Wallace Handler that he will help Li Tianran in his revenge plan by getting Zhu Qianlong to kill Nemoto Ichiro. But Wallace Handler is not prepared for Lan Qingfeng’s next move.

REVIEW

Mainland film-maker Jiang Wen 姜文 ends his trilogy of larger-than-life tales from Republican China not with a bang but with… well, if not a whimper, then a graceful dying fall. Maybe reckoning that even he couldn’t top the splashy excesses of the first two entries – the Sichuan-set Let the Bullets Fly 让子弹飞 (2010) and especially the Shanghai-set Gone with the Bullets 一步之遥 (2014) – Jiang goes for a smaller physical stage and a lighter, more irreal tone in this final tale, the Beijing-set Hidden Man 邪不压正. Recognisably in the same vein as the previous two films, with a group of opportunists trying to best each other during a volatile period of history, it’s still an entertaining couple of hours even if it lacks the depth and richness of the previous entries. Its faults are partly due to the script but also, amid an otherwise strong and resonant line-up of acting talent, to the major miscasting of Taiwan-born, Vancouver-raised actor Peng Yuyan 彭于晏 [Eddie Peng] in the lead role.

Though he’s generally fine in contemporary rom-coms, Peng, 36, still lacks the stature to go up against seasoned actors, especially in period or costume roles. That’s not just because he always looks too modern but also because, despite a decade in leading roles, he still lacks big-screen heft and the necessary acting smarts. As Hidden Man‘s lead character, who returns to China to avenge the murders of his master and his master’s family while also acting as some kind of anti-Japanese secret agent for a shadowy US figure, Peng fails to reconcile the jokier and more dramatic sides of the film into an ironic middle ground. As a result he comes over as more of a wannabe Sun Wukong/Monkey King figure – a role he already attempted, lamentably, in Wu Kong 悟空传 (2017) – rather than the driving force of the film, an impulsive, unruly and obsessive character rather than a strong, proactive one around whom the cavalcade of opportunists, double-dealers and tricksters can revolve.

The film’s other, though not quite so obvious, weakness is the screenplay by Jiang, veteran playwright/scriptwriter He Jiping 何冀平 (Flying Swords of Dragon Gate 龙门飞甲, 2011; Our Time Will Come 明月几时有, 2017), Li Fei 李非 (Red Amnesia 闯入者, 2014; Fate Express 命运速递, 2015) and Sun Yue 孙悦 (Gone with the Bullets). Though he’s always free with his sources, Jiang rarely conjures his films up out of nothing: Let the Bullets Fly was based on a novel and Gone with the Bullets on true events. For Hidden Man, he’s loosely adapted a kind of modernist, urban martial-arts novel, Xiayin 侠隐 (2001, see cover, top left) – by Beijing-born, Taiwan-raised, New York-based writer Zhang Beihai 张北海 – that famously took him over six years to write and is set in the same kind of demi-monde of spies, gangsters, socialites and foreign journalists that’s more familiar from mid-1930s Shanghai movies than Beijing ones. In its language, characters and nostalgia, the novel evokes a city that Zhang himself barely knew – he was born the same year it opens, 1936 – but which he researched in exhaustive detail. (To coincide with the film, a revised version was published in summer 2018, see cover, bottom left.)

The film, alas, takes only elements from the original novel, with a small cast of characters into which Peng’s outsider is plunged. As entertaining and well-turned as the dialogue is – and, like the previous films’, loaded with double meanings and unspoken thoughts – the effect starts to wear thin when it becomes clear that the plot is simply going round in elaborate circles, mostly centred on Jiang’s shady businessman, as the audience waits for Peng’s character to exact his revenge. Given that there’s nothing to stop him taking this revenge much earlier than 25 minutes from the end, the film starts taking on water round its midpoint and could easily lose 15 or so minutes with no loss to the overall structure.

Aside from Peng, the cast shines amid all the elegant, jokey and double-entendre dialogue. Again playing a role that’s not technically the lead but is actually pivotal to the whole plot, Jiang, 55, is as good as ever, with a commanding physical presence and never far from a big fat cigar as he manipulates everyone to his requirements. A decade younger but with an already weathered, characterful face, Liao Fan 廖凡 (the detectives in Black Coal, Thin Ice 白日焰火, 2014, and Guilty of Mind 心理罪, 2017) holds his own in face-offs with Jiang and can also handle the more outre comic moments, such as discovering his woman’s buttocks covered in seal marks while in flagrante. As the other villain, Japan’s Sawada Kenya 泽田谦也 (from Jiang’s Devils on the Doorstep 鬼子来了, 2000) is less well drawn, with no real character beyond a hissing Japanese.

Far more flavoursome, and going toe to toe with Jiang in some scenes, is bilingual, Beijing-born film-maker Andy Friend 安地, as the American adoptive father of Peng’s character. Dialogue between Peng and Friend often switches, naturally, between Mandarin and English, but the whole US angle of the film’s plot (including an early sequence set but not shot in San Francisco) seems unnecessary, and manufactured for box-office reasons.

Both female leads bring real colour and some extra depth to the film, even if their roles aren’t especially well integrated into the main narrative. The classiest goes to Jiang’s actress wife Zhou Yun 周韵, 39, so good as the film director in Gone with the Bullets, here playing a lame seamstress who has her own revenge agenda beneath a playful, quizzical front. Too bad she largely gets to interact only with Peng, in a series of lightly romantic rooftop scenes in which she seems to be playing in a vacuum. (Zhou also has a supervising producer 总制片人 credit on the film.) Only slightly less resonant is Xu Qing 许晴, 49, looking half her age as a femme fatale whose buttocks become a major comic plot point.

Using some of the same key crew from Gone with the Bullets, notably d.p. Xie Zhengyu 谢征宇, editors Cao Weijie 曹伟杰 and Zhang Qi 张琪, and art director Liu Qing 柳青, Jiang turns in a typically good-looking product, with trademark pools of light in interiors, some ooh-aah moments near the start (Peng’s character sweeping through a snow-covered 1930s Beiping) and resonant, more intimate moments later on. Overall, however, the film has a much less lavish feel than the trilogy’s first two entries. Xie’s handheld camerawork often reflects the jumpy, playful nature of Peng’s character, in contrast to the other main roles, and, though the concept of having him travel around the city via its rooftops rather than its streets imparts a slightly fantastical, irreal feel, divorced from everyday life, it’s not developed in any meaningful way.

Editing throughout is spot on, with some of the machine-gun dialogue exchanges heightened by rapid cutting back and forth. Music by France’s Nicolas Errèra (Shaolin 新少林寺, 2011; The White Storm 扫毒, 2013; Mountain Cry 喊•山, 2015) is, however, bland and has to fight for recognition between chunks of pop classical and easy listening. Action, when it comes, is swift and tightly staged. Despite being set in the north, most of the film was actually shot in central and southern China, especially the rooftop scenes – actually a giant set constructed in Shilin, Yunnan province.

With a final box-office tally of RMB583 million, the film performed very solidly but not spectacularly. Though its “disappointing” take has been blamed on the runaway success of black comedy Dying to Survive 我不是药神, released a week earlier, its take was roughly commensurate with that of the previous two legs of the trilogy (Let the Bullets Fly, RMB654 million; Gone with the Bullets, RMB 515 million). The rather lame English title (which roughly translates the original novel’s) refers to the Peng character’s undercover life, though in the movie he’s generally quite visible. (Some use of the word “bullets” would have been more suitable to link the trilogy together.) The film’s Chinese title is the phrase that Liao’s character uses after his show executions, literally meaning “Evil Will Not Prevail over Righteousness”.

CREDITS

Presented by Wuxi Zizai Entertainment (CN), Hehe (Shanghai) Pictures (CN), Emperor Motion Pictures (HK), Flagship Entertainment Group (HK), Tianjin Maoyan Media (CN), Dream Sky Entertainment (CN), Beijing Buyilehu Film & Culture (CN). Produced by Beijing Buyilehu Film & Culture (CN).

Script: Jiang Wen, He Jiping, Li Fei, Sun Yue. Novel: Zhang Beihai. Photography: Xie Xie [Xie Zhengyu]. Editing: Zhang Qi, Cao Weijie, Jiang Wen. Music: Nicolas Errèra. Additional music: Shen Bi’ang [Björn Shen], Aaron Zigman, Dylan Ebrahimian. Art direction: Liu Qing. Costume design: Dong Zhongmin, Wang Zhi [Uma Wang]. Make-up design: Zhang Shuping [William Chang]. Sound: Wu Jiang. Visual effects: Yang Yuejuan, Wang Shaoshuai.

Cast: Jiang Wen (Lan Qingfeng), Peng Yuyan [Eddie Peng] (Li Tianran/Bruce), Liao Fan (Zhu Qianlong), Zhou Yun (Guan Qiaohong), Xu Qing (Tang Fengyi), Sawada Kenya (Nemoto Ichiro), Andy Friend (Wallace Handler, doctor), Liu Xiaoning (master), Zhao Jiale (young Li Tianran), Yuan Shanghan (master’s daughter), Ding Jiali (master’s wife), Alexander Sullivan (US boss’ driver), Steven Schwankert (US boss), Cai Jiang (Xue Jia’nan), Chen Xi (Xi), Li Meng (Lan Lan, Lan Qingfeng’s daughter), Mu Chen (hospital head), Paul Morris (Paul Morris, hospital doctor), Yang Guangjun (old clothmaker), Bu Zhenyuan (Tang Fengyi’s spy), Song Song, Duan Haochen (Zhu Qianlong’s assistants), Kajioka Junichi (Sushi, Japanese tank commander), Bo Chen (opium addict), Yan Yan (butcher), Shi Hang (Pan Yueran, Guan Qiaohong’s assistant), Juan Van Wassenhave (French bar manager), Ma Datao (Zhang, general).

Release: China, 13 Jul 2018; Hong Kong, 6 Sep 2018.