Lost in the Stars

消失的她

China, 2022, colour, 2.35:1, 121 mins.

Directors: Cui Rui 崔睿, Liu Xiang 刘翔.

Rating: 8/10.

Twisty-turny psychothriller is a flashy but entertaining ride that’s the latest, very free adaptation of a much-filmed French play from 1960.

STORY

Bankal island, Balandia, southeast Asia, May 2020. With his wife of one year, Li Muzi, still missing after 15 days, He Fei (Zhu Yilong) is furious that the local police still seem to be doing nothing, Also, his visa expires in five days’ time. After causing a fuss at the police station, he’s thrown out onto the street. Afterwards, an ethnic Chinese policeman, Zheng Cheng (Du Jiang), explains that the police are all overworked during the tourist season but promises to look into the matter the next day. Back at his hotel He Fei drinks heavily and falls asleep looking at a photo of his wife taken on the beach. Four days to visa expiry. He Fei wakes up next to a woman (Wen Yongshan) who claims to be Li Muzi but whom he denies knowing. Zheng Cheng arrives and checks her passport, which has a Balandia visa and is in the name of Li Muzi. The hotel’s room maid confirms her identity and she looks the same as the woman on He Fei’s’s mobile phone. She says she’s been on Mushan island the past 15 days and went there to teach him a lesson about paying more attention to her. Zheng Cheng tells He Fei to stop making a fuss, and leaves. He Fei tries to find locals who would remember his wife, but without luck. He’s pickpocketed by street kids but saved by a mysterious, high-powered woman on a motorbike (Ni Ni) who then leaves. The CCTV in a bookshop shows the same woman who claims to be Li Muzi. Zheng Cheng finds some drugs on him, which the woman says were prescribed for a neurological condition he has, which includes blackouts and memory lapses, from years of deep-sea diving. He Fei tells Zheng Cheng she’s lying. At a bar, He Fei spots the woman on the motorbike, whom he learns is Chen Mai, a top international lawyer who’s never lost a case. He approaches her to help him but she refuses. Three days to visa expiry. Next day Chen Mai finally agrees to take his case. (He Fei explains how he had met Li Muzi (Huang Ziqi) about a year ago when he was a diving instructor, how they’d bonded over their love of a Van Gogh painting, and how they’d quickly married, despite the opposition of her BFF, Manman, a well-known stage director whom he never actually got to meet. On the night Li Muzi had disappeared, she’d said she would join He Fei later but never turned up at the bar, from which he’d arranged a surprise expedition to celebrate their wedding anniversary.) Chen Mai works out how the deception by the fake Li Muzi was done and leaves as the latter turns up at the hotel. That evening He Fei and the fake Li Muzi tango at a beach restaurant. He tells her to reveal the truth but she keeps up the pretence, adding that she’ll have him hospitalised and then, as his wife, take everything he has. Later, Chen Mai tells He Fei the only chance they have is to find the real Li Muzi, though she suspects a separate team kidnapped her. Two days to visa expiry. He Fei and Chen Mai find the abandoned building where the whole crime was planned, including newspaper clippings of the death of Li Muzi’s parents in a car crash and the financial reorganisation of the family company Xingchuan. But they have to make a run for it when one of the gang, gunman Pagan (Dima Shadow), turns up. Chen Mai theorises that Li Muzi found out He Fei had a secret gambling habit and organised her own disappearance to teach him a lesson. (He Fei explains how he came from a poor background, had moved to Shanghai, and had worked his way up to being a diving instructor. In desperation he’d turned to gambling but ended up in debt. After meeting Li Muzi, who was from a very wealthy family, she’d agreed to give him a second chance and paid off his debts. After her parents had died in a car crash, He Fei had taken over the running of the company and had never gambled again, so Chen Mai’s theory about Li Muzi getting her revenge cannot be true.) One day to visa expiry. He Fei is booked on the last flight of the day but is determined not to give up the search for Li Muzi. Chen Mai traces who the gunman was but still suspects Li Muzi planned her own disappearance and that He Fei is still hiding something. And then, at the hotel, the fake Li Muzi has He Fei arrested by the police for physical assault and taken to a psychiatric hospital.

REVIEW

A twisty-turny crime drama-cum-whodunit that is still unveiling surprises in its final minutes, Lost in the Stars 消失的她 is sometimes too over-stuffed for its own good – and in retrospect is scarcely believable – but is full of meaty performances, is attractively shot in a semi-tropical setting, and makes no bones of the fact it’s just there to entertain. Trimming by 10 or so minutes, mostly to its final half-hour, would sharpen the whole thing up. But the psychothriller’s two-hour running time hasn’t prevented it being a surprise (and welcome) summer hit in the Mainland, taking a very hunky RMB2.6 billion in its first 13 days and still easily topping the charts. [Final tally was RMB3.53 billion.]

It’s a (very) loose remake of the 1990 Russian film Trap for a Lonely Man Ловушка для одинокого мужчины, directed by the late Aleksey Korenev (see poster, left), which in turn derived from the French play Piège pour un homme seul (Trap for a Lonely Man) by the late actor/playwright/director Robert Thomas (1927-89). The four-act “detective comedy” (comédie policière) made Thomas famous overnight when it opened in Paris in Jan 1960 (see showbill, below left) and has since seen multiple adaptations, often very free, including three US TV movies (Honeymoon with a Stranger, 1969; One of My Wives Is Missing, 1976; Vanishing Act, 1986). In the 1960s Alfred Hitchcock was interested in filming the play but never did. Some of its plot elements are so common to the mystery/crime genre that it’s even been theorised that Thomas was “inspired” by earlier films like Conflict (1945), with Humphrey Bogart, itself based on earlier story material and a novella, or Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958), with Richard Todd and Anne Baxter, which went on to inspire two Indian films (Sesh anka, 1963; Puthiya paravai, 1964).

Whatever the truth, the fact is that Thomas liked the genre, having previously written 8 femmes (8 Women, 1958), a kind of Gallic riff on the traditional, country-house British whodunit that was eventually adapted into a 2002 film, with a star cast, by François Ozon. The play 8 femmes was not a success at the time but Piège was, and very much in the same vein, mixing crime drama and Gallic humour in a unique mix. Like most adaptations, this Chinese one ignores the comic side and overdoses on the crime elements, resulting in an all-stops-out mystery-thriller that’s the most extravagant version of the play yet, and one that is still unveiling more twists in the final minutes.

It’s directed by two relative newbies: Beijing-born Cui Rui 崔睿, who studied direction at University of Southern California and, after various jobs on several shorts, makes his feature debut here, and Liu Xiang 刘翔, a d.p. (Erdos Rider 鄂尔多斯骑士, 2015) who went on to direct, co-write and shoot the lightly comic crime puzzler Knock Knock 不速来客 (2021) which echoes all the way through Lost in the Stars. However, for the general public the most important name on the poster is that of creative producer 监制 and co-writer Chen Sicheng 陈思诚, 45. Chen has his name on a number of billion-RMB hits, mostly crime stories – from the Detective Chinatown 唐人街探案 series (2015-  ), all of which he’s directed, to Sheep without a Shepherd 误杀 (2019) and Fireflies in the Sun 误杀II (2021), on which he was creative producer. Lost in the Stars follows the same routine as the latter two, with Chen producing but turning direction over to newbies.

Where the Russian film of Piège stayed reasonably close to the original, Lost reimagines it on a flashy scale, in a fictional, Malay-speaking, Southeast Asian tourist resort that provides d.p. He Shan 何山 (Wrath of Silence 暴烈无声, 2017; Wisdom Tooth 日光之下, 2019; Fireflies in the Sun; Hachiko 忠犬八公, 2023) with plenty of opportunities for saturated visuals. Chen and co-scripters Gu Shuyi 顾舒怡 (improving on her sole previous feature, the shambolic Hong Kong psychothriller Heartfall Arises 惊心破, 2016) and Yin Yixiong 殷一雄 (a UK-educated short-story writer, in her first screenplay credit) open gangbusters as our confused hero He Fei creates a fuss at a local police station for ignoring his wife’s disappearance for 15 days, is kicked out into the rain, is befriended by an ethnic Chinese cop who promises to help him, and, after getting drunk back in his lavish hotel room, wakes up the following morning next to a glamorous woman who insists she’s his wife and has mountains of proof to back up her claim. The friendly policeman comes by and believes her.

At this point the viewer doesn’t know whom to believe, as He Fei is clearly very wound up while the woman is very convincing and the policeman is very procedural. The film could easily have become just 90 minutes of spousal befuddlement but it soon fans out into much more, with the first of several flashbacks introduced by He Fei. It’s giving nothing away to reveal that He Fei’s protestations are correct and the woman is actually an imposter. What the plot then goes on to reveal is the much more complicated how and why, as He Fei is aided by a glamorous jet-set lawyer who’s never lost a case. As well as multiple twists along the way that manipulate the viewer’s sympathies, the narrative is also driven by the fact that He Fei has only four days left in the country before his tourist visa runs out.

Both the writers and the cast manage to suspend the necessary sense of disbelief to make the whole thing work, though the final 40 minutes (which could also be tightened up) border on the fantastic. Despite that, the whole production just manages to scrape an 8/10 as it doesn’t pretend to be anything else except glossy entertainment, and is also consistent fun. Production values, led by He’s widescreen visuals, art direction/styling by Zheng Chen 郑辰 (Tiger Robbers 阳光劫匪, 2021; The Fallen Bridge 断•桥, 2022) and editing by Chen regular Tang Hongjia 汤宏甲, are ultra-smooth, and the players all hit their marks.

As he did in his first major big-screen outing, Lighting Up the Stars 人生大事 (2022), Zhu Yilong 朱一龙, 35, manages to manipulate the audience’s feelings in a sly way, starting off one-note but gradually becoming more complex. He has okay chemistry with the flashing-eyed Ni Ni 倪妮, 34, an always interesting but very variable actress who makes a waah! entry on a motorbike and is initially convincing as a tough, hot-shot lawyer, but loses some of her authority as the film progresses. Hong Kong’s Wen Yongshan 文咏珊 [Janice Man], 34, who had supporting roles in Fireflies and Detective Chinatown 3 唐人街探案3 (2021), is strong as the fake wife, especially in the film’s first half, and actually has stronger chemistry with Zhu than Ni. As the friendly Chinese cop, Du Jiang 杜江 is solid in his rather wooden way.

The film was entirely shot on Hainan island, southern China, between Nov 2021 and Mar 2022. The Chinese title literally means “She Who Disappeared”.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing As One Pictures (CN), Shanghai Taopiaopiao Movie & TV Culture (CN).

Script: Chen Sicheng, Gu Shuyi, Yin Yixiong. Play: Robert Thomas. Photography: He Shan. Editing: Tang Hongjia. Music: Hu Xiao’ou. Art direction: Zheng Chen. Styling: Zheng Chen. Sound: Li Danfeng. Action: Hu Lifeng. Visual effects: Xu Mingjun, Xu Tonghui.

Cast: Zhu Yilong (He Fei), Ni Ni (Chen Mai; Shen Man), Wen Yongshan [Janice Man] (Li Muzi/Jane), Du Jiang (Zheng Chen), Huang Ziqi (Li Muzi), Liu Erjin (hotel front-of-house manager), Xu Dong (photo studio boss), Yu Chengqun (doctor), Lei Songran (boss), Shi Jiankang (Hassel), Chen Mengqi (Huo Ran, voice), Meng Zhixu (young Shen Man), Zhang Yiwenhan (young Li Muzi), Dima Shadow (Pagan, gunman), Scotty Cox (Chris, barman), Zhu Haiyu.

Premiere: Hainan Island Film Festival (Closing Film), 25 Dec 2022.

Release: China, 22 Jun 2023.