Leaping over the Dragon Gate
龙门相
China, 2020, colour, 2.35:1, 113 mins.
Director: Xiao Yifan 肖一凡.
Rating: 6/10.
Blackly humorous crime story, set in snowy northeast China, is undercut by some weak psychology and an over-long coda that unbalances the whole.
STORY
Hengdao village, Heilongjiang province, northeast China, 11 Feb 2009. A man looks down at the body of another man with an axe in his head. (One month earlier, Li Wenhong [Li Tao], wife of undertaker Zhang Yinghao [He Xiwei], had told her lover, fox-fur farmer Wang Yuanshun [Duan Qiong], that she was pregnant and wanted an abortion. Wang Yuanshun himself had a wife [Piao Ye] and three young children, but he had tried to persuade Li Wenhong to keep the child, vaguely promising the three of them a future together. Next day Zhang Yinghao, who was a close friend of Wang Yuanshun, had invited him round to a slap-up meal and asked if he could loan him RMB200,000 for a cemetery building project, for which he thought there would be a huge demand. Wang Yuanshun had politely declined, saying he was short of cash and his real-fur business was declining. Zhang Yinghao had then borrowed RMB100,000 from a money-lender, for three months at 6%; just after he’d left the gambling joint, it had been raided by police. This had the effect of thwarting two assassins [Wo Zhiqiang, Zhao Dongfei] who had been hired by Wang Yuanshun to kill Zhang Yinghao but were proving totally incompetent. When they were next together, Li Wenhong had asked Wang Yuanshun why the contract killing of her husband was taking so long. Wang Yuanshun had already paid them RMB10,000; later, after crashing a car while following Zhao Yinghao one day, they had demanded a further RMB10,000. They’d next tried to blow up Zhao Yinghao’s car, but he hadn’t been in it at the time. Not realising that, they had told Wang Yuanshun the job was done and Li Wenhong had made plans to go away with him, his three kids and her unborn child. She was originally from a poor family in Sichuan province and had been sold by her parents to Zhang Yinghao, so had never considered the bleak, cold northeast her home. But she’d then received a call from the county hospital that Zhang Yinghao was still alive, with just some burns. She had visited him and found him very jolly and loving; he had given her the keys to a house he’d bought her in Mudanjiang city by selling his jade talisman worth RMB500,000. Meanwhile, an angry Wang Yuanshun had given one of the killers a gun to finish the job immediately. However, Li Wenhong had separately told the other killer to call the whole thing off. Wang Yuanshun had just caught the first killer in time, as he entered the county hospital, and had then tried to play the two killers off against each other in order to protect himself. Finally, one killer had killed the other, and he and Wang Yuanshun had dumped the body in a well and parted. Li Wenhong had then decided to have an abortion; Wang Yuanshun, after discovering some details about Zhang Yinghao’s cemetery project, had visited him at his home for another meal.) A year later, after the killer’s body is discovered in the well, the police investigate, led by veteran detective Meng (Ma Guowei). He is about to retire but is determined to solve the case.
REVIEW
A blackly humorous crime story, in which a married man hires two incompetent assassins to kill his lover’s husband, Leaping over the Dragon Gate 龙门相 is an interesting first feature by Hebei-born film-maker Xiao Yifan 肖一凡 that doesn’t quite fulfil its promise due to niggling plot details and a lack of overall balance. Premiered at the First film festival in summer 2020, and released directly online this autumn, it’s in the established sub-genre of wintry northeast crime movies – in this case set in a bleak village in Heilongjiang province and with a small cast of about half-a-dozen people whose fortunes are juggled around with a dry, mordant humour.
Xiao studied manga publishing at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts from 2006 and then worked as art director on Beijing Blues 神探亨特张 (2012), an exhilarating, docu-drama-like ensembler, directed by Xiao’s mentor (and fellow Hebei’er) Gao Qunshu 高群书, that centred on a group of plainclothes crime-hunters in the wintry capital. After that, Xiao studied film production at a New York college for two years (2013-15) before returning to China in 2016. The biggest name on the credits of Leaping is that of Gao, who’s billed as creative producer 监制; after an initial run of notable works (war-crimes drama Tokyo Trial东京审判, 2006; WW2 spy thriller The Message 风声, 2009; splashy Eastern Wind Blast 西风烈, 2010), he’s slipped a little off the radar in recent years, but is here very much working in his own filmic territory (the wintry northeast police drama Old Fish 千钧。一发, 2008, set in nearby Harbin).
The script, co-written with the pseudonymous Hua Long 画龙 and reportedly inspired by a true case, starts intriguingly with a corpse in the snow and an axe in its head, and then flashes back a month as the audience is made to wait some 70 minutes to see whose body it was. There’s an assurance to the early scenes that’s impressive, as relations between the three principals are succinctly laid out (especially in a meal between the husband and lover, who are in fact close friends) and then, almost casually, the fact is revealed that the lover has hired two bozo assassins to bump off the husband – with the full complicity of the husband’s wife. Sensibly, the comedy of the two incompetent killers isn’t overplayed, and their amateurishness later becomes a plot driver of its own.
The problem lies in some of the psychology. The reason why the lover – who has a wife and three kids of his own – encourages his mistress to have her child, rather than abort it, doesn’t make any sense. And the virtual absence from the script of his own wife and home life (which, in the brief scenes still there, seems perfectly happy) further weakens the lover’s psychology. On the mistress’ side, her background partly explains her desire to have a life away from her husband, though he’s no ogre and actually very loving. These and other small niggles eat away at an otherwise cleverly constructed black comedy.
The other major problem is that the last half hour (“one year later”) is almost a separate movie, with the new protagonist of a taciturn, wise old detective – on the edge of retirement – relentlessly investigating the truth but with no hard proof to finally nail his suspicions. Superbly played by Ma Guowei 马国伟, a real-life Harbin policeman who leapt to fame as the lead in Gao’s Old Fish, this mini film-within-a-film throws the preceding 75 minutes into the shade – partly because of Ma’s strong performance but partly because it’s directed and played far more conventionally – and ends up completely unbalancing the movie as a whole.
All that aside, there’s still much to enjoy here, from the chilly widescreen imagery by d.p. Zhang Haozhe 张浩哲, which, even when shooting in a naturalistic way, finds time for the occasional well-composed landscape, and in the playing by He Xiwei 何熙维 (aka singer-comedian He Jiaoshou 和教授, “Professor He”) as the cuckolded husband, and the rest of the non-pro cast like Duan Qiong 段琼 as the smooth-talking lover, Li Tao 李桃 as the mistress with an ear-bending Sichuan accent, and Wo Zhiqiang 沃志强 and Zhao Dongfei 赵东飞 as the bumbling, quarrelling assassins.
The film was shot in Hengdaohezi township, Mudanjiang municipality, Heilongjiang province, in early 2019, and was originally known as The Advanced Animals 高级动物.
CREDITS
Presented by Huanxi Media Group (Beijing) (CN), Huanshixi Media Group (Shanghai) (CN), Huanxi Media Group (Qingdao) (CN), Rockview Film Entertainment (Hainan) (CN), Huanshixi Media Group (Beijing) (CN), Beijing Hard Steel Media (CN). Produced by Rockview Film Entertainment (Hainan) (CN).
Script: Hua Long, Xiao Yifan. Photography: Zhang Haozhe. Editing: Sun Xiao. Music: Liu Ye. Art direction: Song Ge. Art direction advice: Xiao Haihang. Styling: Chai Yuan. Sound: Zhang Mingxi, Long Xiaozhu, Zhang Jinyan. Visual effects: Liu Peiyu. Executive direction: He Yonggao, Wang Zhenlei.
Cast: He Xiwei (Zhang Yinghao), Ma Guowei (Meng), Duan Qiong (Wang Yuanshun), Li Tao (Li Wenhong), Wo Zhiqiang (Leon, killer), Zhao Dongfei (Li, killer), Piao Ye (Gong Meili, Wang Yuanshun’s wife), Zhang Xiaoyu (Xiaoyu, Wang Yuanshun’s no. 1 daughter), Zhang Yi (Xiaoyi, Wang Yuanshun’s no. 2 daughter), Lu Chuhan (Hanhan, Wang Yuanshun’s no. 3 daughter), Chi Qiang (Li Baotian, Hengdao village head).
Premiere: First Film Festival (Competition), Xining, China, 28 Jul 2020.
Release: China, 30 Sep 2021 (online).