Back to the Wharf
风平浪静
China, 2020, colour, 2.35:1, 119 mins.
Director: Li Xiaofeng 李霄峰.
Rating: 7/10.
Crime-based drama, set across 15 years, fails to capitalise fully on a very strong first half.
STORY
Xiyuan city, somewhere on the coast of southern China, 1992. Song Hao (Zhou Zhengjie), a top student at Xiyuan High School, is told by his headmaster (Zhang Jianya) that he will no longer be getting automatic admission to university. As Song Hao will easily pass the gaokao (university admission exam), his quota is being given to another student instead. Song Hao is devastated, as is his father, Song Jianfei (Wang Yanhui), who works on the city’s building committee; the latter learns the quota is to be given to Li Tang (Gao Yuhang), Song Hao’s best friend who recently saved him from being beaten up in an amusement arcade. Li Tang is also the son of the city’s deputy mayor, Li Weiguo (Jin Hui). In the middle of a typhoon, Song Jianfei sets off to find Li Weiguo at his office, while Song Tao goes straight to Li Tang’s home. By mistake Song Hao enters the wrong house, is mistaken for a thief by its old owner, Wan Youliang (Zhao Longhao), and accidentally stabs him during a scuffle. Later, Song Jianfei arrives, realises the person he saw leaving was Song Hao, and finishes off Wan Youliang to protect his son. From his home, Li Tang sees all the comings and goings. That evening, Li Weiguo invites Song Jianfei and Song Hao to a celebration dinner for Li Tang. Li Weiguo, who is from the same hometown as Song Jianfei, tells the latter that he’s destined to become head of the building committee once the present head retires. Before dawn the next day, Song Hao quietly leaves home, hitching rides to Guangzhou, where he gets a job in a stone-carving factory. His father, who saw him leave, tells his wife (Chen Jin) that their son is a murderer on the run, and the victim’s two-year-old daughter has been sent to an orphanage. Fifteen years later, in 2007, Song Hao (Zhang Yu) returns to Xiyuan for his mother’s funeral. He’s recognised by motorway toll-booth worker Pan Xiaoshuang (Song Jia), a fellow student who’d always held a torch for him. Song Hao finds his father has had a new partner for the past six years, Jiang Fan (Ye Qing), by whom he has a five-year-old son, Song Yuan. Song Jianfei lets Song Hao stay in the old family house and, now being a man of influence, says he’ll arrange for Song Hao to get a new ID card to replace the one that expired. Song Hao visits the orphanage where his victim’s daughter, Wan Xiaoning (Deng Enxi), was raised, finds out her name, and follows her home from high school to the house where she lives, the only one remaining in a site being redeveloped. There he bumps into Li Tang (Li Hongqi), now a cocky fuerdai, whose property development company is being stymied by Wan Xiaoning’s refusal to accept an offer for her home’s demolition. Li Tang is now close to Song Hao’s father who, as building commission head, okays Li Tang’s business deals. Next day, Wan Xiaoning holds up Song Hao, who’s been following her again, and at knifepoint demands some money for an abortion. Song Hao decides to leave for Guangzhou, but at the toll booth he’s hijacked by Pan Xiaoshuang inviting him to dinner. She gets very drunk but Song Hao doesn’t rise to the bait; in fact she still lives at home with her father (Lin Jinfeng), who’s the local police chief. Needing to wait for a couple of days to get a new windscreen for his car, Song Hao gets to know both Pan Xiaoshuang and Wan Xiaoning better, ending up with him staying on in Xiyuan. But then, months later, Li Tang starts to complicate matters.
REVIEW
After 15 years on the run, a young man returns to his home city and finds the past still catching up with him in crime drama Back to the Wharf 风平浪静, the third – and marginally best – feature by Anhui-born film-maker Li Xiaofeng 李霄峰 (Nezha 少女哪吒, 2014; Ash 灰烬重生, 2017, rev. 2020). However, despite some quality performances and good production values, the film has some of the same weaknesses as the earlier ones, especially poor script development of a promising first half and some hard-to-accept coincidences and implausibilities. Premiered in competition at the 2020 Shanghai Film Festival, it was later released to modest business (RMB83.5 million).
Though it’s by a different co-writer (first-timer Yu Xin 余欣), the script has a similar structure to that of Ash – starting with a crime in the 1990s, jumping ahead in time, and then linking various characters by way of the past crime. Wharf has a much less complicated structure than Ash, with none of its flashbacks – and is the better for it. It’s also less of a metaphysical drama about guilt and salvation, with none of the previous film’s rather laboured references to Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection. The pity is that, after a strong first half, in which the screenplay organically develops a web of potentially volatile relationships, the writing then fails to capitalise on this promise. As its continues, the film gradually loses much of its mojo, and (like its distracting anti-smoking plugs) seems to surrender to local censorship requirements with a conventional and underwhelming finale.
That’s a shame, as the first hour or so, carefully laid out, is very impressive. The opening 30 minutes, set in 1992, build a patchwork of complicit relationships in a coastal city, amidst a typhoon that has emptied the streets: a son and father linked to the death of a man; the son’s school friend silently observing events; and the school friend’s big-wig father who promises the son’s father a promotion in the future. Fifteen years later, when the son, now in his early 30s, returns to the city after being on the run, those relationships have ripened: his father (now with a younger son and consort) is head of the building commission and a power in his own right, and the school friend is now a budding property developer who needs the former’s approval for development schemes. The new elements to the mix are a fellow student of the son who always fancied him back in high school, and the now-teenage daughter of the man who died. It’s a combustible mixture that could go either way, especially as the former fellow student just happens to be the daughter of a local police chief.
As in a recognition scene in Ash, there’s a big leap of faith required of the audience to accept that a motorway toll-booth employee would remember a fellow student’s face from 15 years ago, but the subtly assured performance by actress Song Jia 宋佳, 40 – in her strongest role since The Shadow Play 风中有朵雨做的云 (2018) – soon overcomes this stumbling block. Other weaknesses also pepper the film: it’s never explained why the orphaned teenager is living in a house marked for demolition, and her role in preventing it, and the scene of the protagonist just happening to bump into his old school pal on the building site is unlikely, to say the least. But these writing lapses are outnumbered by the script’s good moments: the highly sexual relationship between the protagonist and Song’s toll-booth employee, who knows exactly what she wants, or the edgy matiness between the two male leads, a taciturn but brainy man on the run and a cocky fuerdai who knows more than he lets on.
As the protagonist, Zhang Yu 章宇, 38, isn’t given much dialogue to work with, largely remaining an uncommunicative observer of events driven by more colourful characters; but it’s the type of role Zhang is no stranger to (Ciao Ciao 巧巧, 2017; Dying to Survive 我不是药神, 2018) and he makes a good enough fist of it. At the other end of the scale, Taiwan’s Li Hongqi 李鸿其 (Love You Forever 我在时间尽头等你, 2020) is good as the extrovert fuerdai with a nasty streak beneath his chumminess. As the teenage orphan, 15-year-old Deng Enxi 邓恩熙, the niece in Last Letter 你好，之华 (2018), is okay as far as she’s allowed to go, showing flashes of nettle; but her role is never properly developed and later becomes just a script convenience. Among the older cast, versatile Wang Yanhui 王砚辉 is especially strong as the protagonist’s quietly ambitious father.
Replacing Li’s previous d.p., talented Dutch-Chinese Joewi Verhoeven 中伟, the versatile Piao Songri 朴松日 (The Crossing 过春天, 2018; Wild Swords 无名狂, 2019) creates a variety of different moods, ably underpinned by an alert, atmospheric score by Wen Zi 文子 (Black Coal, Thin Ice 白日焰火, 2014; A First Farewell 第一次的离别, 2018). Billed as creative producer 监制 is popular comic actor Huang Bo 黄渤, who supported the picture via his HB+U young directors’ programme.
The film’s title is a four-character phrase that literally means “the wind is still, the waves are calm”, used to connote that all is peaceful, as if nothing happened. It’s also the title of a Hakka song by Taiwan composer-singer Chen Yongtao 陈永淘 that’s heard over the end titles sung by Taiwan’s Wu Bai 伍佰. Quite what the film’s English title means is anyone’s guess.
CREDITS
Presented by Xiamen Maoying Media (CN), Tianjin Maoyan Weiying Cultural Media (CN), Fujian Pingtan TR. Movie (CN), Shanghai Hanna Pictures (CN). Produced by Tianjin TR. Movie (CN), Shanghai Dashui Cultural Development (CN).
Script: Yu Xin, Li Xiaofeng. Photography: Piao Songri. Editing: Zhang Qi. Music: Wen Zi. Art direction: Zhong Cheng. Stylist: Guo Xiaoyan. Sound: Lu Ke, Feng Yanming.
Cast: Zhang Yu (Song Hao), Song Jia (Pan Xiaoshuang), Wang Yanhui (Song Jianfei), Li Hongqi (Li Tang), Deng Enxi (Wan Xiaoning), Zhou Zhengjie (young Song Hao), Chen Jin (Xu Ruifang, Song Hao’s mother), Zhang Jianya (Zhang, headmaster), Ye Qing (Jiang Fan, Song Jianfei’s lover), Gao Yuhang (young Li Tang), Zhao Longhao (Wan Youliang, Wan Xiaoning’s father), Ding Guanzhong (car mechanic), Lin Jinfeng (Pan Jianyun, Pan Xiaoshuang’s father/police chief), Jin Hui (Li Weiguo, Li Tang’s father).
Premiere: Shanghai Film Festival (Competition), 29 Jul 2020.
Release: China, 6 Nov 2020.