Gone with the Bullets

一步之遥

China/US/Hong Kong, 2014, colour/b&w, 2.35:1, 3-D (China only), 140 mins.

Director: Jiang Wen 姜文.

Rating: 8/10.

Lavishly mounted satire of excess in 1920s Shanghai is stylish big-screen entertainment.

STORY

Shanghai, French Concession, the 1920s. Following the fall of the Qing dynasty, Manchu aristocrat Ma Zouri (Jiang Wen) and his childhood friend Xiang Feitian (Ge You) had come south from Beijing to try their luck in the “adventurers’ paradise” of Shanghai. Ma Zouri has become known as a powerful fixer and Xiang Feitian is a police officer in the French Concession. The two give an audience to Wu Qi (Wen Zhang), the spendthrift son of Shanghai warlord Wu Danian (Liu Linian), who 10 days earlier had suffered a severe lack of face after being insulted as just a nouveau riche upstart by an Italian love he’d invited to Shanghai. Wu Qi asks their help in recovering his social prestige by laundering his “new” money – actually his father’s, earmarked for a military academy modelled on the US’ West Point – into “old”. Ma Zouri and Xiang Feitian decide to use the money (and make some for themselves on the side) by reinventing the so-called Flower Realm Election 花域大选 – a vote for the city’s top courtesan – into a talent/beauty contest that will be broadcast live worldwide on radio. Over 20,000 contestants from 72 countries enter, and at a glitzy ceremony hosted by Ma Zouri and Xiang Feitian – filmed by Wu Danian’s daughter Wu Liu (Zhou Jun), an ambitious, foreign-trained filmmaker – the final play-off comes down to westerner White Tiger Foster (Kayla Bingham) and Chinese contestants Shangguan Qinglong (Ruan Jinjia) and Wanyan Ying (Shu Qi), winner of the previous two elections. Ma Zouri stage-manages a dramatic appearance by Wanyan Ying, a 38-year-old, self-styled Manchu princess who has been in love with him for decades; she makes an impassioned speech in which she promises to auction off all her possessions to the poor of the world, as well as her own future by selling herself off in marriage. Wanyan Ying is declared the winner. Later one evening, she organises a private dinner between her and Ma Zouri, in which she aks him to finally declare his love for her. Back at her lavish flat – and overheard by her foreign-educated assistant, Swan Girl (Na Ying) – she amorously tries to pin down Ma Zouri to marry her. High on opium, the two go for a delirious car-ride and end up outside the city. Next morning, Ma Zouri wakes to find Wanying Ying dead by the car; remembering nothing, he flees back to the city. Finding himself wanted for Wanyan Ying’s murder, Ma Zouri goes to the Wu family mansion to ask the help of Wu Liu and her mother Qin Sainan (Hong Huang), who was once his teacher at school but now doesn’t remember him. Wandering around the mansion, Ma Zouri discovers Xiang Feitian, who’s been tied up by Wu Danian in bondage gear in punishment for helping Wu Qi squander his money. Ma Zouri manages to talk Wu Danian into letting Xiang Feitian go free; he and Wu Liu drive Xiang Feitian home and Ma Zouri disappears into the night. For two years Ma Zouri hides out, sentenced to death in absentia. Xiang Feitian rises to fame as his hunter and the instigator of a lethal crackdown on prostitution in the city. Meanwhile, an actor, Wang Tianwang (Wang Zhiwen), profits by the case’s celebrity by mounting a satirical play, Ma Gouri’s Execution by Firing Squad 枪毙马狗日, and Wu Liu makes a documentary, Xiang Feitian Executes Ma Zouri by Firing Squad 项飞天枪毙马狗日, claiming that Ma Zouri schemed to kill Wanying Ying when she promised to give away her fortune. Ma Zouri is tracked down by an English detective and arrested when he tries to kill Wang Tianwang. But Xiang Feitian and Wu Qi decide that Wu Liu’s film still needs an ending, with Ma Zouri’s actual execution.

REVIEW

After his richly entertaining Oriental Western Let the Bullets Fly 让子弹飞 (2010), Mainland actor-director-producer Jiang Wen 姜文 pretty much keeps all his ducks in the right order with his fifth feature, Gone with the Bullets 一步之遥, the second in a planned trilogy of unlinked tales set in the Wild East of early Republican China. Where Fly centred on a selection of typically over-sized swindlers and carpetbaggers in a township in southwest China in 1919, Gone focuses on an equally brash bunch of opportunists in 1920s Shanghai – mostly Manchu aristos from the defunct Qing dynasty who’ve moved south from Beijing to try their luck in China’s swingiest city of the era. Reuniting Jiang and comedian Ge You 葛优 in the leading roles, it’s less labyrinthinely plotted than Fly‘s cat-and-mouse games, but has dialogue that’s again a tasty feast of wordplay and double-talk, roles the cast can sink their teeth into, and packaging that’s often breathtaking in its scale and ambition. Love him or hate him, there’s no film-maker quite like Jiang in Chinese cinema.

The plot is inspired by a famous case that scandalised Shanghai in summer 1920, in which free-spending socialite Yan Ruisheng 阎瑞生 plotted the murder of high-class prostitute Wang Lianying 王莲英 after she’d ditched him and he’d fallen into debt. A theatre version of the story was popular at the time and a more detailed film version, Yan Ruisheng 阎瑞生 (at 10 reels, reputedly China’s first full-length feature), was released in Jun 1921, directed by Ren Pengnian 任彭年, with Chen Shouzhi 陈寿芝 as Yan Ruisheng and former prostitute Wang Caiyun 王彩云 as his victim. Gone preserves some of the original case’s elements – Wang had earlier been voted the city’s top prostitute, and she met her end in a wheatfield outside the city – but otherwise the movie spins off into its own fabulous universe.

On a reported budget of RMB300 million, huge by Mainland standards, that universe is a lavishly mounted, cheeky mash of anachronistic styles and cultural references. Mainland art director Liu Qing 柳青 (Sacrifice 赵氏孤儿, 2010; Blue Sky Bones 蓝色骨头, 2013) and d.p. Xie Zhengyu 谢征宇 (The Missing Gun 寻枪, 2001), and especially top Hong Kong costume designer/stylist Zhang Shuping 张叔平 [William Chang], create a semi-fantasy 1920s Shanghai in which everything seems possible. As Jiang’s character Ma Zouri, functioning as his own narrator, drily muses at the start: “To be or not to be? That is the question.” As a Manchu aristocrat during the Qing dynasty, he’d enjoyed access to the highest imperial circles; now, in Republican China, he’s come south to make his mark in an “adventurers’ paradise” where one is only “one step away” (the film’s Chinese title) from success or failure. For Ma Zouri, it’s to be a case of so near but yet so far.

Aware of its epic reach, the film is constructed in large setpieces, and no more so than in the first half-hour, which is made up of only three, increasingly extravagant sequences that set the tone for the remaining two hours. Opening on a blank screen with Ma’s voiceover, the movie fades in to a conversation between three characters – Ma (aping Marlon Brando in The Godfather, 1972), fellow Manchu pal Xie Feitian (now a police officer in the city’s French Concession) and young socialite Wu Qi, the spendthrift son of a powerful warlord who’s come to beg Ma Zaouri’s help in regaining “face”. It’s a gem of straightfaced comedy, with actor Wen Zhang 文章 (Ocean Heaven 海洋天堂, 2010; Badges of Fury 不二神探, 2013) hitting just the right note of pompous affront to his dignity as he describes how he was accused of being a nouveau riche upstart by an Italian woman he loved. Exhorted to convert Wu Qi’s “new money” into “old money” (i.e. launder it), Ma Zouri reinvents the so-called Flower Realm Election – a vote for Shanghai’s top prostitute – into a colossal international talent/beauty contest to be broadcast worldwide on live radio.

Without a pause for breath, the film launches into a B&W evocation of glittering Shanghai that marries real newsreel footage with fake, and then segues to the contest’s super-glitzy awards ceremony – a show-stopping, 23-minute section that combines nods to Broadway and Hollywood musicals (punchily staged by US choreographers Keith & Sharon Young) with Chinese cross-talk humour and local references. No matter that the show includes music that hadn’t even been written at the time, like George Gershwin’s Summertime and Louis Prima’s Swing classic Sing, Sing, Sing, as well as containing anachronistic references to Busby Berkeley choreography and even the Broadway musical South Pacific. As usual with Jiang, the show’s the thing, and as a chunk of big-screen entertainment this setpiece has no equal in Chinese cinema.

Though even Jiang’s over-sized imagination is unable to match it thereafter, the surprise is that the script – by nine writers, including Jiang, onetime bad-boy writer Wang Shuo 王朔 and regular collaborator Shu Ping 述平 – does manage to sustain itself as the story proper gets under way. Starting with the mysterious death of the show’s winner, and Ma’s fall from grace as he becomes the prime suspect, the script fans out from being just a satire on “new money” and the obsession with social “face” into a broader allegory on lawlessness and lack of values. Fly had the same theme, as do many films in current Mainland cinema; but even through all its subsequent setpieces, Gone does manage to build an array of characters who go beyond simple pastiche and gain unexpected depth, especially the warlord’s dysfunctional family.

As in Fly, and especially the episodic The Sun Also Rises 太阳照常升起 (2007), Jiang can’t come up with a finale that wraps everything up in a satisfying and emotionally resonant way. Here, it’s a car chase that starts in Shanghai and, for no good reason, ends up at a Don Quixote-ish windmill amid the tulou of Fujian province (actually hundreds of miles away). It’s the one major false step in a film that manages to create a convincing alternative universe for its characters and take the audience along with them.

Jiang and Ge show a seamless, gruff northern chemistry as the two Manchu shysters, with the former scaling back his bravado as the latter comes through as a manipulative power-player. Playing her real age (38) for a change, Taiwan-born actress Shu Qi 舒淇 – though distractingly re-voiced (by CCTV presenter Yang Chen 杨晨) – holds her own against both men as the murder victim, first in a grandstanding entrance at the awards show and later matching Jiang line for line in their flirting.

Taking Shu’s place as the female lead in the second half, Jiang’s actress wife Zhou Yun 周韵, 36, is the movie’s most pleasant surprise, as an ambitious, foreign-educated film-maker who “wants to be China’s Lumière”. In her most substantial role to date, Zhou, who played the young widow in the first segment of Sun, gives her role a no-nonsense, insouciant quality that undercuts the film’s braggadocio and provides some moral grounding amid all the opportunism.

Other roles are meatily played, especially by Wang Zhiwen 王志文 (the teacher in Together 和你在一起, 2002, by Chen Kaige 陈凯歌) as an egocentric actor, veteran Liu Linian 刘利年 as the brassy warlord, and China Interactive Media Group CEO Hong Huang 洪晃 as his mannish wife. In a brief role as one of the show’s contestants, US gymnast-dancer Kayla Bingham burns up the screen in a couple of slinkily athletic dances.

Off-camera technical credits are slick throughout, especially the smooth editing by a team of eight in which Jiang (as with the screenplay) gives himself prime position. The music track matches the film’s cuckoo nature, with chunks of Verdi, Puccini, Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Paganani, Schubert and Grieg alongside Jazz/Swing Era classics, George Acogny and even The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond.

*

On 11 Feb 2015 the film screened in competition at the Berlin Film Festival in a version that was 22 minutes shorter. There were no structural changes, and much of the tightening was hardly noticeable, apart from the deletion of White Tiger Foster’s “South Pacific” dance number and some of Wanyan Ying’s introduction during the variety show, the shortening of Wu Liu’s film on Ma Zouri, and the elimination of a late-on scene between Xiang Feitian and Wanyan Ying’s female assistant. This 118-minute version is neither better nor worse than the original, just shorter. However, its plain English subtitles reflect none of the dialogue’s richness and, during the variety show, even stir in references to a “war in Ukraine” and George Gershwin that weren’t in the original.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing Buyilehu Film & Culture (CN), Columbia Pictures (US), Emperor Motion Pictures (HK). Produced by Beijing Buyilehu Film & Culture (CN), Dongyang Yibudaowei Film & TV (CN), Wuxi Qikai Desheng Film & TV (CN).

Script: Jiang Wen, Wang Shuo, Liao Yimei, Shu Ping, Yan Yunfei, Guo Junli, Sun Yue, Sun Rui, Yu Yanlin. Photography: Xie Zhengyu. Editing: Jiang Wen, Cao Weijie, Zhang Qi, Zhang Yifan, Jiang Jiashuang, Dalong Cui, Zhou Yue, Zheng Ting. Music supervision: Andy Ross, Zhang Youdai. Art direction: Liu Qing. Costume design: Zhang Shuping [William Chang]. Sound: Wen Bo, Mike Minkler, Eugene Gearty, Josh Berger. Action: Luo Lixian [Bruce Law]. Visual effects: Rick Sander, Christoph Zollinger (Pixomondo). Choreography: Keith & Sharon Young. 3-D: Keith Collea.

Cast: Jiang Wen (Ma Zouri), Ge You (Xiang Feitian), Zhou Yun (Wu Liu), Shu Qi (Wanyan Ying), Wen Zhang (Wu Qi), Wang Zhiwen (Wang Tianwang), Hong Huang (Qin Sainan, Wu Danian’s wife), Liu Linian (Wu Danian), Na Ying (Shuwan Gouer/Swan Girl, Wanyan Ying’s assistant), Liu Suola (Sai Erye, the award presenter), Niu Ben (Niu, Wanyan Ying’s old admirer), Jiang Hongqi (old guy with sunglasses), Ruan Jinjia (Shangguan Qinglong, Chinese contestant), Kayla Bingham (White Tiger Foster, foreign contestant), Nune Militonyan (Katerina Sergeyevna Ivanova, Wu Danian’s bride), Wang Dan (girl in red).

Release: China, 18 Dec 2014; Hong Kong, 29 Jan 2015; US, tba.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 18 Jan 2015.)