Destinies
灰猴
China, 2018, colour, 16:9, 97 mins.
Director: Zhang Pu 张璞.
Rating: 6/10.
Black crime comedy is a tour de force of jigsaw plotting, tastily played but rather uninvolving.
STORY
Yunzhou town, northern Shanxi province, northern China, the present day. Chapter One: Du’s Restaurant 第一章 老杜饭店. Just outside town, Du Ziteng (Wang Dazhi) runs a roadside restaurant he’s trying to drum up business for. Local police captain Liu Chun (Lv Yiding) stops by for lunch. Fa Huahua (Wu Haitang), Du Ziteng’s separated wife from Sichuan, arrives and again asks for a divorce, which he again refuses. She leaves in a huff and complains to her lover, local gangster Qin Shousheng (Gao Feng), who comes over and offers Du Ziteng RMB500,000 cash if he’ll only just sign the divorce agreement. Du Ziteng refuses and Qin Shousheng gets called away, leaving behind the divorce form and the case with the cash. That evening, Du Ziteng goes to Qin Shousheng’s home and, finding it dark, leaves the cash in the courtyard, saying he doesn’t want it. Back at his restaurant, he organises a surprise birthday dinner for his girlfriend Song Yujiao (Wang Jingyun), during which he proposes to her, adding that he’s signed the divorce form with his wife. Suddenly, in front of the restaurant, someone dumps a bag with a vase inside; when Du Ziteng goes outside to investigate, someone fires a gun at him. Chapter Two: Sliced Noodles 第二章 刀削面. Qin Shousheng and Fan Huahua are lunching at his favourite noodle house, run by Old Song (Luo Jingmin), which he has been trying to buy for some time. Song’s spendthrift son, Song Siyuan (Wang Siyuan), owes Qin Shousheng RMB1 million in gambling debts; the latter offers to wipe the debt if Old Song agrees to sell him the Song family’s secret noodle-sauce recipe. Old Song refuses, and his daughter Song Yujiao – Du Ziteng’s girlfriend – supports him. Qin Shousheng pressures Song Siyuan to help him, and the latter digs up a vase which supposedly contains the recipe. Told by a specialist (Huang Chong) that the vase itself is a priceless antique, Qin Shousheng hides it in his home. However, he then hears that Uncle Five (Li Yu), a fellow gangster to whom he owes money, has just been released from prison. Terrified, Qin Shousheng hires Hong Kong hitman Xiaohuangmao (Luo Dahua) to kill him. Local police captain Liu Chun investigates the suspicious excavation of the vase, which is then stolen by two masked men from the home of Qin Shousheng. The latter reckons one of the thieves must be Yin Cha (Li Yang), one of his own gang who knew where it was hidden. But Qin Shousheng is temporarily diverted by a call from Fan Huahua that Du Ziteng still refuses to divorce her. He accompanies her back to Du Ziteng’s restaurant but has to leave when his men discover Yin Cha’s home address. There Qin Shousheng and his men find a taxi driver, Huang Liang (Zhang Chong), about to make love to Yin Cha’s girlfriend, masseuse Yi Meng (Ma Jingjing). They beat him up and take away a gun he’s carrying. Learning Yin Cha is now outside Du Ziteng’s restaurant, Qin Shousheng returns there, finds Yin Cha unconscious in a van, but no sign of the stolen vase. Chapter Three: A Strange Combination of Circumstances 第三章 阴差阳错. Yin Cha invites his friend Yang Cuo (Xue Jingqian) to join him in stealing a supposedly priceless antique vase that his boss, Qin Shousheng, has recently acquired. After the robbery they stop off at Du Ziteng’s restaurant for a quick bite; but when police captain Liu Chun drops by, they panic, accidentally leaving the pot behind. When Qin Shousheng and Fan Huahua also arrive, to negotiate her divorce from Du Ziteng, they decide to come back that night for the vase – only to find then that Du Ziteng and Song Yujiao are in the middle of a romantic birthday party. Chapter Four: The Master 第四章 高手. On the edge of town, Hong Kong hitman Xiaohuangmao is mugged by Uncle Five and his gang when his motorbike breaks down. He’s then mugged by crooked taxi driver Huang Liang, who also makes off with a gun in Xiaohuangmao’s bag. Now penniless, Xiaohuangmao stops off at Du Ziteng’s restaurant for a quick meal. However, when Liu Chun, and then Yin Cha and Yang Cuo stop by, he quickly leaves, finally arriving late at the home of his client, Qin Shousheng. Finding no one there, he steals the case with RMB500,000 left in the courtyard by Du Ziteng, only to be robbed of it by Uncle Five, who’s outside looking for Qin Shousheng. Chapter Five: Uncle Five 第五章 五舅. Uncle Five leaves prison, keen to see Qin Shousheng whom he suspects is trying to cheat him of money owed. His gang members have been operating a mugging scam on the edge of town, into which Xiaohuangmao falls, but Uncle Five decides to go after the big money and pay a call on Qin Shousheng at home. There he bumps into Xiaohuangmao coming out with a case full of cash. Chapter Six: A Pipedream 第六章 黄粱一梦. Using the money he stole from Xiaohuangmao, taxi driver Huang Liang romances Yi Meng but then falls foul of Qin Shousheng during the latter’s search for Yin Cha. Final Chapter: The Secret Recipe 大结局 秘方. Du Ziteng sets off to find the people who almost shot him that night outside his restaurant and also stole the bag with the antique vase inside.
REVIEW
Various bad guys run hither and thither – mostly after money – in Destinies 灰猴, a good example of the black crime comedy genre that was very popular about a decade ago and still retains fascination for Mainland writer-directors with its Swiss clock-like precision and overlapping threads as one thing leads to another. Set, like many of them, in a dusty northern location and heavy on regional dialect, Destinies is among the most complex, with an ensemble cast of well over a dozen people and chaptered in a way that keeps going back in time and showing the same events from different perspectives, prior to a grand finale with an ironic twist. The first theatrical feature of Shanxi-born film-maker Zhang Pu 张璞, following his online rural horror The Soul of Confused 鬼谷山庄 (2016), it features a colourful cast of non-starry character actors and precision, storyboard direction but failed to impression the box office, with a nothing RMB4 million.
Set in northern Shanxi province, and shot around the director’s home municipality of Huairen, about 300 kilometres west of Beijing, it’s a tour de force of jigsaw construction, starting at a roadside restaurant on the edge of Yunzhou town where the owner, Deng Ziteng, is trying to drum up business. The opening 20-minute chapter sets the scene with him visited first by his separated wife demanding a divorce, and then by her local gangster boyfriend offering a case of cash if he’ll sign the divorce agreement. After refusing both, Deng Ziteng leaves the case at the gangster’s home that evening and returns to his eaterie, where he organises a surprise birthday party for his girlfriend (the daughter of renowned local restaurateur Old Song), during which a bag containing an antique vase is dumped outside and a shot rings out. Events then start fanning out in the next chapter, which begins sometime earlier in the day and introduces a whole host of other characters, including the gangster’s sworn enemy, a hitman from Hong Kong, Old Song’s family, and a prized noodle-sauce recipe that’s supposedly hidden in a buried antique pot. By an hour in, and further time-shifts, the plot is as tangled as a bowl of that scrumptious Shanxi speciality, knife-cut noodles 刀削面.
That, of course, is the whole point: a labyrinthine brain-teaser in which everyone is scrabbling around to get rich or simply survive in a god-forsaken community – a rural version of an urban, get-rich-quick comedy in which the protagonists’ tunnel vision is half the joke. To Zhang’s credit, it does all hang together in often very clever and humorous ways. Where the film disappoints – and shows its origins as a purely intellectual exercise on paper – is in its lack of emotional architecture: the movie is basically on the same level all the way through, with no dramatic highs or lows and no characters the viewer can genuinely root for. The audience is constantly asked just to admire the cleverness of it all.
Performances are all fine, with much fun had from aping the gutteral dialect and Zhang’s d.p., Liang Wei 梁伟, sketching a believably dusty landscape and simple, tasty food. Standouts among the ensemble cast include blank-faced Wang Dazhi 王大治 (the title character in Wang Mao 我不是王毛, 2014; sleazy lawyer in Vengeance Is Mine 六连煞, 2019) as the hapless roadside restaurateur, TV’s Gao Feng 高峰 (who actually comes from the region in which the story is set) as the vain local gangster, cherubic veteran Li Yu 李彧 (the gang boss in Memento 记忆碎片, 2016) as his nemesis, and Hong Kong TV’s Luo Dahua 骆达华 (okay in offbeat Mainland psychodrama Insistence 守株人, 2012) as the comically blighted hitman.
As explained at the start of the film, the Chinese title (literally, “Grey Monkey(s)”) is a dialect word used in northern Shanxi province that roughly means “Bad Guy(s)”. (At the end of the film the word is translated as “tricksters” in the English subtitles.) The film is often referred to as Destines, but this is simply the French title under which it world premiered at the Montréal festival. On the film itself the non-Chinese title is clearly Destinies.
CREDITS
Presented by Beijing Scenepo Media (CN), Huayi Brothers Pictures (CN), Foshan Gongjiang Pictures (CN), Zhejiang Yifei Cultural Media (CN). Produced by Beijing Scenepo Media (CN).
Script: Zhang Pu. Photography: Liang Wei. Editing: Gao Ziyu, Jiang Yijun. Music: Liu Jia, Su Hongliang. Title song: Liu Jia, Su Hongliang. Art direction: Zhang Herui. Costumes: Liu Lanying. Sound: Xu Weibing, Tu Hao. Visual effects: Liu Song. Executive direction: Hou Haoting.
Cast: Wang Dazhi (Du Ziteng), Gao Feng (Qin Shousheng/Qinshou), Luo Jingmin (Old Song, father), Li Yu (Wu Jiu/Uncle Five/Mac Five), Luo Dahua (Xiaohuangmao/Punk Hair, hitman), Wang Jingyun (Song Yujiao, Song’s daughter), Li Yang (Yin Cha), Ma Jingjing (Yi Meng), Zhang Chong (Huang Liang, taxi driver), Wu Haitang (Fan Huahua), Wang Siyuan (Song Siyuan, Song’s son), Lv Yiding (Liu Chun, police captain), Ji Li (Gen, tramp), Biaozi (Leng Housheng/Dummy), Xue Jingqian (Yang Cuo), Gao Zihan (bean-jelly shop owner), Huang Chong (pottery specialist), Qi Xiaoxiao (Hao Lihong), Zhao Jun’an (Sha, boss), Zhang Xi, Ren Liping, Li Yunsheng, Wang Jianjun (Uncle Five’s gang members).
Premiere: The World Film Festival (Chinese Film Festival), Montréal, 1 Sep 2018.
Release: China, 23 Jul 2019.