Lethal Hostage

边境风云

China, 2012, colour, 2.35:1, 109 mins.

Director: Cheng Er 程耳.

Rating: 8/10.

Manipulative but gripping crime rondo set in the southern drug trade, with a fine cast.

STORY

China, the present day. In southern Yunnan province, on the border with Burma, a young woman (Wang Luodan) visits her widowed father (Ni Dahong) but fails to persuade him to bless her marriage to her husband (Song Honglei). In Beijing, a National Narcotics Control Commission detective (Zhang Mo) from Yunnan is on the trail of a drugs carrier (Yang Kun), but the latter escapes and reaches Mengxiu in southern Yunnan for another pick-up. Chapter 1: The Dog 狗. While transferring the drugs into scroll knobs, the carrier is disturbed in his dingy flat by a young woman next door (Gao Ye) whose dog won’t stop barking at him. He is forced to take measures after her elder brother, the narcotics detective, drops her back home that evening. Chapter 2: The Past 往事. In a rundown mall in Mengxiu, a drugs deal is about to take place in a restaurant. At a clinic opposite, a dentist (Ni Dahong) is asked to do some emergency treatment on an old man, who is accompanied by a sidekick (Song Honglei). The drugs deal goes wrong, and in the chaos the sidekick kidnaps the dentist’s young daughter and escapes back to Burma. Later, the dentist tries to rescue her but fails and is sent to prison back in China. Ten years later, after being released, he’s visited by his daughter (Wang Luodan), now married to the sidekick. Chapter 3: The Daughter 女儿. The daughter has grown up in Burma, where she is a kindergarten teacher and is married to the sidekick, now a successful druglord of his own. Wanting to settle down with his wife, he decides to retire after one last job, a decision which imperils both their lives. Chapter 4: The Past 往事. The narcotics detective goes back to his sister’s flat after dropping her off earlier that evening; he finds it empty but suspects she may not be far away. Meanwhile, the sidekick-turned-druglord, now back in China, arranges a meeting with the drugs carrier for one final piece of business.

REVIEW

From its opening, 15-second shot of the back of a young woman’s head, Lethal Hostage 边境风云 knows exactly what it’s doing and what it wants the audience to experience. A highly manipulative crime drama, divided into a prologue and four chapters which juggle with the plot’s time-line, and shot in a planned way that appears to spring straight from a storyboard, it maintains its grip on the viewer not only through sheer technical artifice but also by a tip-top cast that manages to breathe life into potentially cut-out characters and climax in a surprisingly moving end. This second feature by writer-director Cheng Er 程耳 is a powerful follow-up to his equally controlled brain-teaser Unfinished Girl 第三个人 (2007) and, though seemingly a one-trick pony, actually repays repeated viewings.

Where Unfinished Girl was largely set in a northern Chinese apartment where an insurance investigator is held captive by his apparently crazed sister-in-law (Gao Yuanyuan 高圆圆, in one of her least-known but best performances), Lethal Hostage is largely set in sub-tropical landscape around the Burma border, where drug lords ferry their wares across to southern China for pick-up. (The film’s Chinese title roughly translates as “Border Squalls”.) After a young woman revisits her father after a space of time, and asks him to bless her marriage to a man he doesn’t like, the rest of the movie fills in the past and the present of the three people, as well as the lives of another three connected with them. Basically a rondo-like story centred on six characters, Hostage artfully juggles events (and the audience’s perceptions) in a high cinematic, calculated way.

In its game-playing and fractured structure, the movie recalls other crime dramas like heist movie Green Hat 绿帽子 (2004) by Liu Fendou 刘奋斗 (and his much less successful Ocean Flame 一半海水一半火焰, 2008), and even the recent The Man Behind the Courtyard House 守望者  罪恶迷途(2011) by Fei Xing 非行. Among the producer credits it’s no surprise to find the name of Ning Hao 宁浩, director of brain-twisters Crazy Stone 疯狂的石头 (2006) and Crazy Racer 疯狂的赛车 (2008). Though it does have its fair share of ironic black humour, the take of Cheng, who graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 1999, is much less playful than that of Liu or Ning, and with none of their emotional excesses. But he’s helped by a cast that is absolutely perfect.

As the deadly drugs-carrier who doesn’t think twice about murdering anyone who gets in his way, Inner Mongolian-born husky-ballad singer Yang Kun 杨坤 physically fits the role in an offbeat piece of casting. He’s well matched by TV actor Zhang Mo 张默 (the best friend in Liu’s The Pretending Lovers 假装情侣, 2011) as the equally dour narcotics cop on his trail. But the film belongs to two much more experienced actors: top-billed Sun Honglei 孙红雷, who’s made a whole career out of expressionless characters (both serious and romantic), as the sidekick who becomes a disillusioned drug lord and veteran Ni Dahong 倪大红 as his sad-sack father-in-law who carries a deeply buried resentment against the icy criminal. Watching these two minmalist actors together is worth the price of admission alone, and in a film that is light on dialogue Sun communciates more with a glance or a twitch of his nose than pages of conversation.

In a largely male movie, Wang Luodan 王珞丹, here very different from her kooky role in Caught in the Web 搜索 (2012), is okay as the cute young woman caught between the two men. But it’s Zhejiang-born newcomer Gao Ye 高叶, who made her name with the 30-part internet drama Love Male Host 爱上男主播 (2010), who has a much more flavoursome supporting role as the cop’s mouthy, bad-girl sister.

Photography by Xu Wei 徐伟 (Unfinished Girl) of the Yunnan locations around the border town of Ruili are clean and precise, contrasted with that by Du Jie 杜杰 (Crazy Stone; Wind Blast 西风烈, 2010; Kora 转山, 2011) in the more dour-looking Beijing scenes. The offbeat score by trip-hop musician Chen Weilun 陈伟伦 is particularly effective in putting dramatic bounce into the early scenes when the audience still has no clue about what is precisely going on.

CREDITS

Presented by Tianjin North Film Group (CN), Beijing Galloping Horse Film (CN), Beijing Union Three Culture Media (CN), Tianjin Binhai Pictures International (CN), Yunnan Culture Investment (Beijing) (CN), Wanda Media (CN). Produced by Dongyangyingyue Film Production (CN).

Script: Cheng Er. Photography: Xu Wei (Yunnan), Du Jie (Beijing). Editing: Cheng Er. Music: Chen Weilun. Songs: Zuoxiao Zuzhou, Chen Weilun. Art direction: Zhong Cheng (Yunnan), Zhang Xiaobing (Beijing). Costumes: Duan Xiaoli, Jia Liying. Sound: Wu Na, Yang Jiang. Action: Nie Jun. Visual effects: Xu Jian (More Visual Production). Executive directors: Ji Jiatong, Liu Yizhou (Yunnan), Ge Zi (Beijing).

Cast: Sun Honglei (sidekick/drug lord), Wang Luodan (his wife), Ni Dahong (her father), Zhang Mo (narcotics detective), Yang Kun (drugs carrier), Gao Ye (detective’s younger sister), Zhang Yanqing, Meng Jianxin, Liu Yizhou, Wang Jiandong, Meng Haoqiang, Hong Chang, Ye Ting, Hu Baidu, Li Min, Feng Xiaofei, Xiao Long, Huang Shunjie, Jin Liu, Wei Da.

Release: China, 17 Aug 2012.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 27 Aug 2012.)