Tainted Love
鹦鹉杀
China, 2023, colour, 2.35:1, 100 mins.
Director: Ma Yingxin 麻赢心.
Rating: 4/10.
Ambitious but stylistically messy drama about a woman who hunts down her online scammer in a seaside town.
STORY
China, spring 2013. Zhou Ran (Zhou Dongyu), 30, a single, independent woman working as a simultaneous translator in Beijing, has an online romance with a man who calls himself A Chang and says he is in Singapore. When he says he needs some money, Zhou Ran sends him RMB550,000 – all her savings – and then hears nothing more from him. She is an early victim of a form of online scamming – the so-called shāzhūpán 杀猪盘 (“pig slaughter plate”) – that started making headlines around 2016 and is been mostly directed at independent metropolitan women. Nine months later, in the run-up to Chinese New Year, Zhou Ran travels south to Fujian province, east China, to the seaside tourist town of Linguang where she and a similarly scammed friend, Pang Ning (Li Meng), have traced “A Chang”. Pang Ning, who’s already there, has found that the scammer’s former girlfriend was called Chen Ting. Zhou Ran finally traces a Chen Ting (Cai Xiangyu) who fits the bill but it turns out that the A Chang she knew died two years earlier. Zhou Ran keeps bumping into a young travel agent, Xu Zhao (Zhang Youhao), who’s very friendly and invites her along on a local tour of an island he’s conducting the next day. She makes an excuse, but secretly follows him as he goes to meet an old friend, Lin Zhiguang (Zhang Yu), who’s come to stay. Lin Zhiguang tells Xu Zhao he’s broke but hasn’t come to ask Xu Zhao for money. Next day Zhou Ran secretly follows the two men to the island, where a mist falls and all three end up bumping into one another. As they take the boat back together, Zhou Ran suspects that Lin Zhiguang may be “A Chang”, as his voice sounds very similar. Lin Zhiguang approaches a people smuggler, Ming (A Mao), who arranges to smuggle him out of the country on a boat leaving the following evening. That evening Zhou Ran goes to a karaoke bar with Xu Zhao and Lin Zhiguang, where she has a private talk with the latter. He admits he once had a girlfriend in Beijing whom he hurt badly as he was in a difficult situation that he was lucky to get out of alive. He wonders aloud if she’ll ever give him a second chance; Zhou Ran says there no second chances in life. Next day she decides to stay on in Linguang and she spends the day with Lin Zhiguang. She’s still not 100% sure he is “A Chang” and doesn’t know if he has recognised her. That evening he abandons Zhou Ran in town to keep his appointment with the people smuggler; but when he spots plainclothes policemen staking out the meeting point he rejoins Zhou Ran, apologises for accidentally leaving her alone, and says he’ll cook a fish meal for her and Xu Zhao at the latter’s flat. During dinner all three drink a lot and Xu Zhao confesses his love for Zhou Ran. Then Zhou Ran suggests they all play a true-or-false drinking game.
REVIEW
Hot on the heels of No More Bets 孤注一掷 comes another scamming drama, Tainted Love 鹦鹉杀. But although it also tries to be something more than just its subject matter, this first feature by Mainland-born, Madrid-based film-maker Ma Yingxin 麻赢心, following a couple of shorts, ends up as a confused mess, difficult to become engaged with emotionally and suffused with half-baked artsy touches. Released a month or so after the mega-hit Bets, it scraped a meh RMB39 million, largely on the appeal of female lead Zhou Dongyu 周冬雨.
Unlike Bets, the film focuses on one particular type of online scam and a small number of people – the so-called shāzhūpán 杀猪盘 (literally, “pig slaughter plate”), in which the victim is first “fattened up” romantically and then “slaughtered” in a financial con. Aside from No More Bets, the subject was also dealt with in the poorly scripted anti-scamming police drama Butcher Hunter 猎屠 (2022); but unlike those two films, no police investigation is involved here and the scammer is not part of a huge operation based in Southeast Asia. (If the film’s internal dates are correct, the film is set during 2013-14, when this form of scamming was not so well known publically.) Writer-director Ma instead uses the scam as simply a jumping-off point for her story of revenge that turns into a complicated maybe-love drama.
A brief intro shows Beijing-based simultaneous translator Zhou Ran (Zhou Dongyu) falling for the corny blandishments of a man who calls himself “A Chang” and then wiring most of her savings to him when he says he’s in difficulties. At that stage the audience doesn’t know anything about Zhou Ran, except that she’s a (possibly lonely) urban singleton, though the man’s chat-up lines are so corny that one would imagine any woman would see through them, especially a 30-year-old making her own way in Beijing. Flash forward nine months and Zhou Ran is heading south to track down the scammer and take some kind of terrible revenge on him.
It’s never made clear how she and a female friend (who was also similarly scammed by a different man) have managed to track “A Chang” to his hometown and find the name of his ex-girlfriend there. Nor how the friend, who’s clearly very smart – and smartly played by the classy Li Meng 李梦 (I Love You 我要和你在一起, 2022) – was ever scammed in the first place. So, from the very beginning, Ma’s script is not exactly convincing. However, the meat of the film is reached around the 25-minute mark as, after a series of convenient coincidences, Zhou Ran comes face to face with a voice she recognises as that of “A Chang”. The rest of the film then juggles several ideas: is he really “A Chang”? if so, has he also recognised her? is the man’s friend, a young travel agent who takes a liking to Zhou Ran, also a professional scammer? and does Zhou Ran gradually fall for “A Chang” and ditch her revenge plan?
On paper, Tainted Love has all the ingredients for a teasing, suspenseful drama, mingling love and revenge. And for short stretches, as the viewer is left in the dark as to what the characters are thinking and really mean, it does have its moments. Zhou Dongyu, now 31, is a past mistress at characters who don’t reveal their feelings easily (Under the Hawethorn Tree 山楂树之恋, 2010; Better Days 少年的你, 2019), and here she keeps the audience guessing until the final minutes. But with mixed signals also coming from the other two leads – effectively, but no better, played by Zhang Yu 章宇 (An Elephant Sitting Still 大象席地而坐, 2018; Manchurian Tiger 东北虎, 2021), 41 but looking 10 years younger as the maybe “A Chang”, and Zhang Youhao 张宥浩 (Five Hundred Miles 交换人生, 2023) as his disciple/pal – the film lacks a clear emotional line for the viewer to identify with.
Technically things are okay. The largely handheld photography (that gets very wobbly in the drinking sequence) by d.p. Wang Jiehong 王階宏 (indie drama Striding into the Wind 野马分鬃, 2020) provides no special look beyond the occasionally dreamy. The absence of a decent score is no help for an audience trying to find its bearings, and the final half-hour is especially garbled and confused at a script level. This is a film that desperately needed some extra writers and a strong creative producer 监制.
The film was shot around Xiamen city, Fujian province, Apr-Jun 2022. During production its English title was Dancing Green. The Chinese title literally means “Parrot Kill”.
CREDITS
Presented by Beijing Wishart Media (CN), Shanghai Turan Movie (CN), Golden Dragon Pictures Beijing (CN), Joina Movie Industry Development (CN), Shandong Yuhao Times Film & TV Investment (CN), Aranya Pictures (CN). Produced by Shanghai Turan Movie (CN).
Script: Ma Yingxin. Photography: Wang Jiehong. Editing: Li Dianshi. Music: Chen Xiaoshu. Art direction: Huang Jialun. Costume design: Wu Lilu [Dora Ng]. Sound: He Anqi.
Cast: Zhou Dongyu (Zhou Ran), Zhang Yu (Lin Zhiguang), Zhang Youhao (Xu Zhao), Li Meng (Pang Ning), Cai Xiangyu (Chen Ting), A Mao [Hu Maotao] (Ming), Jiang Qiming (taxi driver), Wu Lilu [Dora Ng] (female lay Buddhist), Li Bingyuan (Ming’s younger brother), Cai Yuanfei (policewoman).
Release: China, 15 Sep 2023.