The Bold the Corrupt and the Beautiful
血观音
Taiwan, 2017, colour, 2.35:1, 110 mins.
Director: Yang Yazhe 杨雅喆.
Rating: 6/10.
A strong cast is let down by flat direction and a needlessly oblique script in this period crime drama.
STORY
Taiwan, the present day. Tang Zhen (Ke Jiayan), the chairwoman of one of Taiwan’s biggest companies, Shengtang Group, rushes to hospital after receiving some news by phone. Some 20 years earlier, Tang Zhen (Wen Qi) had lived with her elder sister Tang Ning (Wu Kexi) and their mother Tang She Yueying (Hui Yinghong) in Mituo township, near Gaoxiong, southern Taiwan. Their mother, the widow of a general who had served in Myanmar, ran an antiques business that she used as cover for her criminal activities, helped by Tang Ning and the young Tang Zhen. With a broken marriage already behind her, Tang Ning doused her life in alcohol, drugs and sex, including with two Burmese gangsters (Chen Wukang, Shi Mingshuai) used by the family. Tang Zhen helped out, watching and learning. The mother’s current ambitions were focused on a huge local land/development deal in nearby Xiushan. Via her friends Lin Sang (Yin Zhaode), head of the agricultural association, and his Japanese wife (Okubo Mariko) she wined and dined the wife (Chen Shali) of legislative council head Wang – whom she was backing in a future leadership contest against party secretary Feng Jiangang (Liu Shangqian) – as well as other movers and shakers. Tang Ning arrived late but smoothed things over when the dinner was interrupted by a drunken member (Ying Weimin) of the local planning agency. Tang Zhen had become close friends with Lin Sang’s teenage daughter Lin Pianpian (Wen Zhenling), who was having a clandestine affaire with the family’s 21-year-old stable boy, Wang Jinshan, aka Marco (Wu Shuwei). One day, however, Lin Sang’s wife found out about the affaire and sacked him. Following a dinner at the Tang residence, the Lin family, plus their driver and butler, were shot by gangsters; only Lin Pianpian survived, in a coma. The police commissioner (Liu Yueti), who once served under Tang She Yueying’s late husband and was a family friend, appointed police captain Liao (Fu Zichun) to investigate the case. He discovered that, after being sacked, instead of taking a train out of town Marco had come back to the Lin farm, as Lin Pianpian had decided not to leave with him. Also, Tang Zhen was caught on CCTV arriving at the station just after Marco had left. Sought by the police, Marco was sheltered by Tang Zhen in her family’s greenhouse. Next, the body of Duan Zhong, one of Tang Ning’s Burmese gangster lovers, was found. Lin Pianpian woke up in hospital but could not say much when questioned by police. Eventually, Liao’s team discovered that NT$31 billion had gone missing from Lin Sang’s account, in an elaborate money-laundering operation to buy land in the Xiushan development project.
REVIEW
One of Taiwan’s most eclectic directors, Yang Yazhe 杨雅喆, comes up with his most eclectic movie so far in The Bold the Corrupt and the Beautiful 血观音, a wannabe drama of criminal/political collusion in 1990s Taiwan that’s kept going more by its three lead actresses than by Yang’s script and direction. As the ruthless, politically manipulative matriarch of a provincial crime family, Hong Kong veteran Hui Yinghong 惠英红 [Kara Hui] makes a powerful, suitably iconic lead, backed by Taiwan stage actress Wu Kexi 吴可熙 as her sex’n’drugs-addled daughter and Taiwan-born, Mainland-raised Wen Qi 文淇 (Angels Wear White 嘉年华, 2017) as the teenage member of the family. Supporting performances, peppered with veteran names, are also strong, but the film never realises its potential thanks to Yang’s annoyingly oblique screenplay and totally unatmospheric look and direction. It made a brief impression on Taiwan’s Hollywood-dominated box office in late 2017 (NT$78 million) but as of mid-2018 has not been released in the Mainland market.
Yang, 46, began as a writer and then director of TV drama and finally, after some films for the island’s Public Television Service, made his theatrical feature debut with the slightly offbeat kids’ movie Orz Boys! 囧男孩 (2008). Since then he’s only directed one other feature, the much more ambitious but way less successful Gf*Bf 女朋友 男朋友 (2012), which tried to bundle up 25 years of Taiwan social and political history with thoughts on love, friendship and being gay during those years. Just as the three leads in that film managed to partly obscure the fact that Yang had nothing original to say about the characters or the period, so the performances by Hui, Wu and Wen in Bold often hide the fact that the film is sailing under false colours.
Starting in the present and then flashbacking to the main story by about 20 years – the exact time is left vague – Bold centres on a leading crime family, aided and abetted by political collusion at the highest levels, that has its eyes on a lucrative development scheme in southwest Taiwan whose progress is affected by a mass shooting. The opening, plus the film’s operatic Chinese and English titles, lead the audience to expect a provocative (and bloody) wallow in corruption at all levels; but not only is the story set safely back in the 1990s but also the political background is so fuzzy and the narrative pitted with so many gaps and unexplained/unshown developments that it barely makes sense as a political drama. Even putting that aside, Bold doesn’t succeed as just an o.t.t. crime movie: the photography by Chen Keqin 陈克勤 (Shuttle Life 分贝人生, 2017), though neat and clean, is entirely without atmosphere to underpin the performances, and the film as a whole has no consistent visual style or effective musical score.
What’s left is a series of individual moments – mostly social occasions or meetings in which the dialogue bristles with double meanings as loyalties are formed or tested – in which Hui manages to steer the family ship between various potential disasters. Playing the Hong Kong widow of a famous (presumably Nationalist) general, Hui is consistently entertaining as she flatters and entertains bigwigs with practised charm, occasionally breaking into her native Cantonese when she loses it. But she’s given a run for her money by Wu, 35, a regular in the arty films of Taiwan’s Zhao Deyin 赵德胤 [Midi Z] (Ice Poison 冰毒, 2014) but mostly a theatre actress, who’s just as good as the equally ruthless daughter who salves her conscience via drugs, alcohol and sex with the hired help. Fourteen-year-old Wen (previously known as Chen Wenqi 陈文淇) has the quietest role of the three leads, watching and learning from her elders, but as in Angels she brings an intensity to her role, hinting at a destructive, pubescent sexuality that’s even directed at her best female friend. Along the way, veteran Chen Shali 陈莎莉, 69, is memorable as a practised political wife, Chen Peiqi 陈珮骐, 40, as a sharp-tongued political aide, Wen Zhenling 温贞菱, 25, as the pampered teenage friend of Wen’s character, and newcomer Wu Shuwei 巫书维 as the bit of rough she has a fling with.
It’s also typical of Yang’s disorganised screenplay that the flavoursome device of using a traditional “narrator” – played by Hokkien folk musician Yang Xiuqing 杨秀卿, 83, with her yueqin and dark glasses – is progressively dropped as the film proceeds, as if Yang isn’t sure what to do with it – thus robbing the film of another level of badly-needed theatricality. The film’s Chinese title literally means “Blood Guanyin,” an ironic reference to the Chinese goddess of mercy.
CREDITS
Presented by CMC Entertainment (TW), Atom Cinema (TW), Ko-Hiong-Lang (TW), CS Productions (TW). Produced by Atom Cinema (TW).
Script: Yang Yazhe. Photography: Chen Keqin. Editing: Chen Junhong. Music: Ke Zhihao. Art direction: Cai Peiling. Styling: Wang Jiahui. Sound: Du Duzhi, Jiang Lianzhen. Visual effects: Dong Mingxing, Jiang Wenjun.
Cast: Hui Yinghong [Kara Hui] (Tang She Yueying), Wu Kexi (Tang Ning), Wen Qi (Tang Zhen), Chen Shali (Mrs. Wang, wife of legislative council head), Ke Jiayan (adult Tang Zhen), Xiulan Maya (banquet singer), Wang Yue (county mayor’s wife), Chen Peiqi (speaker’s special assistant), Wen Zhenling (Lin Pianpian, Lin Sang’s daughter), Fu Zichun (Liao, police captain), Ying Weimin (Gu Xianzhong, planning agency official), Wu Shuwei (Wang Jinshan/Marco), Yin Zhaode (Lin Sang, agricultural association’s director), Okubo Mariko (Fujiwara Seiko, Lin Sang’s wife), Shi Mingshuai (Duan Yi), Chen Wukang (Duan Zhong), Yan Yulin (Jiakui, Tang Yueying’s godson, reporter), Wang Weiliu (council head), Lin Zhiru (county mayor), Ding Qiang (Wang, legislative council head), Liu Shangqian (Feng Jiangang, party secretary), Liu Yueti (police commissioner), Yang Xiuqing (yueqin player/narrator), Wang Weiliu (Xu Tianfa, speaker), Zhang Yang, Hu Tao (police detectives), Li Quan (adult Tang Zhen’s assistant).
Premiere: Busan Film Festival (A Window on Asian Cinema), South Korea, 15 Oct 2017.
Release: Taiwan, 24 Nov 2017.