The Unbearable Lightness of Inspector Fan

暴走神探

China/Hong Kong, 2015, colour, 2.35:1, 122 mins.

Director: Luo Zhuoyao 罗卓瑶 [Clara Law].

Rating: 6/10.

Period murder mystery has a strong first half but then loses its mojo.

STORY

French Concession, Shanghai, 13 Mar 1924. The son of a Qing dynasty constable, Fan Ruyi (Ruan Jingtian) is by his own words “the idlest detective in the French Concession”. Due to thin blood vessels, his body can’t handle stress, and because of a trauma in his youth he throws up whenever he has physical contact with a woman. Fan Ruyi is summoned by a gangster boss (Gao Jie), who knew his father, and is paid to move a young woman, Song Xiaoqiao (Yang Zishan) – whom Ruyi assumes is the gangster’s mistress – from the seedy hotel in which she is staying. Song Xiaoqiao refuses to go with Fan Ruyi, so he pays a newspaper boy, Monkey (Liang Wuran), to keep an eye on the hotel. When he comes back later, Song Xiaoqiao has vanished; subsequently, a friend of Monkey, Six (Yang Zihao), is found dead outside the hotel and the manager, Liu (Zhou Xinghua), has disappeared. While Monkey and Fan Ruyi talk in the latter’s home, the building is set on fire and they are shot at. Monkey takes Fan Ruyi into hiding on a sampan outside town where Six’s blind elder sister, Huilan (Zhou Dongyu), lives. Fan Ruyi invents a story that Six had to leave in a hurry and is on a boat to a better life in Southeast Asia. The next day, Liu is found dead in some woods with Fan Ruyi’s name card on him. Fan Ruyi is questioned and tortured by the Eight Warriors, a group of enforcers controlled by the gangster boss; then he is pampered by their leader, Smiling Tiger (Liu Yiwei), in order to find out where Song Xiaoqiao is. Smiling Tiger tells him she’s the favourite daughter of a Sichuan warlord and is to marry General Zhao the following month; yesterday General Zhao and her father received a telegram saying she’d been kidnapped; if she’s not found, General Zhao will block the French Concession off from the opium trade (one of its main sources of income), which will cause social chaos. Fan Ruyi maintains he has no idea where Song Xiaoqiao is. Later, he’s magically rescued by the gangster boss, who later lets him go. Two days later, he sets out to find Song Xiaoqiao using a signed copy of Yu Dafu’s novel Sinking 沉沦 that she had in the hotel. The trail leads to an American private college, McIntyre School, where he and a colleague, Bao (Xu Xiaowen), interview a mysterious pupil, Li Wenxin (Zhang Jingjing).

REVIEW

Five years after her flop fantasy-romance Like a Dream 如梦 (2009), director Clara Law 罗卓瑶 makes a qualified comeback with The Unbearable Lightness of Inspector Fan 暴走神探, a murder mystery set in ’20s Shanghai that has a strong, individual first hour before losing its direction and dramatic mojo during the second half. Law has always had problems with structure, and with sustaining a natural rhythm in her films; unsurprisingly, her best movies are the more free-form Fruit Punch YES！一族 and Autumn Moon 秋月, both from her Hong Kong heyday. Fan is no exception, working okay in bits but with none of the overall dramatic arc expected of a whodunit – a fault that’s disguised in the first half by the script’s intriguing exposition but laid bare thereafter when the mystery plot increasingly fails to fulfil its promise.

Despite all that, Law’s film – only her fourth feature (and second set in China) since moving to Australia 20 years ago – is still a huge improvement on the fanciful, pointless Dream, and looks like a major attempt by the Macau-born director, now 57, to reposition herself within the Mainland mainstream after a couple of decades culturally adrift. Alas, despite a fairly high-calibre cast, the film, released during the Lunar New Year run-up, flopped in China.

The exposition is certainly arresting, with the Neapolitan tune O sole mio on the soundtrack as the viewer is thrown into the bustling international entrepot of ’20s Shanghai and the world of Fan Ruyi, “the idlest detective in the French Concession”, whose de facto office is a crowded teahouse and whose favourite book is Yu Dafu’s 1921 depressive classic, Sinking 沉沦. Looking more like a penniless writer than a police detective, Fan Ruyi is thrown into a classic whodunit set-up as he’s summoned to the mansion of a gangster boss and given what seems a simple assignment: to move the man’s presumed mistress from a seedy hotel to another hiding place. The plot quickly fans out in bizarre ways, as the girl turns out to be a gutter-mouthed harridan, has a copy of Sinking by her bedside, and then immediately goes missing. The bodies soon start piling up as Fan Ruyi find himself dragged down into a mystery he only half comprehends.

Taking up the first 40 minutes of the movie, the plot’s first two days (of 10) are packed with suitably larger-than-life characters and suitably mysterious incident, with Fan Ruyi finally arrested by a weird group of police enforcers for the murder of the hotel manager, tortured on an exotic collection of instruments, and then magically freed. Performances are on the button, in a picaresque crime-novel way, and Law and her key technical crew – US-born, Australia-based d.p. Sion Michel (Like a Dream) and Hong Kong p.d. Xi Zhongwen 奚仲文 [Yee Chung-man] and costume designer Wu Lilu 吴里璐 [Dora Ng] – manage to make period back-lot Shanghai look less familiar than usual and with a more lived-in feel. It’s when the plot pauses for breath at the 40-minute point, and sets out on the development section, that it starts to lose its sense of direction: the solution to the mystery is rather pedestrian and hardly emerges organically from any clues, while the villain of the piece is suddenly introduced and then dominates the final half-hour. Some extended codas only prolong the pain of the final hour.

Almost unrecognisable under a ’20s haircut and specs, plus five o’clock shadow, Taiwan’s Ruan Jingtian 阮经天 (Monga 艋舺, 2010; Paradise in Service 军中乐园, 2014) here makes a virtue of his lack of presence, creating a shambling, scruffy detective who’s not quite as stupid as he looks but is still out of his depth for a large amount of the time. The problem is that the script (by Law’s longtime writing partner, husband Fang Lingzheng 方令正 [Eddie Fong]) gives him no other character with whom to build a strong relationship to sustain the film as it twists and turns. In the event, the most affecting relationship is between the detective and a spunky newspaper boy who helps him.

On the female side, the elfin Zhou Dongyu 周冬雨 (Under the Hawthorn Tree 山楂树之恋, 2010; My Old Classmate 同桌的妳, 2014) is pretty much thrown away in a side role as a blind orphan, leaving the the main dramatic burden to Yang Zishan 杨子珊 as the girl at the centre of the mystery. Yang has her moments (especially when verbally whipping Ruan’s detective) but her character keeps slipping in and out of focus, and the talented young actress doesn’t get the chance to create a rounded role in the way she did in So Young 致我们终将逝去的青春 (2013) and the Chinese Miss Granny 重返20岁 (2015, aka 20 Once Again). In a bizarre decision that only underlines the film’s indecision over what it wants to be – murder mystery? spoof whodunit? noirish romance? larky period adventure? – Yang also pops up briefly in a fat suit as the detective’s wife.

Supports are characterful, especially Liu Yiwei 刘仪伟 as the enforcers’ oily boss, Zhao Lixin 赵立新 as the gangster’s assistant, and Zhang Jingjing 张晶晶 as a mysterious student. As a rich kid with a powerful father, 23-year-old Yang Yang 杨洋 (The Left Ear 左耳, 2015) isn’t really up to the dramatic demands of his role, while Taiwan veteran Gao Jie 高捷 [Jack Kao], though smoothly commanding as ever as the gangster who sets the whole mystery in progress, lacks any sense of menace.

A properly composed score might have helped to bind the film together, but the practice of using chunks of classical gobbits only increases the bittiness, and the final face-off between hero and villain is scored in a spectacularly inappropriate manner. Cutting by veteran Australian editor Jill Bilcock is as smooth as possible in the circumstances.

The Chinese title roughly means “The Wild Detective”, in an explosive sense. The film is also known as Shanghai Noir.

CREDITS

Presented by Le Vision Pictures (CN), Le Vision Pictures (HK) (HK). Produced by Le Vision Pictures (CN), Film Unlimited (HK).

Script: Fang Lingzheng [Eddie Fong], Luo Zhuoyao [Clara Law]. Photography: Sion Michel. Editing: Jill Bilcock, Hayley Miro Browne. Music: Lin Junhui [Lam Kwan-fai], Chen Yubin [Julian Chan]. Production design: Xi Zhongwen [Yee Chung-man]. Art direction: Wang Zhiqing. Costume design: Wu Lilu [Dora Ng]. Sound: Liang Zhida, Chris Goodes. Action: Lin Di’an [Dion Lam]. Visual effects: Zheng Yaoming.

Cast: Ruan Jingtian (Fan Ruyi), Zhou Dongyu (Huilan), Yang Zishan (Song Xiaoqiao; Fan Ruyi’s wife), Yang Yang (James Wu), Gao Jie [Jack Kao] (Boss), Zhao Lixin (Boss’ assistant), Jin Song (Thunderbolt), Zhang Jingjing (Miss Wang/Li Wenxin), Liu Yiwei (Smiling Tiger), Du Haitao (editor), Guo Qiucheng (Zhao Ning), Liang Wuran (Xiaohou/Monkey), Anders Nelsson (McIntyre School head), Xu Xiaowen (Bao), Li Yang (Xiaoma), Liu Bai (servant), Meng Fanhua (Short-Legged Tiger), Deng Taihe (Tiger Dog), Wang Gang (Leopard Head), Sun Jiaolong (Buddhist monk), Zhou Xinghua (Liu), Yang Zihao (Xiaoliu/Six), Lu Shaohua (Fan Ruyi’s father).

Release: China, 16 Jan 2015; Hong Kong, 26 Mar 2015.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 3 May 2015.)