Are You Lonesome Tonight?
热带往事
China, 2021, colour, 2.35:1, 92 mins.
Director: Wen Shipei 温仕培.
Rating: 4/10.
Derivative, arty crime noir is fatally flawed by its weak lead actor and direction-less screenplay.
STORY
Yuexin city, Guangdong province, southern China, 1997, summer. Driving his van at night through some wasteland, air-con repairman Wang Xueming (Peng Yuyan) accidentally hits a man and later drives on. A few days later, the dead man’s wife, Zhang Huifang (Zhang Aijia), files a missing person’s report and later identifies his body at a mortuary. Wang Xueming arrives to mend her air-con and sees the missing-person flyers on a table. He asks her if she found her husband and she says yes. (On the night of the accident, Wang Xueming, after checking the man was dead, had rolled his body into a ditch. After seeing Zhang Huifang’s flyers on a pedestrian bridge, he had gone to a police station to hand himself in but at the last moment had left, unknowingly bumping into Zhang Huifang on his way out. Re-visiting the wasteland, he had found a key with a metal tag marked “19”. That night, his girlfriend (Jiang Peiyao) had noticed he was preoccupied with something. Then one rainy day on the pedestrian bridge he had seen Zhang Huifang herself, followed her home and, after fiddling with her air-con, put his business card through the door.) Wang Xueming is still working on Zhang Huifang’s air-con when a group of Christian women from the residents’ committee come by to cheer her up. After they leave, Wang Xueming offers to do the job for nothing, and the two have a chat. Later, he follows her around and, when two gangsters (Lu Xin, Chen Yongzhong) come round claiming her husband owed them RMB50,000, he beats them up. She invites him to stay for dinner; afterwards, seeing him nosing around in a room, she tells him to leave. Later, he drives her to buy a burial plot for her husband, during which time she tells him about the death of her son from heart problems. Finally, Wang Xueming gets up the courage to tell her it was he who ran her husband over – which triggers a surprising response from Zhang Huifang.
REVIEW
Shot in summer 2018 and finally released three years later, Are You Lonesome Tonight? 热带往事 is a sweaty, southern China, crime noir that has a very film-schooly look and second-hand feel. This first feature by young Mainland film-maker Wen Shipei 温仕培, who studied in both China and the US, looks like dozens of other arty, offshore Chinese noirs (plus a heavy dose of the Mainland Long Day’s Journey into Night 地球最后的夜晚, 2018) and, like so many of its kind, is fatally flawed by a direction-less script. Produced by director Ning Hao 宁浩 and his company Dirty Monkeys, it managed a moderate hawl (for this type of specialised fare) of RMB64 million in a four-week run, largely on the strength of Ning’s name and those of the two stars, young Taiwan actor Peng Yuyan 彭于晏 [Eddie Peng] and Taiwan-born veteran actress/director Zhang Aijia 张艾嘉 [Sylvia Chang].
Framed as a long voice-over flashback by the main character, as he explains how he ended up in prison, the screenplay by Wen and three others (of whom only Wang Yinuo 王一诺, also a Columbia grad, has any previous, if minimal, film-making experience) is set in the fictional city of Yuexin in Wen’s native Guangdong province during a typically hot and sweaty summer. For no evident reason other than to attract attention, it’s also set in 1997, and is basically about one scruffy young guy’s growing guilt after accidentally running over a man in the dark and not turning himself in. After getting to know the man’s widow – now alone in life, as her son already passed away – he finally gets the courage to tell her what really happened. But, in the film’s one unexpected twist halfway through, it turns out that he is the one who doesn’t know what really happened.
After developing a touching, if edgy, relationship between the young man and the widow, the latter character is then dumped for a good half-hour as the film veers off into a full-on crime noir, with a police detective, two killers, the young guy and a bag of stolen money. Reliable character actor Wang Yanhui 王砚辉 (the father in Back to the Wharf 风平浪静, 2020) gives the second half some anchorage as the police detective, filling the huge acting void left by Zhang, now 68 but looking a decade younger, as the lonely but watchful widow. Between the two, Peng, now 39 and still looking half his age, hardly registers: scruffed up to look “characterful” as an air-con repairman, he simply looks like a young actor who’s been scruffed-up to play a repairman and still hasn’t developed any dramatic smarts beyond charm-filled rom-coms.
Peng is a major reason why Lonesome doesn’t work, but he’s not the only one. Despite its sweaty, umbrous look – courtesy of four DPs, led by Austria’s Andreas Thalhammer and his partner of 10 years Han Xiaosu 韩小苏 (Beijing Carmen 北京卡门, 2015; Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies Angriff der Lederhosen Zombies, 2016) – it generates no genuinely involving atmosphere as the plotting and contents are so second-hand. Aside from its ridiculous American English title – derived from the same Elvis Presley song referenced by the 1991 Taiwan drama A Brighter Summer Day 牯岭街少年杀人事件, whose visual palette Lonesome also draws on – it comes complete with every cliche of noir cinema, from Our Tormented Hero looking into a broken mirror, through rooms lit by shafts of light, to the girlfriend moaning that he is distracted by something. When it could have developed (with better writers and a new lead actor) into a touching story about a young man and a widow linked by fate, Lonesome simply plays like a knowing compilation of every arty noir cliche.
Editing by the experienced Zhu Lin 朱琳 is fine, given the material she’s presented with; scoring by Li Heng 李衡 less so, all harsh, staccato strings and percussion that sound corny. The film’s original English title was the far better Tropical Memories, which is close to the meaning of the original Chinese (literally, “Tropical Times Past”). Though shot in the Mainland – in Kaiping, Guangdong province – the whole film has a curiously Taiwan look and feel that has nothing to do with Peng and Zhang in the lead roles.
CREDITS
Presented by Shanghai Dirty Monkeys Studio (CN), Beijing Jingxi Culture & Tourism (CN), Beijing Huanxi Media Group (CN), Alibaba Pictures (Beijing) (CN). Produced by Shanghai Dirty Monkeys Studio (CN).
Script: Zhao Binghao, Wang Yinuo, Wen Shipei, Noé Dodson. Photography: Andreas Thalhammer, Han Xiaosu, Liu Zhang, Zhang Heng. Editing: Zhu Lin. Music: Li Heng. Music spervision: Huang Zijia. Production design: Zhang Zhaokang. Art direction: Xu Guiting, Lu Wei. Costumes: Chen Ziqing. Styling: Zhang Zhaokang. Sound: Du Duzhe, Li Danfeng, Jiang Yizhen.
Cast: Peng Yuyan [Eddie Peng] (Wang Xueming), Zhang Aijia [Sylvia Chang] (Zhang Huifang), Wang Yanhui (Chen Er), Zhang Yu (blind singer), Jiang Peiyao (Wang Xueming’s girlfriend), Lu Xin (gangster with gun), Chen Yongzhong (gangster), Deng Fei (Xu).
Release: China, 12 Jun 2021.