Piano Trojan
钢琴木马
China, 2013, colour, 2.35:1, 88 mins.
Director: Lv Zusong 吕祖松.
Associate director: Cui Siwei 崔斯韦.
Rating: 4/10.
Ambitious drama-thriller about a hacker and a biochem company is let down by script and direction.
STORY
Xiamen, Fujian province, southern China, Sep 1949. As the PLA advances on Xiamen, KMT forces are already evacuating to the island of Taiwan. During a shootout in a church, Huang Cansen (Lian Kai), head of military intelligence at the Xiamen garrison, meets Li Laiya (Zhang Zheng), a refugee from Nanjing who’s been given shelter there. Like Huang Cansen, she is a pianist. He falls for her and arranges for her to accompany him to Taiwan; but just before leaving he discovers she’s a Communist agent who’s been sending coded messages via her music. They agree to meet at the Black Cat Club, where she’s been playing. Gulangyu, Xiamen, Sep 2012. Wang Aming (Zhang Mo) is a brilliant software engineer but spends his time at home playing computer games and doing occasional hacking jobs; his girlfriend Li Qingzi (Lin Yixin) teaches music at a kindergarten but is bored with her job and fed up with being the breadwinner. One day Wang Aming photographs a piano melody on an old gravestone, as a present for Li Qingzi. However, she’s unimpressed and sells her valuable upright piano and moves off the island, getting a job in Xiamen as a pole dancer. In the city, Wang Aming sees it on sale for RMB200,000 and determines to get the money to buy it back. He agrees to help university friend and fellow software engineer Kang (Liu Tong), who runs a hacking service: the job, worth RMB1 million, involves breaking into the secret Star Programme of Da Song Biology, whose CEO, Xu Donghui (An Zehao), has long been suspected by police of handling illicit drugs. Hired by Da Song’s chief financial officer, Chen Jiazhou (Jin Peng), Wang Aming locks Xu Donghui out of the Star Programme by changing the password; Chen Jiazhou then demands RMB5 million from Xu Donghui for the new password. During the handover, Chen Jiazhou is killed by Xu Donghui’s assassins (Power Station) and Wang Aming barely escapes alive. Avoiding both the police and the killers back at his flat in Gulangyu, he eventually manages to get off the island and hide out in Li Qingzi’s flat in Xiamen. When he refuses to go to the police, she reluctantly agrees to shelter him. Wang Aming is determined to find out the secret of the Star Programme and, following the clue of some photos taken at a Hakka community in the Nanjing mountains, Li Qingzi agrees to drive him there.
REVIEW
An ambitious drama-thriller that aims way too high for its limited budget, and is let down by a confused script and style-less direction, Piano Trojan 钢琴木马 still has enough quirky elements to be moderately entertaining, partly through its setting on the well-known island of Gulangyu just off Xiamen, southern China. The first and only theatrical feature so far by director/producer Lv Zusong 吕祖松, whose background was in commercials and has since made online movies, it’s of curio interest for being written and co-directed by Cui Siwei 崔斯韦, a scriptwriter for Ning Hao 宁浩 (among others) who went on to write and solo-direct the impressive action-thriller Savage 雪暴 (2018). It made no impression at the box office, with a tiny RMB910,000.
Starting with an episode set in Xiamen, on the eve of Liberation, with a KMT intelligence officer and a pretty Communist spy he falls for, the film then flashes forward to a seemingly unrelated story 63 years later involving a young slacker/hacker, his browned-off girlfriend, and a plot about dark deeds by a biochemical company. (The Chinese title, “Piano Wooden Horse”, refers to a Trojan virus linked to a piano melody.) The connection between the 1949 and 2012 stories is peripheral at best, and not clearly explained – which also goes for some of the plot, which is laid out in a disjointed and unconvincing manner. Lv and Cui have some offbeat ideas but lack the directing skills to make the most of them – such as the finale, with the hero and heroine tied up in quayside chairs in the rain (see poster, above).
Performances by dour Mainland actor Zhang Mo 张默 (the best friend in The Pretending Lovers 假装情侣, 2011; narcotics cop in Lethal Hostage 边境风云, 2012) as the hacker and Taiwan actress-singer Lin Yixin 林逸欣 (Summer Times 夏天协奏曲, 2009) as his piano-playing girlfriend are okay but no more, and Taiwan rock musicians Power Station 动力火车 [You Qiuxing 尤秋兴, Yan Zhilin 颜志琳] lurk around as assassins. The largely handheld widescreen photography by Luo Pan 罗攀 (who subsequently became the regular d.p. of veteran director Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚) doesn’t glamourise the touristy Gulangyu but more visual style and composition would have been welcome.
For the record, Zhang (the son of veteran actor Zhang Guoli 张国立) was arrested in 2014 on marijuana-related charges and briefly imprisoned in 2015, effectively ending his career.
CREDITS
Presented by U&A Assembly Film & TV (CN). Produced by U&A Assembly Film & TV (CN).
Script: Cui Siwei. Photography: Luo Pan. Editing: Zhang Yifan. Music: He Miaoshu. Art direction: Meng Xun, Ma Haitao. Styling: An Lei. Sound: Wang Yanwei, Wang Changrui. Visual effects: Pu Yue (Vision Unit). Executive direction: K’erbanjiang.
Cast: Zhang Mo (Wang Aming), Lin Yixin (Li Qingzi), Power Station [You Qiuxing, Yan Zhilin] (killers), Fu Heng (Wang, police captain), Lian Kai (Huang Cansen), An Zehao (Xu Donghui), Zhang Zheng (Li Laiya), Jin Peng (Chen Jiazhou), Liu Tong (Kang), Ma Lie (Ma Weidu), Huang Sanyuan (piano-shop staff), Lin Xianghong (Jin, boy in shop).
Release: China, 10 May 2013.