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Despite the very strenuous efforts of the clowning Yan Ni, playing the philandering and never-named wife to a grumpy and crusty old restaurateur, Zhang Yimou's remake of the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple remains little more than a grating and wholly unnecessary curiosity. Murder and greed and treachery are the coin of the realm here, as before, but Zhang brings little else to the story besides an improved color palette and bad comic timing.
The mood is curious right from the start, with a slapstick performance in a lonely noodle shop by a mad hatter of a Silk Road trader whom everybody calls "The Persian" but who looks and acts more like Jack Sparrow. As the trader twirls and howls to show off his wares to the shop's employees - there don't ever seem to be customers around - and their boss's wife, he finally comes up with something that she wants: a three-barreled pistol. (The film's time period is never quite specified, though it's long enough ago for everyone to be attired in fancifully antiquarian dress and for firearms to be a near-magical novelty.)
A demonstration of a cannon doesn't produce another sale, but it does bring the local police sniffing around to see what all the fuss was about. The police seem unusually preoccupied with the crime of infidelity, which makes Wang's wife and her apparent lover, the already-spineless and jumpy noodle shop employee Li (Xiao Shenyang), even more nervous. While the police chief is a cross-eyed buffoon more given to slurping free noodles than solving crimes, his lieutenant Zhang (the amazing Sun Hunglei) is the very picture of precise detection. It's Zhang, then, who informs the bilious Wang (Ni Dahong) about his bratty bride's dalliance, and Zhang whom Wang hires to kill them both.
Zhang's farcical and liberal adaptation of the Coens' knotty noir is certainly an artistically brave move, but not one that brings anything worthwhile to the story. While some of his modifications pay great dividends - particularly recasting the original's jovially sleazy private detective (M. Emmet Walsh) as the unsmiling, by-the-book but deceptively deviant Zhang - for the most part they simply drag the affair down. The giddy slapstick of the early scenes gives way to a long and mostly mirthless middle stretch. There the original's bloody mechanics of greed, deceit, and evidence and witness disposal is played out at length in cramped spaces, without much ingenuity.
Much like Zhang's last feature, Curse of the Golden Flower, he seems to be content for the bulk of his directorial imagination to focus strictly on the visual. And while this film is practically bare-bones when compared to the opulence of something like The House of Flying Daggers, the setting, with its red-zebra-striped desert valleys, has an appealingly fanciful sensibility. But instead of Zhang's art direction weighing the film down with its stagy beauty, here the film feels heavy and moribund by virtue of its script alone. Where a sharp, noir-ish tang of guilt and recrimination is called for, Zhang can only muster up a turgid tale of mistakes and cheap shtick.
Aka A Simple Noodle Story or San qiang pai an jing.
The mood is curious right from the start, with a slapstick performance in a lonely noodle shop by a mad hatter of a Silk Road trader whom everybody calls "The Persian" but who looks and acts more like Jack Sparrow. As the trader twirls and howls to show off his wares to the shop's employees - there don't ever seem to be customers around - and their boss's wife, he finally comes up with something that she wants: a three-barreled pistol. (The film's time period is never quite specified, though it's long enough ago for everyone to be attired in fancifully antiquarian dress and for firearms to be a near-magical novelty.)
A demonstration of a cannon doesn't produce another sale, but it does bring the local police sniffing around to see what all the fuss was about. The police seem unusually preoccupied with the crime of infidelity, which makes Wang's wife and her apparent lover, the already-spineless and jumpy noodle shop employee Li (Xiao Shenyang), even more nervous. While the police chief is a cross-eyed buffoon more given to slurping free noodles than solving crimes, his lieutenant Zhang (the amazing Sun Hunglei) is the very picture of precise detection. It's Zhang, then, who informs the bilious Wang (Ni Dahong) about his bratty bride's dalliance, and Zhang whom Wang hires to kill them both.
Zhang's farcical and liberal adaptation of the Coens' knotty noir is certainly an artistically brave move, but not one that brings anything worthwhile to the story. While some of his modifications pay great dividends - particularly recasting the original's jovially sleazy private detective (M. Emmet Walsh) as the unsmiling, by-the-book but deceptively deviant Zhang - for the most part they simply drag the affair down. The giddy slapstick of the early scenes gives way to a long and mostly mirthless middle stretch. There the original's bloody mechanics of greed, deceit, and evidence and witness disposal is played out at length in cramped spaces, without much ingenuity.
Much like Zhang's last feature, Curse of the Golden Flower, he seems to be content for the bulk of his directorial imagination to focus strictly on the visual. And while this film is practically bare-bones when compared to the opulence of something like The House of Flying Daggers, the setting, with its red-zebra-striped desert valleys, has an appealingly fanciful sensibility. But instead of Zhang's art direction weighing the film down with its stagy beauty, here the film feels heavy and moribund by virtue of its script alone. Where a sharp, noir-ish tang of guilt and recrimination is called for, Zhang can only muster up a turgid tale of mistakes and cheap shtick.
Aka A Simple Noodle Story or San qiang pai an jing.
