Review | Cannes 2019: The Wild Goose Lake film review – China’s underbelly exposed in film noir by Diao Yinan
- The only Chinese-language title in competition at the 2019 Cannes festival, its subject matter – urban crime in China – is a surprise in the current climate
- The story of the hunt for a gangster on the run, Diao’s sensational thrill ride is the best neo-noir yet by a member of China’s Sixth Generation of filmmakers
3.5/5 stars
The sole Chinese-language title in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Diao Yinan’s fourth feature is his most ambitious to date. Backed by funds from both China and France, the Chinese filmmaker again attempts to appropriate and Sinofy the film noir genre; his 2014 film in that vein, Black Coal, Thin Ice, won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival.
Like fellow Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye’s recent The Shadow Play, Diao’s The Wild Goose Lake zeroes in on the country’s urban underbelly, where hoodlums, prostitutes and policemen go about their business in mean, neon-lit streets. The film is visually dazzling, even if its storytelling is sprawling at times and its social commentary forced.
Diao offers a glimpse of a side of China one would never have imagined seeing in the current climate in which censors try to suppress anything which deviates from official representations of the country and its dreams of hyper-modern grandeur. Indeed, his film is an object lesson in the eccentricities of the Chinese censorship regime. Who would have thought someone could have a dig – albeit a mild one – at China’s notorious state surveillance system, or its public spectacles celebrating the authorities’ ability to upholding law and order?
Set in 2012 – ie. before current leader Xi Jinping came to power – the film mischievously ticks off all the classic film noir tropes: it begins on a rainy night at a quiet railway station, where a jaded man and a mysterious woman meet.
Wearing a scar and days-old stubble, Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge) is waiting for his wife; dressed in red, Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun-mei) accosts him for a cigarette and tells him the meeting’s off. Through a series of flashbacks, their stories are revealed: Zhou is a gangster trying to flee an unnamed city after killing a policeman in a gangland confrontation gone bloodily awry. Liu is a “bathing beauty” – the euphemism for women providing sex services on the shores of a local lake.
