"A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop" Features Lots of Schtick — Chinese Style

Comments (0) By Nick Pinkerton Thursday, Sep 30 2010

Following up his Beijing Olympics opening-ceremony mega-production, Zhang Yimou remakes the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple by dressing it up in flamboyant silk and translating it to Mandarin. The honky-tonk of the Coens' Southwestern noir becomes a noodle-shop compound on the edge of a Western China painted desert, sometime in the feudal era. Owner Wang (Ni Dahong) cruelly harasses his younger wife (Yan Ni), pushing her into the arms of an effete assistant (Xiao Shen-Yang). Wild cards include a snooping detective (Sun Hunglei) specializing in adultery, and an unheard-of innovation imported by a whirling dervish merchant: a pistol. Woman, gun, and shop in play, Yimou engineers a set piece that lasts all through one very active night, with a shrinking cast double-crossing each other while crisscrossing the compound courtyard on tiptoe. There's little dialogue in this stealthy sequence, but a soundtrack of great precision. This sustained scene is well-made, but not worth making—like the film as a whole, despite its rare stand-alone pleasures such as a choreographed noodle preparation where a small wad of dough is juggled and spun out into parachute width. Those with a higher tolerance for bumptious jestering—from a yipping and mincing Xiao, or Cheng Ye as a bucktoothed jelly-belly—may, however, cry "masterpiece." They are instructed to seek out the longer Chinese cut, which apparently packs in more such interminable shtick, broad as the Yangtze.