By Carol Borden
Wen Shipei’s Are You Lonesome Tonight? / Re Dai Wang Shi (or, “Tropical Memories”) (China, 2021) is a remarkably assured first feature film that’s more like a traditional noir than many of the new wave of neo-noirs coming out of China right now--Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake (2019) or Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), for example.
Late one night, HVAC repairman Wang Xueming (Eddie Peng) encounters a recalcitrant ox in the road. Unable to pass, he takes another road and hits a pedestrian. And then, as happens in noir, Wang makes a decision that leads to a chain reaction of events. He disposes of the pedestrian’s body. It’s 1997 Guangzhou and there are no surveillance cameras. Wang doesn’t have a cellphone. No one will know and it’s easy to move on late at night when there’s no way to call an ambulance without waking people up and confessing.
Later, Wang recognizes Mr. Liang, the man he hit, from a missing persons poster and then encounters Mrs. Liang (the legendary actor and director Sylvia Chang) as she is distributing the posters. He decides he will confess to her. Meanwhile, Wang learns more and more about Mr. Liang. And it leads him somewhere dangerous even as he can’t help getting more involved in Mr. Liang’s secrets and Mrs. Liang’s life.
Eddie Peng embodies Wang’s guilt and fear well. He’s tense, silent and curled in on himself. There’s something in him he wants to say, but he just can’t bring himself to. It comes out in sweat, anxiety and cigarette smoke. There’s a great scene where Wang reveals his antihero ambivalence by berating a kid for smoking while stealing the kid’s cigarettes and lighter. Sylvia Chang is perfect as Mrs. Liang, a woman who is not a femme fatale but not exactly a model widow. She’s poised but she cannot cry. She doesn’t miss her husband, but she’s haunted by her past as a wife and mother. And the film occasionally shows us glimpses of her ghosts as she attempts to adjust to life on her own.
Are You Lonesome Tonight? has the lovely use of color I associate with Chinese neo-noir--influenced by the Taiwanese New Wave, Hong Kong films and, I assume, Jia Zhangke, who has his own neo-noir-ish film now, Ash Is Purest White (2018). Are You Lonesome Tonight? also plays with flashbacks, as when Mrs. Liang is haunted by memories of her husband and son or when the film alternates between Wang in 2005 and Wang in 1997. It has a very neat use of a flashlight for spotlighting actors engaged in specific actions during a confrontation on the street. And it has a dance studio sequence, which is another thing I’m starting to associate with mainland Chinese neo-noir.
But there’s also some explicit Freud, who always likes to show up in classic noir.. And composer Hank Lee dissonant strings simultaneously reminiscent of something like Kronos Quartet, classic noir and Bernard Herrmann. And there’s classic noir in the revelation of Mr. Liang’s other life, Wang’s efforts to make good for Mrs. Liang, and especially the arrival of sympathetic police lieutenant Chen (Wang Yanhui) midway through the film. Chen is there to get to the truth, solve Mr. Liang’s murder and catch the killer or killers. Chen is there to try to make sure that crime doesn’t pay. He’s not corrupt. He’s not cruel. He is a cinematic cop reminiscent of Hayes Code era straightforward police. And so it’s clear, in calling Are You Lonesome Tonight a more conventional noir, I am not saying it’s bad. Sometimes you want a more straightforward noir shot in shadows and neon color. Sometimes it’s nice when a police lieutenant solving a murder isn’t corrupt, the “femme fatale” makes out okay and someone sings a torch song.
Just in your own life never take the bag of money. Leave that alone.
I MUST see this film!
ReplyDelete