You walk into an unfamiliar office, flanked by coworkers you do not yet know, to begin a job you do not yet understand. Who will brighten your afternoons, and who will rub you the wrong way before the first cup of coffee? Where is the true center of the building, where people congregate and business gets done? Where is the dead space, where no one ever goes?
You could guess at these questions, but you’d probably guess wrong. The first impression of a place—an office, a college campus, a vacation getaway, or a new neighborhood—is nothing like the command of prolonged inhabitancy. No matter how intuitive we think we are, the unknown still plays havoc with the human radar.
Zhang Yimou’s unusual Chinese gangster film Shanghai Triad is about these feelings of disorientation: It not only depicts them but creates them within the audience. For all the movie’s period trappings and violent plot twists, it is basically an experimental piece—a crime tale told through the eyes of a child who misses more than he sees. The film develops in such a way that the audience is always craning its collective neck in hopes of seeing around the story’s corners, but Shanghai Triad reveals nothing before the proper moment. It’s a unique filmgoing experience—and, for the patient, a rewarding one.
Shanghai Triad follows a teenage boy, Shiusheng, as he leaves the Chinese countryside for a job in the big city, chasing the whims of his mob-boss cousin’s mistress, a capricious singer. Out in the streets, a war between the mob boss and his rival is simmering and threatening to boil, while in the club where the chanteuse headlines, an illicit affair is highlighted through the lyrics of popular songs. The events of the film take place over only one week, yet in that week Shiusheng moves from the crowded dance halls of 1930s Shanghai to the still of a small island, where a partially obscured narrative of betrayal reaches a bloody end.
Since we see only what Shiusheng sees, the only character we really get to know is the singer, played by Yimou regular Gong Li in a typically passionate performance. The rest of the players—the mob boss, his henchmen, his rivals, and Shiusheng’s good-natured uncle—come through in fragments, as seen through keyholes, mirrors, and the shadows that play across doorways. Our perception of these fiends and heroes changes along with Shiusheng’s, but the haunting mystery of the film is how we are suppose to perceive Shiusheng himself. How much does he really understand of the turmoil around him? Is he seeing more than he actually sees?
Many of Yimou’s fine previous films—Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, the incomparable To Live—have utilized a passive protagonist, but never before has his lead been so blank-faced, so silent, so hard to read. Shiusheng has moods, but they are subtle and fleeting. Mostly he stands in service, quietly awaiting instruction and eluding any attempt by the audience to pin him down. As a stylistic choice, the quietude is admirable, but it does drain the film of some feeling. Unlike Yimou’s other films, Shanghai Triad is something more to puzzle over than to take into your heart.
What a puzzle, though! Seemingly random images—a stained dagger, a boy walking straight into a mirror—take on greater narrative and metaphorical meaning as the story progresses. A silly song becomes a declaration of unrequited love. A name overheard through swaying reeds signals the onset of endgame. The film is so deliberately paced that it lulls the audience, but much skullduggery is afoot just beyond our vision, and if you pay attention, you can glimpse some of it.
The film is not entirely without visceral impact either. The Oscar-nominated cinematography is chromatically impressionistic (tinted blue for night and gold for day), and it changes as Shiusheng’s feelings change. When he first comes to his cousin’s palace, the camera sways about, overwhelmed by the opulence. When he’s worn down by the drudgery of his job, the framing of the pictures is tilted toward the ground.
For the audience, the trouble comes not in guessing the secret motivations of the characters—anyone who’s ever seen a movie before will figure out who’s betraying whom—but in figuring out the plot itself. The true events of Shiusheng’s week are not laid out until the film’s end—at which point, to be perfectly honest, you may feel burned by the way the story has been told. You may feel you missed the real movie, which took place offscreen.
In truth, though, we have gotten exactly the movie Yimou intended to make, and if we think about it hard enough, we may realize it’s much more compelling than the one we kept expecting. The cinema screen, like any other space, takes some orientation; if it’s going to be a livable space, it may have a different center than we had imagined. Shanghai Triad lives or dies with its hero, a boy who gets jerked around and left out of the loop, and we go where he goes and see what he sees. And if, as in the film’s final shot, he is tied upside-down on a ship’s mast, then we too are left there—hanging, dangling, trying to find our footing in midair.—Noel Murray
Shanghai Triad closes Thursday night at the Belcourt.
Twelve Monkeys
The current fascination with courtroom thrillers is a far bigger mystery than the thrillers usually contain. Most people would rather confess to a crime themselves than sign on for jury duty. And yet they’re willing to pay six bucks to see exactly the kind of tense, nerve-wracking, minutely detailed gabfest they avoid in real life. Perhaps that’s the lure—in a cinematic courtroom, we can pretend we’re making those hard decisions without real lives weighing on our consciences. We can place ourselves in any of those roles—judge, attorney, defendant, juror—without placing ourselves at risk, just to imagine how we’d respond.
The only aspect of the legal system The Juror evoked for me was the feeling of being sequestered for a month. Based on a novel by George Dawes Green, The Juror stars Demi Moore as a well-off sculptress and single mother—I’m not even going to ask where a single mom finds time for sculpting—who signs up for jury duty out of civic spirit. As luck would have it, she’s selected to hear the trial of the year: a case involving a Gotti-esque mafioso (Tony Lo Bianco) accused of murder. Trouble is, the mobster has no intention of riding Old Sparky, so he sends his most diabolical triggerman, an evil smoothie called the Teacher (Alec Baldwin), to muscle a juror into pressing for acquittal.
If you’ve somehow missed every courtroom drama since, oh, A Bill of Divorcement, you’ll be amazed to learn which juror the Teacher picks, and how easily he gets to her in the midst of a high-profile case. The setup, however, peals with sweet logic compared to the denouement, in which someone under watch by the Justice Department can leave the country not once but twice. Just how much does it cost to fly to Guatemala? Not much, I guess, when you pull down the kind of bucks a sculptor does.
The contrivance wouldn’t hurt so much if the movie were staged as fast-paced escapism, but the director, Brian Gibson (What’s Love Got to Do With It?), creates an oppressively dark, logy mood that smothers the thrills. Any fun to be had is soured by Ted Tally’s script, which makes sure the movie’s most likable character is not only murdered (in a way that’s both unpleasant and unbelievable) but sexually humiliated first.
In roles worthy of free-cable-weekend fare—the kind that comes on before dawn—Alec Baldwin and Demi Moore transcend their undistinguished material. Moore gives her maternal avenger a fury and conviction (no pun intended) she hasn’t shown since Ghost, while Baldwin’s voracious gaze and honey-dripping voice are a funny put-on of maniacal self-absorption. (When he murmurs that he longs to live and love in a lakeside cabin, he sounds like Robert Kincaid gassed on paint fumes.) In supporting roles, James Gandolfini registers warmly as a noble lug of a hood, while the terrific Anne Heche brightens up the movie briefly as a hip, affectionate surgeon. The actors acquit themselves with honor. It’s the rest of The Juror that’s guilty as hell.—Jim Ridley
