Chinese Filmmaker Wei Shujun's Richly Atmospheric Noir Puzzler Only the River Flows

ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS / He Bian de Cuo Wu

(Wei Shujun, China, 2023, 101 minutes) 

 

There are few genres more self-referential than film noir. As Wei Shujun's richly atmospheric, Mandarin-language noir begins, the Peishui City police chief (Hou Tianlai) requisitions an old movie theater as office space for the county's criminal investigation unit. 

 

By setting up desks on the stage in front of the screen, they're essentially enacting a film within a film. (Wei and co-writer Kang Chunlei adapted the screenplay from To Live author Yu Hua's novella Mistakes by the River.)

 

It's a clever idea, though one inspired by a sad fact, since the grand old theater's closure has more to do with a downturn in the county's economic fortunes than a lack of interest in movie-going. There's also something sad about a police force that doesn't have their own headquarters.

Captain Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong, who put on 20 pounds for the role), meanwhile, sets up shop in the projection booth, surrounded by canisters of film. Through a square opening in the wall, he can observe the detectives, but he's otherwise physically (and psychically) isolated. 

 

Cinematographer Zhiyuan Chengma shot the film on 16mm, making it look more like a movie movie than a documentary or docudrama. The year is 1995, and the officers use pagers rather than cell phones. The film begins in earnest when Ma receives a message about a murder. 

 

Like the noir films of China's Diao Yinan (Wild Goose Lake) and Bi Gan (Long Day's Journey into Night), this one is filled with water. The town, which is located in Jiangdong Province, is situated next to a river, the victim--Wang Fengxia (Yang Cao), aka Granny Four--is found lying by the shore, and scenes are often drenched in rain and mud whenever the detectives set foot outside office or home. 

Through their questioning, Ma and his excitable partner, Xei (Tong Linkai), find that neighbors thought highly of Granny Four, but less so of the young man (Kang Chunlei) she adopted after her husband's death. In fact, they call him the madman; more because they find him strange than because they find him dangerous. From the way they describe him, he sounds developmentally disabled. It's the first sign that conformity rules in this community; if you step outside the lines, you will get shunned.

If the detectives aren't convinced that the madman--his name never appears in the film--who reappears after a brief absence, had anything to do with the murder, they're convinced that a cassette found in the victim's handbag may provide a clue. There's music on one side--and a young woman's voice on the other. Her words reveal a secret love affair with someone named Hong, but the detectives consider the train sounds in the background more significant...though I was never certain why.

 

Ma and Xie proceed to interview a few rather unusual suspects, like a hairdresser who asks for them to arrest him, even though there's no evidence he killed--or even knew--Granny Four. Like the couple on the tape, he's hiding a secret. Xie, in some ways, is almost as offbeat, but in more subtle ways. He hums along to the music on the tape and makes weird train noises when they interview a conductor. Though Jessica Kiang, in her Variety review, cites Wei's "pitch-black sense of humor," I didn't feel he was going for comedy so much as an evocation of a provincial town's secrets, lies, and quirks.

Even before the detectives have solved the first case, another body turns up. They had interviewed the victim, though his connection to Granny Four isn't clear. The chief feels certain he knows who committed both crimes, though he has no proof. He just wants the captain to arrest this person, write up his report, and put the case to rest. Then another--and yet another--body turns up, capsizing the theories of both captain and chief. 

All the while, Ma and his wife, Jie (Zeng Meihuizi, aka Chloe Maayan, who has worked with Bi and Diao), are expecting their first child, only to find there may be complications. Any time something in this film seems easy or straightforward, complicating factors arise. As his personal and professional lives circle the drain, the handsome captain starts to look tired and worn--he was never exactly an ebullient presence to begin with. 

 

The concept of a film within a film returns when Ma watches a slide show featuring images of the suspects and victims over and over again--after all, his office is filled with projectors. At a certain point, the slides start to include images from his own life, both real and imagined, a sure sign that he needs a good night's rest or that he's losing his marbles. His behavior afterward suggests the latter, not least when he starts to see a certain person who may or may not be there. A person he tries to kill. Repeatedly. 

The film's credited actors all leave their mark, but it lives and dies by its lead, and Zhu Yilong gives a star-making performance. Until recently best known as a TV performer, he has started to make waves in China for his movie appearances. From some angles, he recalls Tony Leung, but he's  more compact and somber in affect. His character doesn't even crack a smile until the end, by which point it's hard to tell is he's truly happy or if these lyrical moments--he even sings in one--are really happening. 

The ending suggests that everything works out, except there's something manic about the tone. It could be true, or it could be fantasy. I suspect the answer lies somewhere with the Albert Camus quotation that opens the film: "There's no understanding fate; therefore I choose to play the part of fate, I wear the foolish, unintelligible face of a professional god." 

 

Though Wei has directed two previous features that received a warm welcome at international film festivals--you can stream Striding into the Wind through Prime--Only the River Flows looks set to be the film that puts both men on the map, not least since it became a box office hit in its home country, a notable achievement for an independent feature without clear resolution.

 

If the film plays more like a procedural than a noir--hence the comparisons to Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder--the latter tends to eschew happy endings, so if Only the River Flows is as much a noir as a comment on the noir, well, I think Ma Zhe has a pretty vivid imagination.

 

 

Update: Only the River Flows opens in Seattle for two days, Sept 14 at the Egyptian and Sept 15 at SIFF Film Center. Click here for more information.

Only the River Flows is currently playing at New York's Metrograph and opens at San Francisco's Roxie on Aug 16. Find more dates here, though nothing scheduled for Seattle yet. I'll update this post when there are more opportunities to see it on-screen or online. Images: KimStim (Zhu Yilong and Chloe Maayan), FirstShowing.net (Zhu and Tong Linkai), Roxie Theater (Zhu and Maayan), and Sinema Transtopia (Zhu and projector).

Pedro Costa Captures Singer Jeanne Balibar on Stage and in the Studio in Ne Change Rien

This is a revived version of a Line Out post from 2011 (without any notice, The Stranger purged every post from the internet some time after they pulled the plug on their music blog in 2014).

NE CHANGE RIEN / Change Nothing

(Pedro Costa, France, 2009, 103 minutes) 

Portugal's Pedro Costa spent several years making this meditative movie about the music of French actress and singer Jeanne Balibar. 

In the DVD liner notes, he confesses, "The idea of making a film that revolved around music scared me a little," but he proves himself a natural. 

Costa started shooting before making the acclaimed Colossal Youth, and picked up the thread afterwards. In both cases, he shot in black and white, but because he has no interest in artificial light, most scenes are shrouded in darkness, which fits the dusky alto's nocturnal style, but may frustrate those expecting a more conventional profile--at times, you can't see her at all. 

As with Nico, a possible influence, Balibar isn't the most expressive vocalist, but Costa prefers languid types, like Ventura, the real-life, mononymous figure who glides through Colossal Youth. 

There's no narration or forced storyline, but rather a series of rehearsals and performances in which Balibar talks, sings, smokes, and works things out with her band, making Ne Change Rien a snapshot of the creative process as much as the finished work. The same is true of Costa's 2001 documentary about Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? 

Early on in the film, Balibar says, "We should really try to bring out the silences," which sounds like a description of the director's style (I first wrote about his work here). Costa also works in a voice lesson in which she receives instruction from an unseen coach. Though her ensemble includes bass, drums, and keyboards, voice and guitar always take center stage, resulting is a slow-motion mélange of jazz, chanson, and electronica. 

Like the minimalist works of Andy Warhol--especially 1966 film The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound--Ne Change Rien isn't for everybody, but fans of French pop and chiaroscuro music portraits like Bruce Weber's 1988 Chet Baker profile, Let's Get Lost, will surely find it of interest.

Ne Change Rien is available on home video through Cinema Guild. Special features include additional performances, musical sketches, promotional spots, and the static 2003 short The End of a Love Affair (I also reviewed the DVD for Video Librarian). For anyone who wants more in a similar vein, I would recommend Bertrand Bonello's 2012 concert film Ingrid Caven: Music and Voice. Jeanne Balibar images from Mubi and CineLuso / YouTube. 

Bram Stoker and Thomas Harris Collide in Oz Perkins' Serial Killer Thriller Longlegs

LONGLEGS 

(Osgood Perkins, USA, 2024, 101 minutes) 

As a director, Osgood "Oz" Perkins has a feel for atmosphere. 

Each of his four features looks and feels a particular way, even as he's worked with three different cinematographers (Andrés Arochi shoots  everything here with funhouse-style wide-angle lenses). The films all fall within the horror genre, they're all rather deliberately paced, and they're all predicated on action more than words. Except for 2020's Gretel & Hansel, a decidedly feminist take on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, he writes all of his scripts, including Longlegs, his latest with Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage. 

Considering Monroe's track record in horror--especially The Guest, It Follows, and Watcher--I had high hopes about this pairing (Monroe is now working on They Follow, David Robert Mitchell's long-in-the-works sequel to It Follows). She has a certain grounded quality, which makes it easy to root for her to triumph over whatever over-the-top terrors filmmakers should throw her way, from brainwashed soldiers to psychopathic janitors. 

That's true here, too, though she's never played a character exactly like FBI agent Lee Harker. Possibly because of the way she was raised, Harker is better at dealing with signs and symbols than human beings--she's so bad at banter, in fact, that it's kind of funny. I would assume her surname is a nod to Mina Harker, the amateur detective in Bram Stoker's Dracula, not least since Perkins is an avid fan of Tod Browning's 1931 adaptation (below). If that's the case, then Blair Underwood's Agent Carter (no relation to the Marvel secret agent) is the film's designated Van Helsing and Cage's prosthetic-encrusted Dale Cobble, aka "Longlegs," is the film's Dracula. 

In addition to Mina Harker, Lee recalls Clarice Starling in Thomas Harris's Silence of the Lambs. Just as Clarice grew up without parents, Lee grew up without a father--and her mother (Alicia Witt, a former child actor like Perkins) is a loony tune. Lee also refuses to let anything deter her from solving a series of murders in which Longlegs appears to have been involved. And they must want to get caught, because they keep leaving Zodiac-like messages for her to decode. These sequences recall David Fincher's film of the same name.

The murders themselves recall the from-out-of-nowhere kills in Larry Cohen's God Told Me To, in which seemingly ordinary men snap and transform into murderers, uttering "God told me to" before taking their own lives. If Longlegs sounds like a synthesis of superior novels and films, that's exactly right. It looks like Perkins' work, but most every plot development feels familiar, and I felt much the same about his second film, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and The Blackcoat's Daughter, which this one most closely resembles in regards to an outside force controlling a character's actions--Kiernan Shipka even returns in a small role.

If Longlegs is this film's most original creation, Cage's go-for-broke performance aside, it's also one of the weakest. Your mileage may vary, but the more Lee learns about the lurker, with whom she has a certain connection--not the one you might think--the sillier things get. Suffice to say, dolls are involved. Neon was wise to tease the character in their marketing materials, because it creates the expectation of something terrifying, rather than something ridiculous. And possibly even problematic. 

In addition to Longlegs' penchant for cackling with abandon, the high voice, long hair, feminized features, and It's Pat-like wardrobe render the character genderless. I'm not suggesting they're meant to be nonbinary. I suspect Perkins was just going for what-the-fuck weirdness. Then again, I would like to think that Jonathan Demme meant no offense by the cross-dressing, serial-killing Jame Gumb, aka Buffalo Bill, in his Oscar-winning adaptation of Silence of the Lambs, except Ted Levine's baroque take on the character has long been a thorn in the side of trans viewers--like Matrix codirector Lilly Wachowski--even among those who otherwise love him and his work. 

It's possible that Longlegs represents Perkins' first horror comedy, except Neon didn't market the film that way, and most of the humor feels unintentional, except for Lee's enjoyably awkward banter with Agent Carter's daughter, Ruby. If anything, the film could've used more sequences like that. 

And as much as I love T. Rex, he never makes the lyrics to "Bang a Gong (Get It on)" serve any real purpose, other than as an excuse to quote iconic Marc Bolan lyrics like, "You've got the teeth of the hydra upon you." And to establish that Longlegs is a glam rock fan--so, I guess they aren't all bad?

As with his other films, Perkins creates intriguing mysteries, only to give too much away at the end. Longlegs is no exception, though the character itself remains a bit of a question mark...leaving the door open to a prequel should the filmmaker, and his studio, be so inclined to milk the weirdness further.

Mostly, I credit him with creating something original out of pre-existing material--if you're gonna steal, steal from the best--and even if Longlegs is my least favorite of his films, I look forward to seeing what he does next, and I already know what it is: The Monkey, an adaptation of the Stephen King story. As he told The Hollywood Reporter, "It's deliberately comedic."

Longlegs opens at Seattle multiplexes on Fri, July 12, and at SIFF Cinema Uptown on July 16. Images: the IMDb (Maika Monroe), Universal Pictures (Helen Chandler as Mina in Dracula), and Den of Geek (Nicolas Cage).

A Dazzling Mia Goth Will Stop at Nothing to Achieve Her Silver Screen Dreams in MaXXXine

MAXXXINE 

(Ti West, 2024, USA, 104 minutes) 

The thing about Maxine Minx (née Maxine Miller) is that she is not a good person. Not because she's an adult film star or because she enjoys the occasional bump of cocaine, but because she won't let anything–and I mean anything–stand in the way of her success. 

In X, the first film in writer/director Ti West's retro slasher trilogy, Maxine (Mia Goth in a role that fits her like a black leather glove) turned killer in order to defend herself from two geriatric psychos. By the end, she took some glee in the killing, but Maxine was ultimately a heroic final girl, whereas Pearl is the origin story of a villain (Goth played Pearl, at different stages of her life, in the first two films; there is no Pearl in the third).  

In MaXXXine, Goth is neither hero nor villain, but a little of both: she's an antihero. Maxine does bad things, but it's hard not to root for her success, because she's plucky as hell and her enemies are worse. Plus, no one in these films is without sin; they're all flawed or compromised in some way.

Much like Naomi Watts's Betty (left) in 2001's Mulholland Drive, Maxine doesn't just have looks and drive, she has real talent. If Betty--and her alter ego, Diane--doesn't find fame in David Lynch's nightmarish noir, Maxine will have better luck in Ti West's…though there's a difference between fame and infamy. 

After two films set in Texas, West catches up with Maxine, seven years after the events of X, in Los Angeles. At 33, she knows her days as an adult film performer are limited, so she's been auditioning for metal videos and genre films, like the lead in the sequel to a film-within-the-film called The Puritan. 

In real life, adult film performers rarely, if ever, get cast as leads in non-pornographic features, horror or otherwise. Marilyn Chambers (below) famously appeared in David Cronenberg's 1977 Rabid–she gets a namecheck in MaXXXine–but it didn't make her a straight star (at one point, Maxine is even seen watching Behind the Green Door on video). More often, they're hired to play strippers and murder victims, and not often enough to build a legit career. Even Traci Lords and Ginger Lynn could only get so far. 

I'm certain Ti West is aware of all of this, but Maxine's casting in The Puritan II feeds into the plot and makes for a lovely fantasy–dulled only by the fact that the casting director asks Maxine to bare her breasts during the audition, something often asked of adult film performers, even when the role requires little to no nudity (Ginger Lynn recounts just such a story involving the late Tony Scott in the Cleo/Leo episode of The Projection Booth; fast-forward to 2:59 for all of the depressing details). 

Though Maxine should be on top of the world, she isn't. If her acting dreams appear to be coming true, everything else is falling apart, because she soon attracts a stalker who knows exactly what went down in Texas in 1979 and plans to use that knowledge for some nefarious purpose that will not be revealed until the end of the film. In the meantime, this black leather-clad figure sets out to murder and desecrate everyone she cares about.

I won't say who bites it, but potential victims include her attorney (a toupéed Giancarlo Esposito), her peep show colleague (singer/songwriter Halsey with a pronounced Jersey accent), the director who fought to cast her (Elizabeth Debicki), her bubbly costar (Lily Collins), and her best friend (actor/musician Moses Sumney), a bespectacled video store clerk with a predilection for Judas Priest t-shirts. Even with his sex appeal tamped down, Sumney makes a vivid impression. I hope more acting lies in his future. 

Though Esposito's Teddy Knight, Esq. does what he can to keep Maxine safe, Debicki's Elizabeth Bender, the director, couldn't give a shit as to why she seems increasingly freaked out. And her star isn't the only one, since serial killer Robert Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker, had women throughout San Francisco and Los Angeles on edge from 1984-1985 (local filmmaker Megan Griffiths made a very good telefilm for Lifetime about his reign of terror).

Sophisticated veneer aside, Elizabeth is just as ruthless as Maxine, and if all distractions can be kept at bay, she believes they'll have a hit on their hands. 

If I wasn't familiar with West's work, I might think he had a problem with female ambition, but I don't. Elizabeth isn't wrong that if she fucks up, she might not get to direct again. Studios in the 1980s were infamous for giving women exactly one shot--while providing as little support as possible--before dropping them if their film failed to perform. As the Bette Davis epigram at the outset makes clear, West is more interested in the way the pursuit of fame threatens to turn ordinary human beings, especially women, into monsters. If Elizabeth and Maxine are every bit as ambitious as Pearl, though, they aren't lunatics.

Nor is Maxine the same naïve, if not completely innocent woman she was at 26. She isn't just older and wiser, she's rougher and tougher. Suffering from PTSD, perhaps, but better able to withstand the vagaries of Hollywood.

The reveal of the stalker, a development involving bumbling detectives played by Bobby Canavale and Michelle Monaghan, doesn't come from out of nowhere, but I still found it unsatisfying, though it's consistent with West's work to date, since he's been exploring the ways faith, whether Christian (The Sacrament) or Satanic (The House of the Devil), can lead lost souls down some pretty twisted paths. It's an idea he introduced into the trilogy through the fire and brimstone preacher who appears on Pearl's TV in X. 

MaXXXine is more satisfying when it leans into its atmospheric, steam-rising-from-the-grates-afer-midnight slasher movie meets hair metal video aesthetic with nods to the spiked-heel pleasures of peak-era Dario Argento and Brian De Palma. 

It's most satisfying of all when Mia Goth gets to do her thing, whether Maxine is striking sparks off other characters or just talking to herself. 

There's a notion I've seen bouncing around social media that Ti West doesn't deserve her, a sure sign that the speaker isn't especially familiar with his work. He's a very good director, and he has been since the student shorts he made while studying filmmaking with Kelly Reichardt, who introduced him to actor/director/producer Larry Fessenden, who appears in MaXXXine as a security guard (and has his own horror film currently making the rounds).

It reminds me of a Film Comment profile of Gloria Grahame in which she stated, "Those men never directed me" about such heavy hitters as Fritz Lang and Nicholas Ray. "Maybe," she concluded, "I just did it for myself."  

I seriously doubt Goth feels that way about West, with whom she has worked three times, so it's unfortunate that anyone would feel the need to diminish his abilities in order to elevate hers. Goth didn't write these parts or direct these performances. West capitalized on her considerable strengths, she rose to the occasion, and if anyone deserves stardom more than the title characters of these films: it's Mia Goth. But she didn't do it by herself. After all, it took an Elizabeth Bender to show the world what Maxine could do.

MaXXXine opens nationwide on Fri, July 5, and in Seattle at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Wed, July 3. Images from A24 by way of Variety (Mia Goth), the IMDb (Moses Sumney, Elizabeth Debicki, and Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive), and Etsy (Marilyn Chambers circa Behind the Green Door).