A Woman, A Gun and a Noodle Shop
Cinema Nova, 23/11/2010
Status: Behind by 8 and a half films
I have mixed feelings about remakes. In general, an American remake of a fairly new foreign language movie (like, say Let Me In) will set me awailing and agrumping. But a Mandarin-language remake of the Coen Brother’s 1984 film Blood Simple set in 18th century China? That, I thought, was definitively worth a look.
A cruel noodle shop owner named Wang hires a bent cop to kill his wife and her boyfriend, who both work for him. The cop has another idea. Lots of people die.
When director Zhang Yimou is good he’s really good (Raise the Red Lantern, Hero) but when he’s bad he makes me want to take to my own eyes with pointy things (House of Flying Daggers, Curse of the Golden Flower). So I was nervous about A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop.
It’s an odd film (as you’d expect, really) but a good one. Yimou picks and chooses from existing sensibilities and film traditions to come up with something that’s not entirely Chinese, but not Western either, and not historically accurate and neither is it modern. Like I said, odd. Yimou has a couple of goes at the over-the-top design and color palette that has worked well for him in the past and creates a mood that can balance both some clever visual jokes and some genuinely tense scenes. Some of the acting slips too readily into slapstick for my liking, but that could just be me.
I’m still not convinced that remakes are a good idea in general, nor that Yimou has made a return to form, but it’s certainly a tick in the “pro” column for each argument.
