Only the River Flows Wei Shujun (2023; China) Zhu Yilong
viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 19 Aug 2024; ticket £12:25
It’s cold in China
It is a sign of the barrenness of Wei Shujun s ‘Only the River Flows’ (even his title feels pretentious and meaningless) that he has to fill out the music track with repeated renderings of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, the Pathétique. My feeling is that Wei has made such promiscuous use of this piece because he was looking to exploit its resonance and gravity in the hope of lending to his shallow scenario some form of emotional depth.
Only the River Flows (ORF) is a police procedural drama whose script (derived from a novel) is structured about a number of intersecting elements feeding into the life of his protagonist, detective Ma: his actual tec work, his personal mental state, the in-house police politics and his home life which incorporates his wife’s increasingly complicated and uncertain pregnancy and term.
Older style police or ‘tec procedural scripts fronted up with ‘process’ and left any socio/political/personal issues to take the form of background shading. Certainly in the best of these films, such as Lang’s ‘Big Heat’ and many of the adaptations of Chandler and Cain’s novels, this restrained intrusion of dark forces worked very effectively. As the narratives developed the contextual shadows often pressed in a little closer revealing to the audience the corruption darkness and emptiness within which the protagonists were enmeshed as they pursued their investigations.
But fashions change with the times. And in times of transparency inclusiveness etc, scripts now have to give the protagonists ‘rounded’ lives. A kind of obsessive literalism dominates the contemporary script rule book. Of course this works well in typical series which employ multiple episodes to string out their narratives, the which need multiple sub-plots to extend the material. Series scriptings have to feature lead characters who have partners (on whom they may cheat) difficult children/families, health and mental health problems, loads of red herrings etc to fill out the time. Whether this works effectively in feature films is a moot question, but certainly in this respect Wei flounders.
Intercutting between the political the procedural the personal and the intimate, Wei’s script is simply a device that switches from one thing to another, from one area of concern to another. In working so many elements into ORF none of the disparate parts have time to strike a relational chord with the audience. The relations depicted are expressed as series of mechanistic events designed to direct the audience’s attention not to engage them. The most obvious example in ORF is the suicide of Ma’s immediate buddy who jumps off the roof of the police station. This is depicted as a sudden unnerving event: the shocking crash of his body thumping onto the roof of a car next to Ma as he is leaving the police station. This suicide event is too extreme for the scenario to cope with, ORF’s narrative occupies a narrow emotive space and incorporating this drastic public suicide into the play out of the story is beyond Wei’s capacity. It has the feeling of being an event that is capricious, in the sense that it’s written into the scenario purely for its value as spectacle.
Likewise the script’s plotting of Ma and his wife coping with the news that her unborn child may well suffer from a genetic defect. The effect, the abort or not not abort positions, is to turn his home life into a piece of emotional soap opera a cheap way of giving Ma’s relationship with his partner any sort of heft or meaning.
Perhaps these scripted events were designed as part of Wei’s vision of his film as a pallet of darkness, his intention to paint a picture of China as a twilight landscape. But the outcome is the feeling that instead of engaging the audience Wei tries to manipulate them by exploiting over determined stimuli. But the mechanistic nature of his script ultimately works against engagement because the characters and their situations are not developed in such a way that the audience is able to invest in any reason to care about them.
The procedural sections of the film are developed so that they become intertwined with Ma’s personal breakdown. Wei cuts away from Ma investigating/tracking down suspects to Ma’s hallucinatory nightmarish encounters with the serial killer. Horror sequences, employing mostly rather familiar tropes, are used to create an interplay of the real and the imagined which in contemporary film making has become the norm. The object filmically is familiar enough: to be adroit enough in the intersplicing of the real and the imagined so that the viewer is confused as to which is which, making the point that the subjective and objective can combine in the realm of personal experience. Scripted intelligently something of this nature can be effectively realised. Mostly however such intermingling comprises a one thing after another style of film making permitting lazy script writers to hammer the audience with a series of tricks, indulging in spectacle at the cost of meaning.
As Wei’s film moves flips through its multiple plots and subplots, it rains is heavily. Wei lets know this is dark China. Rain is introduced sort of as an idea in the first section of the film, and continues as a thematic throughout ORF. Rain is now an established metanym in the movie business: it’s everywhere (perhaps the cinematic rain making technology is easy and cheap now), but like a lot of visual tropes, overuse more or less as a repeated leitmotif, simply diminishes effect.
adrin neatour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
