The Golden Bear at last year’s Berlin film festival was awarded to this movie from Chinese writer-director Diao Yi’nan. It is a diverting and downbeat noir, which at one point seems to pay homage to Carol Reed’s The Third Man. It never quite catches fire, but it has a curious atmosphere of its own: menacing, pregnant with unease.
Zhang Lili (Fan Liao) is an ex-cop traumatised by a brutal shooting he witnessed five years before while on the trail of a killer leaving chopped-up body parts in piles of coal. Now a drunk and a loser, he works as a security guard and becomes obsessed with a new case: corpses chopped up in the same way, but with a macabre new detail – the feet have ice-skates attached. With the weary indulgence of his former police colleagues, he begins to investigate and conceives an obsession with the first victim’s beautiful and mysterious widow (Lun Mei Gwei), who works at a dry-cleaner’s.
Taken at a stolid, unvarying pace, the film doggedly grinds towards an ingenious conclusion, but with not much in the way of thrills or style along the way. There is one great scene: that initial horrible shootout, filmed in cool, blank long-shot. It won’t be long before some movie brat over here rips it off.
