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The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan, 2019)
🕑 Added 2019-11-04 16:28:24 +0000 UTC
"Overcorrection," my driver's ed teacher called it. Cannes, having made the mistake of keeping Bi Gan's dreamy but meticulous Long Day's Journey into Night out of competition in 2018, decided to give the bump-up to this superficially similar Chinese offering which, taken on its own merits, is an Un Certain Regard-level offering, if that. I should confess, this is my first go-round with Diao. I haven't even had the chance to catch up with his previous film, Black Coal, Thin Ice, which won the Golden Bear back in 2014. That's a significant oversight on my part. But based on The Wild Goose Lake, I'm not in a terrible hurry.
My dominant thought through much of Diao's film was that it's a lot harder to make a Wong Kar-wai film than people seem to think. Although there are certainly moments of cribbed Hou-isms (particularly the urban motorcycling of Goodbye South, Goodbye), The Wild Goose Lake is primarily an attempt to take a husk of a story and gussy it up with saturated light. Most of the film is suffused with a piercing, sickly green, but there is also an obsession with reflective neon and the blare of city lights broadcasting their primary hues across the night sky. Combined with some clumsily orchestrated extended flashbacks, this practically cries out of comparison to Chungking Express and Days of Being Wild.
None of these surface affectations can disguise a fundamental emptiness at Wild Goose's core. The story of Zhao Zenong (Hu Ge), a motorcycle thief who accidentally kills a cop and becomes the subject of a citywide manhunt, the film is essentially a waiting game punctuated with flashes of violence, both in memory and in the present. He is accompanied by a "bathing beauty" (read: seaside sex worker) named Aiai (Kwei Lun-mei) who is there to provide background information about Zenong's estranged wife Shujun (Regina Wan), and to be a generic gangster moll / possible femme fatale.
But neither of these characters are ever provided with enough emotional heft to upstage the pure tactile surface of Diao's cinema, his self-satisfied camera moves or compositions. One gets the sense that people are there to fill out prescribed genre functions in a throwback to the 80s / 90s cinΓ©ma du look, the junk food days of Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix. Although actually, The Wild Goose Lake reminds me of nothing so much as those early Lou Ye films -- Suzhou River, Purple Butterfly, Summer Palace -- that promised so much but never really delivered. But he's still at it, proving that Diao isn't wrong to think you can go far on miles of style.
