In the Mood for Noodles
In only his second departure in eight years from the wuxia genre, Zhang Yimou's A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP is a retelling of an early Coens' classic.
Zhang Yimou: Showing teeth in his BLOOD SIMPLE remake
With this new film, Zhang Yimou may be at a turning point in his career. Competing at the Berlinale, the movie by the Chinese director, A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP (China), is his take on BLOOD SIMPLE (USA, 1984), the first Coen brothers feature. It plots the story of a noodle shop owner's wife, who cannot stand her husband anymore, and who manages to buy a gun. The husband on the other hand, a very jealous man, hires a private detective to kill his wife, since he has learned about her cheating on him. From that moment, every character – including three other workers at the noodle shop – will evolve in a chaotic universe, where appearances can be very misleading.
The Chinese director breaks with the seriousness of his first features (RED SORGHUM, 1987 and RAISE THE RED LANTERN, 1991), and leaves the martial arts of his most recent ones (HERO, 2002, and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, 2004). There are quite unexpected changes on several levels, such as the presence of black humor (which of course is a typical characteristic of the Coen brothers cinema) and the use of quite a simple plot, which differs from the convoluted script of THE CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER (2006), for instance. Thus, the making of this film represents a certain challenge for Zhang Yimou, who has tried out a very different genre, in quite an effective way.
Another characteristic of A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP is its total lack of music. Zhang Yimou, who used to work with grandiloquent music (such as Shigeru Umebayashi's compositions), emptied his movie of every single piece of music. This absence of score is however replaced by the musicality of the movie, through the editing, characters, images and camera moves. Somehow, the viewer never regrets the lack of proper music, nor the characters’ temporary muteness. Sun Honglei, who plays the role of the detective, hardly ever speaks, but compensates with his perfect presence on the screen.
As always, the director uses some spectacular landscapes. Here, a major part of the outdoor sequences were shot in a Western province of China, where deserted mountains, which look as if they were shaped by blood rivers, offer a marvelous pleasure to the eye. On the other hand, although it does not use any CGI, colours are contrasted so strongly that sometimes the beauty of it appears way too artificial.
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