Scene from "The Lake of the Wild Geese" with actor Fan Liao: Gangs of Wuhan
Photo: bai_linghai / eksystentWhat's the point with these motorcycles? Even in "Fireworks in broad daylight", the film with which the Chinese director Diao Yinan won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2014, motorcycles of every cubic number played a major role. Unforgettable is the scene in which the drunk policeman Zhang (Fan Liao) is stolen his stylish motorcycle in a snowy tunnel driveway. From then on he moved on a rickety moped over the black ice of the dark, sparkling noir thriller.
Liao Fan also plays a policeman in "The Lake of the Wild Geese" - and now he has a more powerful vehicle at his disposal. The question is whether it will be of much use to him in the winding streets and dilapidated buildings of the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Together with an armada of motorized civil investigators, he hunts down the young gangster and police murderer Zhou Zenong (Ge Hu), who is rewarded with a high reward. Zhou had actually only tried to prevent an impending gang war.
At the beginning of the film, the local thieves are taught the art of cracking a motorcycle via a live tutorial in a damp basement. A very amusing idea, but the subsequent distribution of the predatory areas does not suit some heated upstart. There was a shooting, then a night race through the rain-soaked surrounding area, during which there was a spectacular beheading and - unintentional - death of the policeman. Zhou is hiding in a suburb at one of the region's numerous bathing lakes, which soon looks like a Far Eastern version of Brighton from "Quadrophenia": scooters and mopeds whiz around wildly, gangsters and cops merge into a rolling campaign of revenge by competing clans.
It is no coincidence that the film is set in Wuhan, the city that has become world-famous as the epicenter of the corona pandemic in recent months. For Diao, who shot his film there long before the outbreak of the virus and presented it in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in spring 2019, Wuhan was simply a place that offered him the necessary atmosphere of urban impoverishment and economic transformation in the heart of China - and some large bodies of water.
Femme fatale at the crossroads
Because the real main character is the young "swimming companion" Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun-mei, also known from "Fireworks"). The prostitute who buys holidaymakers on the beach is hired by Zhou's ex-accomplices as a middleman. She meets him in the - of course - pouring rain in the concrete pillar labyrinth of a train station - a masterful noir scenery, translated into the neo-realism of modern Chinese art house cinema.
In fact, Zhou was expecting his long-estranged wife. But Shujun (Wan Qian) is being monitored and blackmailed by the police. Liu, the femme fatale is at a crossroads: should they hand them over to Zhou and share the reward with the gangsters, as planned? Or will she help the fugitive in his quest for moral salvation - and thus also save her own honor?
Diao films all of this with his sense of scenes, tableaus and meticulously staged set pieces, which was already on display in "Fireworks in bright light days". He saturates the shadowy world of the noir film with bright neon light and wet shimmering green, yellow and red. Like his Danish neo-noir colleague Nicolas Winding-Refn, who appeared in the Bangkok thriller "Only God Forgives" or his mini-series "Too." Old To Die Young "uses the same color palette, he often persists in his pictures for a long time, so that one can ponder the moods of the film in peace.
Again and again he loosens the tension with anarchic humor, for example when a group of party guests in formation to the German evergreen "Dschingis Khan" trudges across the dance floor - or when the undercover cops who are still dancing wear sneakers with fluorescent soles while chasing a suspect in the nocturnal forest .
Spit back into sour reality
Some fantasy elements as well as action-packed (and suddenly brutal) fistfighting sequences also quote the fate of the broken heroes of traditional Chinese wuxia cinema. But the director denies his rushed staff deep passion or real feelings. Even when Liu and Zhou come to a tender moment of relaxation in the rowing boat on the lake, which culminates in a blowjob, Liu's professional spitting over the railing quickly brings the film and its audience back from romance to sour reality.
As in the celebrated predecessor film, these condemned cities remain ciphers, whose sadness and longings are viewed from a distance rather than actually being felt. The suggestive power of the film does not prevent that: On their agile scooters and motorcycles, the Gangs of Wuhan try to keep up with the turbo-pace of social and economic change in China. One or the other moral accident is priced in, getting up afterwards is a matter of luck.
Icon: The mirror
