(This is a lot longer than the sort of thing normally found in this thread, but I’m reluctant to create a dedicated thread when it will likely be a number of months before this is out anywhere with subtitles. So I’m sticking this here for now.)
Jiang Wen’s
Gone with the Bullets will be playing soon at the Berlinale. This is great news, because a good chunk of the elite film press corps will be going in cold and exposed to what they might well regard as the ravings of a madman. But as the saying goes, there’s a method to the madness, and if the film plays as you'd expect from a movie with
nine screenwriters—including a famous playwright, a famous novelist, an up-and-coming novelist, and the PR director of Jiang's production company—it’s also indisputably Jiang’s film, and even more self-revelatory in its way than the semi-autobiographical
In the Heat of the Sun. (Be warned that some of what's below could be considered
spoilers, though I don’t consider any of them serious enough to warrant the spoiler tag. If you're the type who doesn’t want to read in advance about
any plot developments past the first act, stop reading after the fifth paragraph.)
A key thing to keep in mind here is that this is Jiang’s first film as a director since
Let the Bullets Fly in 2010. That got a decent amount of international attention, at least by the standards of Chinese films, but more important is how it was received in China. For some time it China’s highest-grossing domestic production of all time, and probably the only film to hold the title that really deserved it. It might be the closest thing China has to a consensus favorite, beloved by both critics
and “ordinary” viewers. Everyone expected he would stay the course, and Jiang went from a popular actor who directed artsy, festival-oriented films to a creator of crowd-pleasing blockbusters. Four years later, he ends up doing... this. It’s way too facile to say that
Gone with the Bullets is a $50 million prank, but it might just be that Jiang’s mordant sense of humor also includes a perverse streak of self-sabotage.
Gone has been received in some quarters as though Jiang were setting off stink bombs in theaters, and while
Let the Bullets Fly broke records left and right, its follow-up won’t break even. He’s responded the way artists sometimes do in these situations, expressing regret that audiences didn’t “get it,” but he surely had some idea this was going to happen, and indeed the film itself occasionally suggests it.
Part of the issue might be that
Gone isn’t much of a follow-up to
Let the Bullets Fly. The title similarity exists only in English—they have totally different titles in Chinese, with
Gone’s translating as “a step away”—but the PR still gave the impression that this was a more direct successor than it actually is. It turns out they don’t have much in common beyond the time period (1920s China) and certain themes, and for the purposes of watching
Gone with the Bullets, it’s more important to know how
Let the Bullets Fly was received than to have actually seen
Let the Bullets Fly (though you should see it anyway because it’s great). The most overt similarity is the pairing of Jiang with fellow Beijingese star Ge You, as self-styled “adventurers” named Ma Zouri (Jiang) and Xiang Feitian (Ge). Wu Qi (Wen Zhang), a
nouveau riche warlord’s son, hires the duo to enhance his reputation and “turn my new money into old money,” which for some reason involves sponsoring a beauty pageant for Shanghai courtesans.
The pageant sequence runs a full 25 minutes, and while it serves some plot functions—mainly introducing the female leads, Wanyan Ying (Shu Qi, distractingly dubbed into a northern accent) and Wu Qi’s sister Wu Liu (Zhou Yun)—it’s really more of an extended teaser that encapsulates the film’s tone and structure. The sequence is an exhausting string of anachronistic, hypersexualized dance numbers broken up by crosstalk routines between Ma and Xiang; similarly, the film as a whole is divided between extravagant set pieces and long, loopy dialogues with Carrollesque wordplay and illogic.
Let the Bullets Fly could be described this way as well, but while it was never strictly “naturalistic,” it took its good time building to the more ludicrous elements, like the townspeople covering every inch of their roads with silverware.
Gone offers no similar grace period: when Ma and Xiang walk out onstage, they’re encased in giant soap bubbles, a stunt considerably less plausible than the usual
kid-in-a-bubble tricks and one I’m confident has never been seen on an actual stage. The dancers move on- and off-stage with mysterious speed and set changes occur almost instantly between cuts. The rest of the film isn’t in quite the same breakneck mode, which is probably just as well, since in that case it would only be
Moulin Rouge! Redux. But the level of stylization remains consistently high.
Case in point: when pageant-winner Wanyan reveals her love for Ma, they have a long conversation about marriage (with Ma’s amusing interpretation of the phrase “I do”), then embark on an opium binge that includes a joyride through an oversized CG rendition of the Bund, the Moon crashing into the Earth (no, really), and Wanyan’s accidental death. Ma stands accused of her murder and heads to the Wu family mansion, where he meets their somewhat addled patriarch (Liu Linian, who co-starred in Jiang’s ’86 debut
Hibiscus Town) and his shrewish wife (Hung Huang, the “Chinese Oprah”); he also discovers Xiang Feitian in a compromising position, a delicate matter given that Xiang has a day job with the police. Ma can’t convince everyone of his innocence, not least because can’t remember the night in question, but he’s sufficiently charming that they allow him to walk away.
Here Jiang takes a page from an actual incident in 1920, when Shanghai went bonkers over a dissolute young man who murdered a concubine; perhaps the most notable outcome was
China’s first docudrama. In that case, though, the accused’s guilt was apparently beyond doubt, and while his real-life model was speedily captured, Ma spends the next two years in hiding. But his notoriety only grows over time, and his plight isn’t so much that of the Wrong Man as the Reluctant Celebrity. More accurately, it's the plight of the celebrity who’d much rather be known for something else. But he’s stuck with being Ma the Murderer, largely because too many are invested in his public image as such. (His old pal Xiang, for example, has won fame as a hero cop hunting down a brutal killer.) So Ma must relive his claim to fame—Wanyan’s “murder”—through newspapers, a documentary, a stage play, and eventually a film starring... Ma himself.
The last three are crucial to what Jiang is doing here. The documentary is directed by Wu Liu, who sympathizes with Ma even as her film throws him under the bus. The play stars actor Wang Tianwang (Wang Zhiwen), who goes on to direct the later film-within-the-film. Jiang presents Wu Liu as an ideal capital-A Artist: though she initially accepts the idea of Ma as a killer, her film shows a genuine curiosity about the truth, and her filmmaking is born of a pure desire to create and invent. She hopes to be nothing less than “the Chinese Lumière,” and even builds a monkey-powered camera rig, something I doubt Auguste or Louis ever came up with. Her documentary would’ve been decidedly avant-garde in the actual 1920s, resembling nothing so much as a silent black-and-white Tony Scott flick. Wang is by contrast a pompous hack who sensationalizes an already sensationalized event, is motivated largely by careerism, and is given to pronouncements like “film is an art that can be understood by the whole world”—a comment Jiang almost surely intends as ironic, given its placement in
this particular film.
Unpleasant as Wang is, Ma, Wu Liu, and the rest of their circle are obliged to include him in their plans. He becomes the philistine within; as Jiang puts it, “Wang Tianwang is in everyone.” I suspect Wang’s notions of film and art are echoed in studio boardrooms around the world, and Jiang probably heard it a lot in critiques of
The Sun Also Rises, his similarly divisive and financially disappointing 2007 “comeback.” The the idea of art “for the people” also evokes a doctrinaire Communist attitude that might be
making a comeback in China today. But where the official version defines “the people” as “the
Chinese people,” for many in Chinese film, validation lies abroad. In this light,
Gone’s frequent references to Western films, which
James Marsh dismisses as simple pandering, feel like a playful rejoinder from an artist urged to shoot for the Moon after his last film: if these films are what I should aspire to, then I’ll give ’em to you one after another. (Rumors of a Robert De Niro cameo were nothing more than that, but Jiang makes up for it by literally shooting the Moon.) Jiang even features a crude sort of Francophilia when Ma recalls an old affair with a French student, perhaps referencing Jiang's failed marriage to a Frenchwoman. Later, Xiang coaches Ma on how to act before the authorities of the French Concession, like a producer offering notes. “The French like romance, but you can’t be
too unrestrained”—clearly Jiang didn’t listen. Too bad this couldn’t play at Cannes instead of Berlin. If Jiang “panders” to foreign viewers with his nods to
The Godfather,
A Trip to the Moon, and
L’Amant (!), it’s partly to mock the ambitions of China’s “culture industry,” for whom the approval of Cannes or the U.S. box office is the ultimate honor.
This is all a bit insider-baseball, but
Gone with the Bullets links it to a broader sham cosmopolitanism. The “worldiness” of Old Shanghai is just a shiny façade for the same old greed and corruption, where a money-launderer can hold down a high-ranking police job and rule of law remains a bad joke. (“What difference does it make if he’s killed someone or not?”) That this isn’t entirely dissimilar to New Shanghai (read: New China) is no doubt part of the point. Meanwhile, newly-imported forms of mass media allow for manipulation of public opinion on a previously unimaginable scale, creating a feedback loop where opinion-makers justify their decisions with appeals to public sentiment. All this is bound up with the insecurities of a new elite no more legitimate than the old. The warlord Wu has an implied link to the
Wuchang Uprising (which helped overthrow the
ancien régime only to pave the way for local despots) and hits on a perfect way to turn his new money into old: he marries an exiled White Russian countess, in a Western-style wedding relayed through an interpreter. (The assorted references to Western weddings pay off spectacularly in the film’s nutso conclusion.) For this new ruling class, the trappings of the West are merely a shortcut to legitimacy. Plus ça change: today, the Communist Party fiercely denounces “Westernizing” influences to maintain its own despotism, even as it purports to uphold “scientific” Marxism-Leninism borrowed from the winning side of the Russian Civil War. The Party is never mentioned in
Gone with the Bullets, but could Jiang’s interest in China’s first docudrama have been piqued in part because it was released in Shanghai on the same day the Party was founded in that very city? He’ll never tell.
Nearly a hundred years on, China is still grappling with its relationship to Western “modernity,” coexisting with an assertive nationalism that in its own way also seeks validation from abroad—something Ma and Co. cannily exploit, whipping up patriotic anger to get him extricated from the clutches of the French. It’s a stroke of genius or egotism—probably both—that Jiang sees his own post-
Let the Bullets Fly predicament through roughly the same lens. Jiang can make movies for “the Chinese people,” or for overseas tastemakers and their local imitators, or maybe even for all of the above. The filmmaker himself is a disposable commodity in this framework, capable of being tossed aside and replaced with any number of others who might satisfy these demands.
Gone with the Bullets resists this by taking the filmmaker’s self as its subject, breaking it down into its component influences, impulses, and temptations and examining where these came from. In short, it puts viewers inside a celebrity mind cracking beneath the weight of history and expectations. This was plainly a step too far for many of them, but I hope a lot more will take it anyway.
