What would you do if you were a husband constantly under suspicion by your paranoid wife ... and you one day find a suitcase floating down a stream filled with frozen body parts? If you are hapless henpecked innkeeper Dashang, you bury the ice encased limbs in the flowerpots of your greenhouse, then act incredibly guilty. This is the initial situation of first-time director Wang Fen’s very black, very funny comedy The Case. Dashang and his wife run a lovely inn in Yunnan’s picturesque Lijiang town. She had once caught him having an affair, and now he’s always guilty until presumed innocent. There’s a “trust crisis” in the air, according to a talk radio show they listen to, and Dashang and wife are living it every moment. He additionally seems beset by some mysterious ailment that keeps him at home, puttering around the inn, constructing oddly charming little decorations. Tending to his plants in his only solace, in the private greenhouse where one fateful day he buries the frozen evidence of someone else’s possible crime. Dashang manages to survive a surprise visit by the local inspection authorities, but his domestic life is already strained to the breaking point. With the addition of a mysterious, voluptuous hotel guest (with a conveniently bed-ridden husband) who seems oddly drawn to Dashang, all hell is moments away from breaking loose. Dashang and his wife’s domestic roles seem oddly reversed, from a gender perspective (in this film by woman director Wang Fen). The wife wields all the power in the relationship: his spinelessness -- he always seems just on the point of scuttling off into a dark corner, like the cockroaches that plague their inn -- in the face of her intense scrutiny is both funny and unnerving. The whole film manages to keep an exciting balance between suspense and comedy, as dryly amusing jealous byplay alternates with the mystery of the body parts, and Dashang’s fear of being discovered. When comedy snaps neatly into domestic farce, as he and his voluptuous guest submit to the inevitable, his burden of secrets becomes unbearable, and the film’s tension becomes electric. A fine cast of seasoned comic actors and newcomers gives The Case its energy and character. Theatre actor Wu Gang (star of Trouble Makers, 2006) is superb as Dashang: his Stan Laurel face is all nervous energy and barely suppressed terror, and he captures both the charm and hang-dog self-loathing of a man completely and amusingly at his wits end. Wu Yujuan is a firebrand as the unnamed wife: those who might remember her from Woman From The Lake of Scented Souls (1993) will be surprised at her sharp comic presence. Wang Sifei is all smoldering eros as the seductively mysterious guest at the inn, and Jia Zhangke fans will be amused to find his favourite actor Wang Hongwei (who also appears in this year’s FEFJ in One Foot Off the Ground) in a key cameo role. Tourist destination Lijiang and its surrounding mountains are shown off to nice effect; and an eccentrically rhythmic soundtrack by Xiao He gives jaunty strong support to the film’s more bizarre flights of fancy. Underlying this pointed farce about domesticity and violence is an comedy of gender anxiety, in which men imagine a world where their traditional dominance has just vanished, like smoke, leaving them face to face with an absurd, blackly comic world both funny and anxiety-ridden. When told with the wit and manic energy on display here, though, the feeling is light and non-threatening: social satire sneaks into mass entertainment, and can really be a lot of fun.
Shelly Kraicer