From the swampy jungle of Thailand to a park in Hangzhou in the Zhejiang province in China, the road is long, even for a crocodile, whose story begins in July 1990, when she is captured and taken abroad, via the Guangdong black market in the province of Yunnan, and sold to the highest bidder. Bidding are Zhao Big Mouth who wants to put her on his restaurant’s menu, and Liu the Bald, who just manages to buy her for his theme park. On 30 June, 2011, we find Liu the Bald, owner of a park in Hangzou, forced to sell his crocodiles to a businessman who promises to offer them a better life. Amongst the animals is Ah Mao, the female crocodile from Thailand, who in twenty years has grown to a gigantic eight metres, weighing two tonnes. That day, Liu the Bald was supposed to return to Beijing to his family, who he has left on the sidelines for many a year. But a businessman does business and the crocodiles go directly to the restaurant belonging to Zhao Big Mouth, who finally gets his hands on Ah Mao. But you don’t mess about with eight metre, two tonne crocodiles. Ah Mao manages to escape, despite the powerful anaesthetic which should surely have killed her. She escapes to a nearby tea plantation where she encounters and terrorises Wen Yan who, back from Italy after eight years there, left her cheating boyfriend, Zhou Xiaoou, on the motorway. He too finds himself wandering around the same plantation. Her cries from the lamp-post she has clambered up do not attract anyone’s attention and, in an attempt to shoo the crocodile away, her handbag with her savings of eight years of €100,000 (around 1 million RMB), end up in Ah Mao’s jaws. Wen Yan’s desperation at having lost her life’s savings grows when nobody believes her, not even the local policeman, Wang Beiji, known as Wang the Imprecise, thanks to the common knowledge that he never hits his target. The alarm bells ring out when Wang Beiji, who starts to comb the area, finds a sheep torn to pieces at the bottom of the dam. After finding out that Ah Mao has €100,000 in her stomach, Zhao Big Mouth and his men try to track down the crocodile to get the money.
In a story pushing the limits of probability, in which a gigantic crocodile roams around plantations, hiding in a lake, terrorizing folk, the film has no ambitions if not to be entertaining, but the director Lin Lisheng does not refrain from adding a touch of black humour to the proceedings, presenting a ‘misunderstood’ crocodile, worried about adapting to a hostile environment, defending herself and trying to avoid becoming a meal for hard to please clients in an illegal restaurant, to lay her eggs, look after her hatchlings, just like every mother of every species. In the end, the mother crocodile, the monster of the story, ends up being the most ‘humane’ and ‘healthy’ one in this melange of characters who people the film. Wen Yan loses her bag with a head-spinning amount of cash in it, just for the thrill of “bringing her euros with her wherever she goes, so that she can touch it and really feel that she owns money.” Zhao Big Mouth does not pull back in the face of danger, he is totally unperturbed about the idea of risking the lives of his men or the possible death of his butcher in the pursuit of money and business interests; the local policeman, Wang Beiji, with his gun in his hand, finally finds the right occasion to prove his courage and get his own back on those who have for years labelled him simply as the one who always misses his target, he who pathetically practises at home on video games. And Liu the Bald himself earned his living at the expense of a crocodile and, unable to save her and sure of her trust in him, coerces her to a place where her life will be taken. It seems that, in order to survive in the jungle which is China today, there are crocodiles in sheep’s clothing, and we can but shed a tear for the real ones.
Maria Ruggieri