A drastic change of pace for Cao Baoping who, after a film dedicated to teenager issues (
, FEFF 2009), making this one even darker with an unequivocally gothic edge. Based on a novel by Xu Yigua,
is an allegorical film which deals with the theme of responsibility, of the relationship between cause and effect, and destiny.
The story revolves around three youngsters who have fallen into crime and who for years go on the run trying to atone for their crimes and escape – fruitlessly – the destiny which awaits them and which turns up in the form of a sharp, meticulous policeman with a steel-clad memory.
The prologue, shot in black and white, which begins with a long sequence of three youngsters fleeing through the woods, is narrated by an off-screen voice which explains the moral of the story, with statements that call to mind the truisms of so many Greek tragedies: “it’s no one’s fault but your own”, “justice is blind” and others.
Seven years pass, the action shifts to the present day, the images are now in colour and two of the fugitives are living together and are trying to get their lives back on track: Yang Zidao works as a taxi driver, one who is always willing to stand up in defence of the underdog, Xin Xiaofeng is a traffic warden and Chen Bijue, who during the flight in the woods received a head injury which seems to have left him mentally infirm, lives in isolation in a small fishing community.
The three are bound together by their old friendship, by their shared sense of guilt and by the love they feel for a little girl they have taken into their care, one who needs urgent and expensive medical assistance…
The arrival of the talented and intuitive new police chief Yi Guchun throws a spanner in the works of the trio: the policeman is convinced that he is still destined to solve the very first case he worked on – the slaughter of a family of five people, including a young woman who was raped before being killed – and this spells out the beginning of the end of the trio’s dreams of starting anew.
The situation is not helped by the morbid obsession of Xiaofeng and Zidao’s landlord, who secretly tapes their conversations, and the casual encounter between Zidao and Yi Guchun’s sister, which will have disastrous consequences on the three men on the run.
The trio’s attempts to vanish become increasingly desperate, but futile. In the end, they are betrayed by their sentiments, or rather their sentimentalism, or even by a deep existential fatigue, due to their having given everything up in order to survive, including the chance of forging friendships, love and any other relationship, bar the one with the little girl, for whom they are willing to make any sacrifice.
The film is peppered with strong images, rarely seen in Chinese cinemas, including one scene which is not so much graphic, but nevertheless explicit, of a homosexual love scene, as well as a capital execution reconstructed with a wealth of detail, and the breathtaking scene of a chase around the cornice of a skyscraper. The conclusion of the film is amoral: as Xiaofeng says to his boss: “Humans are neither good nor bad,” but divine and infernal at the same time, capable of both sublime acts and horrendous evil.
The film, presented in its original version at the International Film Festival in Shanghai, where the three protagonists shared the best actor award and Cao Baoping won best director, was then released on the big screen following cuts of the scenes that the censors held to be the most troubling.