Cast: Lun Mei Gwei, Fan Liao, Xuebing Wang
Director: Yi’nan Diao
Country: China | Hong Kong
Genre: Drama
Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage of the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival. For more information on the festival visit http://www.berlinale.de and follow Berlinale on Twitter at @berlinale.
After several days of a drastically uneven Berlinale, I half-heartedly found the motivation to attend the screening for Yi’nan Diao’s third feature Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bai Ri Yan Huo). My expectations, at that point, were close to non-existent, and it is to my great surprise that I found myself genuinely captivated by this stylish neo-noir set in China’s industrial districts. Dong Jingong’s lambent cinematography delightfully captures the tale of the consequences of a gruseome crime, and how it brings a classical wounded femme fatale and an ex-cop closer together amidst a world of nebulous morals. The precise contours of its gripping narrative and purposeful sense of direction eventually recedes around midway, at which point the script begins to lose focus, its meandering state a resounding turn-off.
Jingong’s cinematography shifts from the pale greys of a joyless existence to the stylish night scenes sleek combination of shadows and fluorescent light.
When severed body parts begin to crop up in various coal factories all over China, ruthlessly efficient, and recently divorced, cop Zhang (Liao Fan) singles out a prime suspect. Unfortunately for the police officer’s already fragile mental state, the arrest turns into a vicious bloodfest of casualties in a scene that hugely benefits from Diao’s “all-over-the-shop” tone. Half a decade later (a transition masterfully executed in one ingenious long take), we find the mentally fragile police officer—now a security guard in a factory—drunk and half asleep on the side of a road, still evidently struggling to come to terms with the murderous events of that day.
It is only the surfacing of freshly dismembered workers that finally succeeds in pulling the man out of his self-destructive spiral. Convinced that he can crack the case himself, Zhang seeks out Wu Zhizhen, widow of the original victim, and soon uncovers a morbid pattern of murders involving all those who get close to her. Black Coal, Thin Ice’s characters firmly adhere to the conventions of the noir: the potentially poisonous but damaged Zhizhen the femme fatale to Zhang’s ragged officer of the law. The delimitation of their relationship swiftly blurs between suspicion and romance, a quite literally explosive cocktail, as it turns out.
Jingong’s cinematography shifts from the pale greys of a joyless existence to the stylish night scenes sleek combination of shadows and fluorescent light. In one of the film’s most effectively tense scenes, a policeman is brutally murdered at the hands of a man armed with a pair of ice skates. The suspect slowly tugs at the ice skates under the nose of the innattentive cop, the backstreet’s murky lighting embalming the two men in anticipatory blood-red. If this particular scene is particularly Hitchockian in its deliberately-paced unnerving execution, Diao’s latest is otherwise better compared to the sensibilities of Johnnie To. In fact, the more knowledgeable viewers will most likely have a field day of recognizing the multiple influences at play.
[…] Diao’s latest is otherwise better compared to the sensibilities of Johnnie To. In fact, the more knowledgeable viewers will most likely have a field day of recognizing the multiple influences at play.
The ice-skate scene signals Black Coal, Thin Ice’s high point and, disappointingly, it’s all downhill from here script-wise, the film’s carefully economical opening in stark contrast to the tiresomely unstructured final third. It struggles from a severe case of not knowing how to provide a satisfying end, and ultimately stutters towards its exhausted finale that, for all its visual panache, cannot efface the frustration of unfulfilled potential.
[notification type=”star”]58/100 ~ MEDIOCRE. Black Coal, Thin Ice struggles from a severe case of not knowing how to provide a satisfying end, and ultimately stutters towards its exhausted finale that, for all its visual panache, cannot efface the frustration of unfulfilled potential.[/notification]
