Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014)
Cast: Fan Liao, Lun Mei Gwei, Xuebing Wang
Director: Yi’nan Diao
Country: China
Genre: Drama
Editor’s Note: The following review is part of our coverage of the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival. For more information please visit tribecafilm.com or follow Tribeca Film Fest on Twitter.
As a 15-year-old, I’d never heard the word “pastiche.” Still, I understood that urge: to create your own version of the things you loved. If you grew up on action movies, maybe you tried to make one as a teenager. My own attempts never went well. I lacked the technical skills to translate my ideas into something that looked and felt like the real thing. But even if I did have some virtuoso knack for crafting action spectacles in my parents’ backyard, I still had nothing to say. I just wanted to imitate the films that enchanted me. There was no goal, no purpose, but artful recreation.
You could say the same about most pastiche efforts. You couldn’t, though, about Black Coal, Thin Ice, the new Chinese thriller from director Diao Yinan. The film transcends mere mimicry. It captures the mood and narrative turns of a classic film noir, and it adds to them an emotional depth and light surrealism you don’t associate with the genre. It plays with our knowledge of the noir pantheon; it subverts some expectations and satisfies others. It’s a fine tribute to films like The Maltese Falcon and an elegant noir in its own right.
It plays with our knowledge of the noir pantheon; it subverts some expectations and satisfies others. It’s a fine tribute to films like The Maltese Falcon and an elegant noir in its own right.
Having won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival in January, Black Coal, Thin Ice made its North American debut this week at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film opens on a severed hand half buried under a mound of coal. For the next 100-odd minutes, Diao’s movie will explore that one image from every angle: Whose limb is it, how did it get there, who’s next? Officer Zhang Zilli (Liao Fan) heads the search to answer those questions. The pursuit goes wrong fast. After the botched arrest of a coal truck driver — the first of many moments of abrupt, expertly staged violence in Black Coal, Thin Ice — Zhang leaves the force and the film glides five years into the future.
The case of the severed hand has long since been solved. It belonged to the husband of Wu Zhizhen, (Gwei Lun-Mei), a sad-eyed employee at a local laundromat. Zhang, now an alcoholic security guard, soon learns of two similar amputation killings from his old partner, Captain Wang (Yu Ailei). All three victims appear to have been hacked up with an ice skate. And all three connect back to Wu. An aimless, unstable Zhang decides to pursue the case on his own. He begins to trail Wu, the widow and central source of mystery in the film. From there, Black Coal, Thin Ice develops, in great noir tradition, into a cavalcade of plot turns and reveals.
Diao’s third feature evokes the world of film noir without a trace of affectation. It sheds the overt hallmarks of the style — dagger-like shadows, plumes of cigarette smoke, low-angle shots, fast-talking innuendo — for a more naturalistic approach. Indeed, the most distinctive thing about Black Coal, Thin Ice is its appeal as a full-bred noir set in the real world.
The people are real, too. Our detective is a charisma-free wreck, not a hardboiled icon. Our lady has secrets, but she’s far too world-weary to strike the pose of a femme fatale. Diao whittles the style down to its essence: the story of men and women with secrets in a harsh world. The film gains much of its emotional power from this emphasis on character beats over orthodox replication of the noir style. Even the obligatory homages to noir classics hold some surprises. A visual reference to the famed Ferris wheel scene in The Third Man only highlights just how different of a film we’re seeing now.
Diao’s third feature evokes the world of film noir without a trace of affectation. It sheds the overt hallmarks of the style — dagger-like shadows, plumes of cigarette smoke, low-angle shots, fast-talking innuendo — for a more naturalistic approach.
Diao also adds a nice dollop of surrealism to the proceedings. The film eludes our expectations with bursts of the bizarre: a horse shows up in an office building, a nightclub owner collapses into a bathtub mid-interview, fireworks erupt in the daytime. Black Coal, Thin Ice delivers the essentials of a pulpy noir, and it adorns them with the melancholic spirit and oddball charms of something we haven’t seen before.
Of course, not every film needs rewrite the rules of its genre. Diao clearly has the chops to write and direct a serviceable love letter to the films he adores. What makes his film exceptional, though, is its expansion on the films that came before it.
[notification type=”star”]83/100 ~ GREAT. Perhaps the most tackily noir thing about Black Coal, Thin Ice is its English-language title. An acclaimed thriller out of China, the film is a dark, odd, and affecting riff off the classic noirs of the 1940s and ’50s. [/notification]
Perhaps the most tackily noir thing about Black Coal, Thin Ice is its English-language title. An acclaimed thriller out of China, the film is a dark, odd, and affecting riff off the classic noirs of the 1940s and ’50s.
