It’s
a distinctly Chinese variant on film noir—the noodle shop noir. This snappy
debut, following in the loose tradition of Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop and Yong Qing’s Chongqing Hot Pot has all the elements.
There is a flirtatious wife, a jealous husband, a jewel heist, and a remote
noodle shop inn. Li Yuhe also pretty
much throws in the kitchen sink for his first feature, Absurd Accident (trailer here), which screens during the 2017 Asian American International Film Festival.
Everyone
is conning someone in this provincial town. Yang Baiwan thinks his wife Ma
Lilian is unfaithful, but he is really getting played by bogus doctor of
Chinese medicine, who represents himself as the front man for a Triad assassin
named “Mr. Marcus.” After Yang slips her a mickey and leaves to establish his
alibi, the doctor arrives instead of Mr. Marcus, to start plundering the joint
rather than bumping her off. However, when Ma prematurely comes to, she
apparently kills her not-so would-be attacker in the ensuing struggle. Now she
and the remorseful Yang have a body to dispose of.
Of
course, it gets far more complicated. Two armed robbers, a country copper one
night away from retirement, a gold-digger, and a clueless gamer she has
mistaken for big game all lurch into the picture. The doctor’s body also keeps
popping up where it is least expected and sometimes it is not entirely dead.
All in all, it turns into an eight-car pile-up where noir intersects with
farce.
Li
is a little slow out of the blocks setting-up his characters and circumstances,
but when Absurd gets going, it takes
us off to the races with a high-performance sports car. One-darned-thing-after-another
does not adequately describe the film’s gleeful sense of mischief. It is more
like half-a-dozen-things-after-the previous-half-dozen-things.
Ye
Gao is amazing covering the waterfront as Ma, ranging from shrewishness to
vulnerability and finally resting at utter bewilderment. Yet, somehow Suxi Ren
manages to go to further extremes as the man-hunting Miss Gu—she is some
serious trouble. There is something about Xixu’s performance that counteracts
any empathy we might feel for the sad sack Yang, as all the troubles in the
world rain down on his stooped shoulders. That’s a good thing, because it lets
us enjoy the show without guilt.