Nanfang chezhan de juhui

Hu Ge plays Zhou Zenong, an ex-con and a leader of a minor crime family mostly specializing in motorcycle thefts. Unfortunately, a quarrel with another crime family has him accidentally shoot a police officer, mistaking the man for one of his enemies. Now he's on the run and ends up near Wild Goose Lake, a lake resort known for its prostitutes. You can definitely disappear in a place like that. But does he manage to pull it off?

The story revolves around Zhou and Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun-mei), one of the local prostitutes, whose pimp is a known associate of Zhou's. Liu is made to contact Zhou because she's not immediately known to the police, and the rest evolves from that.

If I had to describe the style of the film, I'd say it's a weird mixture of John Woo and Kim Ki-duk. With more emphasis on Kim. It definitely wants to be a crime thriller, but it's very slow and thoughtful about it. The film has this serenity to it. People are in a rush, it's a tense situation, but there are still moments just to have a conversation or to get lost in your thoughts. Have a moment of introspection.

Until the film decides it's time for the final action scene, when all bets are suddenly off. It's a jarring mixture to say the least, but I can't say I minded it.

If I had to name one flaw, I'd say the plot is a touch meandering. The slow style works surprisingly well, but whenever the story needs to move forward, it takes a while to do so and jumps through a few hoops too many.

Still, if you're looking for a Chinese crime drama, you could do a lot worse.

Filmed in competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Chinese gangster thriller The Wild Goose Lake is an accessible and stylistic crime film that brings the visual sensibilities of filmmakers like Michael Mann and Nicolas Winding Refn to a whole new landscape.

Directed by Yi'nan Diao, Lake is the type of film that favors visual and composition over dialogue and character building, as we follow Ge Hu's wounded gangster Zenong Zhou, who finds himself wanted and hunted by cops and fellow criminals alike as he attempts to survive by hiding out in the lawless and violence ridden area of Wild Goose Lake.

It's a great set-up and Diao makes good use of his unique surrounds as the films unique time and place helps mask the fact that the story at the heart of Lake is one we've seen done countless times before from various corners of the globe.

It's a good thing the films are so visually pleasing, from night time scooter rides to bloodthirsty fight scenes, as Hu gets lumped with a rather charisma free centerpiece that never feels as alive as the places he finds himself in, while all of the films supports feel rather forgettable and cookie-cutter also in a landscape filled with generic goons, cops and paperback style token love interests and female hangers-on.

Despite the weak plot line and even weaker caricatures, Lake manages to hold your interest throughout as we remain unsure where things will go and Diao makes sure that every scene is filled with wonderfully framed and captured imagery, often basked in a neon glow and scored moodily, Lake is feast for the senses that doesn't engage the heart but certainly engages aesthetically in a way that is exciting for Chinese cinema moving forward.

Final Say -

The Wild Goose Lake is a crime film that's going to be a big hit for those that have enjoyed other recent visually focused offerings like Only God Forgives and Drive and while the film fails to break any new ground, its intriguing setting and design makes this a sensory feast with a fresh Chinese twist.

3 umbrella's out of 5

Rain falls hard over a remote area where a mobster-on-the-run awaits instructions from a mysterious woman; the camera captures the dazzling, stylish and inventive visions of director Diao Yinan as he opens this action-packed thriller demonstrating how poetically he conceives a scene. Bleeding, hurt and wanted, Zenong has wrongly shot a cop, while on a competition with other gangster families, in order to claim control over the drug/theft most profitable streets. Aiai is a hustler and "bath lover"- a Chinese modern version of prostitution- who is working on both sides, struggling to survive as a mediatior on the bloodshed war between the gangsters' families and the police seeking to avenge their colleague. As they wait for their next move, they both narrate in flashbacks the circumnstances prior, when the street war sparkled a revolution on the local criminal business. An electrifying, fast-paced, ultra violent and seductive neo-noir thriller, Yinan obviously understands of visual techniques, conceiving each frame as a piece of art in movement, with lyrical, glamorous observations on the details, on the silent moments embracing the unexpected, the subtle eroticism, the rain, the neon lights on the roads, but most impressively how he extracts poetry from the bloody confrontations and its uncontrollable shootings. Addressing male rivalry and dominance, pride and greed, it's a riveting, visually-arresting and superbly crafted mobster-on-bikes tale.

I don't rate films 10 very often, you can check my rating history and see for yourselves. this one is a rare combination of technical mastery, as manifest in superb chinematography and lighting work, great editing, amazing acting, that is mainly the two leads who really shine all the way through, Ge Hu as the male lead and Lun-Mei Kwei who in my humble opinion has the most expressive poker face I've ever seen. That is as long as she carries her poker face, when the time comes you'll find she does have more than one facial expression.

On top of all that, we get a tight story of a Greek tragedy proportions set in modern china, depicting a dark and un forgiving world that borrows a lot from the classics of Melville. If you remember Melville's attitude to the famous "honor among thieves" you'll know what to expect from this movie too. But do come with an open mind - you'll be blown away.

Gang warfare in Wuhan in this highly stylized Chinese gangster movie. There isn't a great deal that's new about Yi'nan Diao's "The Wild Goose Lake". Walter Hill, Jean-Pierre Melville or more recently Michael Mann could have made this but Diao's use of flashbacks to propel the story and his superb use of locations certainly give this an edge. Despite the fatalistic tone it's hardly what you would call existential despite moving at a fairly leisurely pace. The plot isn't always easy to follow and sometimes it's hard to know who belongs to whose gang or who's a cop and who isn't.

As a cop killer on the run, Ge Hu is as cool as they come; in another lifetime Delon or Belmondo might have played this part and Lun-Mei Kwei is excellent as the film's femme fatale. In the end there is more atmosphere than action and the film's look finally overwhelms its content but it's great that in this day and age this kind of gangster film is being made and that China has taken such a fundamentally American genre and twisted it to its own ends.