Le Lac aux oies sauvages

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

If you enjoy neo noir, specifically films from directors such as Michael Mann (Thief, Heat) or Jean Pierre Melville (Le Cercle Rouge especially) then this will be right up your rain slicked neon lit boulevard. Similarly it'll likely appeal to fans of 'Asian extreme' cinema and indeed anyone interested in or simply curious about contemporary China and her cultural products. Grounded in believable realism whilst being highly stylised by virtue of action taking place in locales which exist, not film sets. This isn't a China of shiny high skyscrapers and jaw dropping surveillance technologies, instead it's one of dingy backstreets, cheap restaurants, second hand stores, a cheap and plasticky sheen lit mainly with lurid artificial light. I say 'China' in quotation marks because as another reviewer pointed out it's set in a particular province using local dialect. Reminding us China isn't some monolith, that there's great diversity in this huge nation. There's an obvious debt to films by Hong Kong director John Woo - it rains a lot, most of the action takes place at night soaked in a putrid colour cast of neon and sodium street lights. Woo of course being indebted himself to an earlier generation of directors... 125cc motorbikes and scooters are, for most people living on the Latin American, Asian, African continents, their main experience of private motorised transport. Wild Goose Lake is innovative and impressive in this form of transport (rather than conventional gangster cinematic conventions of big black SUV's with tinted windows) being central to the narrative. It is something of a slow burner and I found myself restless during the first twenty minutes. Which is the point, to make you the viewer feel what the characters are feeling, inertia. Waiting. Not quite sure what's going on. If you're more accustomed to Hollywood action gangster movies this will reward but you need to be patient. Give it time and it will deliver. I promise. Don't let subtitles put you off. I watched it in France with French subtitles and didn't have trouble following. While relations between characters became confusing that didn't detract from my enjoyment this movie is driven by action and mise en scene rather than dialogue. The mise en scene or what you see works to reflect and comment on the interior psychological (and exterior) worlds of the characters. One amazing scene towards the climax set in a dimly lit apartment block alludes to trash, with the implication of the characters as literally rubbish. By contrast, another scene uses washing machines in a massively impressive stroke of sheer stylistic inventiveness. Creative violence is all the more astounding being beautifully choreographed, consisting of actual stunts instead of fast cut editing and CGI. Once again, stylistically satisfying innovativeness to the art of killing will delight martial arts fans and jaded movie goers (such as this reviewer) alike. However, what else would you expect from the culture which gave the world kung fu and pioneered the martial arts film genre? French director Jean Pierre Melville nailed the thin line dividing cops from gangsters in films like Le Cercle Rouge (a cop is literally joined to his quarry with a handcuff, said cop lives alone with his pet cats who're surely analogous to the criminals he pursues). A similar line is drawn here, making explicit the symbiotic relationship the police have with the criminals they pursue. A similar fatalism also operates and I loved the way that, even though we know where the Ge Hu character is headed, the journey there is nonetheless thoroughly enjoyable. Liu Aiai is superb as the poker faced hooker. Instead of the femme fatale, she's all the more mysterious, her motivations never quite clear. She's being used, in that sense she's the quintessential noir character caught up in events beyond her control. However she's aware she's being used and it suits her purposes to pretend otherwise. I need to watch this film again. My purpose here isn't to describe the plot but to highlight why I think you should watch this film. Finally, the total lack of irony or post modern referencing of other films is a delight. Sure there's the familiar ingredients of neo noir but they're combined into something very fresh and exciting. Watch for the astonishing 'Rasputin' disco scene and I think you'll agree.

I wouldn't have thought there was anything more left to squeeze out of neo noir then along comes this. Astounding, audacious and amazing.

"Since the film is entirely spoken in Wuhan dialect (kudos to the main cast and their dialect coaches), for the majority of Chinese audience, which means subtitles is a requisite to understand the plot, Diao perceptibly carves out a tenuous mutual attraction between Zenong and Aiai, and the two fine actors exhibit tenacious resilience in restraint and nuances. For Hu Ge, it is also a physical transmogrification that persuasively shucks off his heartthrob mass appeal and signifies a wide road ahead in the mode of a serious thespian; as for Taiwanese actress Gwei Lunmei, who also triumphantly conceals her modern-look and urban delicacy, eloquently morphs into a conflicted character living in the margin with no hope in sight, during a nocturnal boat trip on the placid lake, the vestigial human-to-human compassion and connection brings a chink of warmth into this largely grim tale."

read my full review on my blog: cinema omnivore, thanks

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.

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.