Le Lac aux oies sauvages

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

Diao Yinan 's third feature-length feature film presents a unique and unprecedented temperament in the previous Chinese-language movies. Although this style is not original in film history, as a purely Chinese-language movie, it may be historically Still the first time.

Breaking away from the context of traditional Chinese art films, this film presents a complex look and feel, on the one hand, it is addictive and shocking to the film's audio-visual, on the other hand, because of looking at those screen faces that we are familiar with , The weirdness of performing with a rare performance rhythm.

"Southern Station Party" set the story background in Wuhan. In this city known as one of the "Four Hot Stoves", the car thief Zhou Zenong played by Hu Ge accidentally shot a policeman in the fire of an opponent gang. The police issued a price tag of 300,000 yuan for Zhou Zenong. Zhou Zenong, who became a fugitive, fled in the wild goose lake in Wuhan's "outside of law", but accidentally met Liu Aiai (Guilin Magnesium), an acquaintance who didn't know her in the process. ...



85% of the "Southern Station Party" is a night show, like the night show 25 minutes before the start of the movie. But the night scenes in the film are not a single rendering of a dark atmosphere, and the night under the lens of Diao Yinan is layered. This is due to the ingenious use of neon lights, shadows and sounds.

The film is full of super bright neon elements, whether it is a neon sign, an electric car neon sign, a square dance shoe neon sign, or a toy neon sign ... their dazzling light and shabby gloomy environment seem to be incompatible, so their red It is "disastrous red" and yellow is "dim yellow"; under the contrast of the dark night, they release a sense of fantasy and illusion of stealing in the end of the world.

When I saw Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood for Love"(2000) with Maggie Cheung - I knew we were watching a completely new cinema that would one day self-realise into epic cinema ~ epic Chinese cinema. And I have now seen that realisation in The Wild Goose Lake. This film is like a cross between Godard's Breathless and de Sica's Bicycle Thieves - and is so satisfying you could watch it upside down. It is possibly the grittiest film I have ever seen, with the urgency and cinematic style of French cinema of the 1960s - where the possibilities are endless and every new film in this genre will be waited for in anticipation.

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.