Direction: Diao Yinan
Country: China
The most attractive aspect of The Wild Goose Lake, Diao Yinan’s fourth directorial feature, is the raw and miserable backdrop where the story takes place. The film depicts a particular crime world that incorporates Jia Zhangke’s raw aesthetics, Wong Kar-wai’s dreamy-yet-tense ambiance, and the violent gangster ways that go with the taste of directors like John Woo and Andrew Lau. All this is wrapped in an uncanny aura.
The story centers on a doomed gangster (Ge Hu) and the woman (Gwei Lun-Mei) who will help him put the hefty bounty on his head in the hands of his estranged wife (Regina Wan). Compellingly shot but sluggishly mounted, the film denotes a brutal intensity in its opposite extremities but remains in a morose, torpid state in a middle part where everyone is watching everyone with barely no development coming from there.
Given that the film lingers too much in such trivial scenes, patience is required, yet the obscure cinematography by Jingsong Dong (Long Day's Journey Into Night, 2018) is a factor that definitely deserves attention.
More entrancing than unsettling, this thriller is sort of dismissive of its audience, promulgating style over substance while apparently unaware of the emotional shallowness that emanates from the observant dispassion of Yinan’s lens. There’s an undercurrent of anxiety navigating the calm waters, sometimes so subtle that we get the feeling that some scenes are missing and others are purposely stretched out to fill those gaps. Unquestionably, a peculiar experience.
