Wei Shujun, the director of a terrific new Chinese thriller, is talking about responses in his home country. “It’s distinctly art house,” he says. “It’s completely different from commercial films.”
This surprises me. Only the River Flows, a critical hit at last year’s Cannes Festival, is at home to ambiguities and uncertainties, but it could hardly be more accessible to western audiences raised on crime series and older American noir. It is the 1990s, and we are in a blue-collar riverside town. Zhu Yilong plays a hard-working detective called to the murder of an apparently harmless older lady. A mentally ill man is identified as a key suspect. Then an oddly accommodating hairdresser emerges as a possible killer. Superiors want the case tidied away quickly, but the hero insists on digging deeper. One could easily imagine (not without some concern) the film being remade in the United States.
“If it was in China it wouldn’t count as mainstream, because to be a mainstream commercial film it has to be very easy to understand – very apparent, very straightforward,” Wei says. “It has to fit into a certain genre. It could be noir, but in China that’s not really regarded as a well-established genre.”
I was going to ask if he was consciously attempting to set his film in hard-boiled noir territory. There is a constant hammer of rain as the policemen go about their business. The plot, derived from a novella by the acclaimed writer Yu Hua, is layered with the same sort of cynicism and fatalism that defined mid-20th-century American crime fiction. We are not short of (to paraphrase Raymond Chandler) mean streets down which a man must go who is not himself mean.
“I didn’t set it out to be noir film because I didn’t know anything about noir before that,” he says. “But, after that, I received a lot of feedback that told me that it was noir. As you said, it is a western concept. I realised then that it was so categorised.”
Raised in Beijing, Wei began acting at the age of 14. He found himself attracted and intrigued by what the crew around him were up to. He liked the notion that you had a community from all over this vast country that came together to complete this project and then “went their separate ways”. At university he became something of a cinephile.
“I watched a lot of films,” he says. “But, actually, I didn’t study film-making at all. I studied audio recording, but I was very interested in film-making. So I went and got a master’s degree. That was how it came about.”
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Wei Shujun came out of the traps at a pace. He has appeared three times at Cannes – previously with the short On the Border and with his road movie Striding into the Wind – something no other Chinese film-maker born in the 1990s can boast. That must have been quite a culture shock for him. More experienced film-makers have had their nerves shattered by a first appearance at that frantic jamboree by the Med. It’s all noise, clutter and endless adulation. An amiable fellow, Wei smiles at the suggestion.
“It’s wonderful to be at Cannes,” he says. “Especially as there are so many great films and it is a very tolerant environment. It is a good platform. But, at the same time, because there’s a lot of commercial things in Cannes – sponsorship, commercial activities and also big names, like actors and so forth – I have to remind myself not to get lost in it.”
There are a lot of written and unwritten rules that we have to abide by in order to survive or to work in the community. That is particularly true in Chinese culture
Only the River Flows played to rave reviews at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard strand; it emerges here a year later as a tasty alternative to the big summer blockbusters. One can’t help but wonder about the decision to set the film in the 1990s. Yu Hua’s source story could take place in that decade, but the text is not specific. The makers of crime and horror sometimes shift backwards to avoid the plot-dismantling presence of mobile phones. But I would guess there are political and social issues unique to China that also play a part in the decision.
“It is for a very simple reason involving criminal-investigation technology,” he says. “After 2000 we have DNA and we would have a completely different story. I wanted to go without that modern technology. That’s one thing. The other thing is that, at that time, the individual’s relationship with another individual – and with the community and with society – was different from what we are experiencing now. People were much closer together. People lived in very similar dwellings. They worked together. They played together. They did everything together. There was a strong sense of community at that time. Nowadays, everyone has a mobile phone and is absorbed into the mobile phone.”
That will certainly need no explanation to Irish readers. Wei’s explanation does suggest an interesting take on Only the River Flows. This is a bleak tale. It begins with a murder. Early on, the protagonist and his wife learn that their unborn baby may have a birth defect. An atmosphere of (literal) gloom hangs over the surrounding area. Yet Wei is suggesting this may, viewed at a certain angle, be an exercise in nostalgia for an era the director barely remembers.
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“I do feel that technology has advanced and is advancing, but there are other things that might not be advancing,” he says. “I noticed that old film posters were beautifully made. When we are looking at the aesthetics with today’s eyes, we still feel they are beautiful. Nowadays, with digital technology, we can’t re-create that kind of thing any more.”
This is, nonetheless, a portrait of a somewhat claustrophobic society. Everyone is being asked to conform. We learn that the hairdresser is concealing a personal truth. The hero’s wife resists pressure to have an abortion. The detective is told to accept the most convenient solution and to move on. Is there something here about the pressure for all square pegs to be hammered into round holes?
“You are right. And that’s something particularly true in Chinese culture – because we need to conform,” he says. “There are a lot of written and unwritten rules and also conventions that we have to abide by in order to survive or to work in the community. That is particularly true in Chinese culture. There are indeed a lot of such pressures.”
Making the most of this success, Wei is now moving on to write a crime series for Chinese television. Meanwhile, Only the River Flows continues to clock up fans. I wonder if he has been surprised by reactions outside China. Do we view the piece differently from domestic audiences?
“What surprised me was that the feedback is quite similar across the world,” he says. “I realised that, even though we have different cultures in different countries, the life experiences are very much the same. When you come across something humorous you laugh. You feel afraid. You feel apprehensive. And so on and so forth.”
That makes sense. There is little in his current film that will trigger culture shock.
“All these human emotions are triggered by very similar things, and the experiences should be very similar as well.”
Only the River Flows is in cinemas from Friday, August 16th
