Film review: Murder and old movie houses in enigmatic Chinese noir Only the River Flows
Nothing is that simple in Wei Shujun’s film, the latest from one of the rising stars of international cinema
Brooding Yilong Zhu stars as a small town cop on the hunt for a killer in the enigmatic procedural Only the River Flows
VIFF Centre presents Only the River Flows from August 23 to 31
FROM CHINA, ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS is part noir, part procedural, but also a wide open text for the viewer.
Yilong Zhu plays existentially stricken, chain-smoking cop Ma Zhe, charged with investigating the murder of an old woman, known around the smallish rural Banpo town as “Grandma Four”. All the clues point to a mentally-challenged indigent she recently took under her wing, called simply “Madman”, but Ma is unconvinced. Gradually the bodies and the suspects pile up, most provocatively a hairstylist with a certain paraphilia (now we’re in giallo territory) that fits the killer’s profile and who even begs Ma to please just arrest him already.
But nothing is that simple in Wei Shujun’s film, the latest from one of the rising stars of international cinema. Within minutes of opening, the entire village police force is relocated into a recently closed movie theatre, with Ma’s office stationed right inside the projection booth, dropping us into a world of movie-drunk self-reflexivity. In Shujun’s playful pile-up of big signifiers, the very first thing we see are kids playing cops in a labyrinthine building with gaping holes where there should be an outside wall. At home, meanwhile, Ma’s pregnant wife Bai Jie (Chloe Maayan) is frustrated by an enormous jigsaw puzzle. A little on-the-nose, sure, given that we’re watching a film that avoids any comforting finish, but Zhu’s brooding presence keeps us invested, and he’s helped enormously by crimson-rich 16mm photography that works hard to transport everything back to small-town Jiangdong Province, 1995.
By the time it winds up, it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s being projected by Ma’s febrile mind. Perhaps what makes Only the River Flows most interesting is the subtle shade it throws at China’s emerging social and political structure. Ma is a pain in the ass to his slightly buffoonish chief, a Party man who loves table tennis and delivers motivational speeches about “the collective” while pressing for a cosmetic solution to a brutal crime, and his colleagues seem incapable of independent thought or action. Almost everyone is motivated by shame and the fear of social penalty.
Perhaps most telling, Shujun depicts the medical establishment as bureaucratic and dehumanizing, if not downright cruel, when Ma and Bai Jie are advised to terminate her pregnancy based on a "10 percent chance of genetic mutation." Her resistance against such institution-brained logic begins at home, while Ma is a free-thinking man who might be driven slightly mad by all of society's noble lies. They make a good couple. 
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