《一步之遥》

    Starring: Jiang Wen, Ge You, Zhou Yun, Shu Qi

    Director: Jiang Wen

    “We should struggle less at home, and expand more ashore,” says a character during the first section of “Gone With The Bullets,” in which a Chinese diva triumphs over her U.S. and European counterparts in a rigged beauty pageant in Shanghai. Director Jiang Wen, who co-penned this film with eight other screenwriters, has certainly walked the talk in this line: “Gone with the Bullets” is an extraordinary mélange of seminal stylistic tropes from abroad, a two-hour-plus journey taking in nods to newsreels, silent slapstick, musicals, film noir and even New Hollywood.

    Unlike his brilliantly barbed, sensitively structured and meticulously multi-layered 2010 hit “Let the Bullets Fly,” “Gone With the Bullets” —described as the second installment of a trilogy of gun-slinging satires set in tumultuous 1920s China — is a sprawling, episodic spectacle reading less like a j’accuse of social malaise and more like a record of a self-styled auteur’s ego going completely into overdrive as he indulges in shaping his lead character (played by himself) as a misunderstood and victimized idealist while unleashing a torrent of supposedly clever bites at the hands that feed him.

    Jiang’s character in the film, Ma Zouri, carries a similar life trajectory to Yan Ruisheng, a middle-class man who plotted the murder of a prostitute in Shanghai in 1920. What makes Yan’s case legendary is not the crime itself, but its fallout: the case at once scandalized and mesmerized the city’s chattering classes, with the man’s trial and subsequent execution leading to entrepreneurs staging plays, stand-up comedy shows, musicals and even making a film (allegedly the first-ever Chinese feature) out of the incident.

    Dressed in a tuxedo, toying his pet and holding court in his dark, timber-covered office, he hears requests like a Chinese equivalent of Vito Corleone with his Tom Hagen-like police-officer sidekick Xiang Feitian (Ge You). Here, the one pleading for help is Wu Qi (Wen Zhang, “Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons”), a warlord’s spoiled scion who wants Ma to help him launder his “new money” so as to rid of his reputation of being parvenu. Ma’s solution? To use the money to stage a lavish show of a beauty pageant, with its Oscars-night-like proceedings broadcast live on radio around the world.

    It’s a hectic first half hour, as Keith and Sharon Young’s dashing dance sequences (including one based on South Pacific) competes for attention against a Ma-Xiang comedic cross-talk, Ma’s voiceover introducing other characters in the background, and interwoven faux newsreel footage of a Shanghai enthralled by the event. It’s around this time that the winner of the night emerges, as incumbent beauty queen Wanyan Ying (Shu Qi of “Three Times”) is “re-elected” by the crowd after her stirring (and Ma-penned) monologue calling for openness, generosity and an enthusiasm for individual (and possibly national) rebirth.

    Barely has the mayhem ended that “Gone With the Bullets” switches gears, as Ma and Wanyan are engaged in some (full-clothed) bedroom frolics while they debate about marriage and discuss the historical origins of people saying “I do.” A drug-addled drive to the countryside later, however, Wanyan is dead, Ma becomes a fugitive and Xiang rises through the ranks in Shanghai’s French concessions with his efforts in capturing his former associate. Ma is arrested trying to interrupt a gaudy Chinese opera performance painting him as an evil psychopath, and his descent into ignominy is complete when Xiang coaxes him to play himself in a lurid exploitative flick about his own misdeeds.

    Amidst all these betrayals and public lynchings, only one light shines through: Wu Qi’s sister Wu Liu (Zhou Yun), a headstrong George Mèlies-like inventor-filmmaker who manages to convince her warlord father (Liu Linian) to extradite Ma from the French to Chinese-ruled soil — a move that will grant the tyrant some respect from the nationalistic crowds and the man she silently craves. A rebel to the bone, Ma continues to flap in the face of his fate, screaming about his innocence and his rightful place in history.

    Ma will have a final harangue at the end, but whether anyone’s left to care about what he says is debatable. It’s only the last of the movie’s unending string of increasingly bizarre aesthetical and narrative twists ricocheting all over the place. With the visual effects also falling short of giving the film that additional, fantastical sheen, the epic pretensions of “Gone With the Bullets” have, well, gone with the wind.

    Now that Jiang has committed an auteur’s inevitable ego-driven project about himself and his history — Ma’s recollections of a Gallic romance mirrors the director’s eight-year marriage with a Frenchwoman, while the materialistic Ying Wanyan and the artistic Wu Liu (played by his own wife) could be seen as Jiang torn between commerce and culture — maybe it’s time for Jiang to step off his pedestal, cast his cynicism aside and engage with the real crossfire beyond his own comfort zone, and to reveal the state of mind a population who think they are calling the shots, but are actually only being stood there to be shot at.

    The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen. (SD-Agencies)