An atmospheric noir detective film by Cannes Film Festival regular Wei Shujun, based on a novel by Chinese literary pioneer Yu Hua. The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard program of the 76th Cannes Film Festival.
The 1990s, Jiangdong District, China. A young police captain is investigating a series of murders. There is a clear suspect, and his superiors demand a swift arrest, but the captain is plagued by doubts. In an attempt to solve the mystery, he delves deeper into the secrets of the locals, but the circumstances of the crimes only become more confusing. The captain dresses in a black leather jacket, smokes constantly and is turning gray and losing weight before our eyes. It rains constantly and the night seems never-ending. Everything is murky and viscous, death comes out of nowhere, and souls are dark.
Only the River Flows is a homage to the police movies Memories of Murder by Bong Joon-ho, with its maniac in the provinces, a metropolitan detective, and blurred boundaries of police morality; Decision to Leave by Park Chan-wook about a depressed cop; and Paprika by Satoshi Kon, in which one of the main characters is the neurotic Detective Konakawa, who has a past in film. Another association in the context of Chinese cinema is the neo-noir Black Coal, Thin Ice by Diao Yinan, where the crimes also take place in the Chinese provinces in the late 1990s.
Aesthetically shot on 16 mm film, the picture is grainy, with contrasting shadows and a dirty gray tone, and looks deliberately old-fashioned. In an interview for the Cannes Film Festival, Wei Shujun said that working with film made the passage of time in the shot more tangible. In addition, film and projection are elements of the plot. In a cinema, the captain has dreams that combine the imaginary and the real. And in his dreams, in the best tradition of Bergman’s Persona, we see the melting of celluloid film, which is both evidence and a metaphor for a fictional reality.
The film will be screened in Chinese with Russian subtitles.
Only the River Flows
Director Wei Shujun
China, 2023. 102 min. 18+