Director: WEI SHUJUN Starring: YILONG ZHU, CHLOE MAAYAN, TIANLAI HOU Running Time: 102 minutes
The film’s poster riffs on The Scream painting. It opens with a Camus quote and is scored with the mournful keys of the Moonlight Sonata. Only the River Flows is a noir that wears its pretentions on its sleeve, and its flavour of thoughtfulness might not taste right to those expecting a typically tense crime story. But the more this postmodern police procedural plays out, the deeper its depths are revealed, and if director Wei Shujun has heavy questions on his mind, he at least has the tact here to ask them with impressive technical skill, and an infectiously dark sense of humour. Hits like Zodiac, like Memories of Murder , even True Detective on its best daysdrove their investigators to despair in their search for the truth. Only the River Flows goes even further round the bend, asking its detective if there is any truth at all. Camus could give him an answer, but he might not like it.
Zhu Yilong plays Captain Ma, an ambitious officer assigned in the early 90s to solve the murder of an old woman whose corpse has been found by a riverbank in a sleepy Chinese town. His partner is more interested in goofing around and flirting, his boss more invested in reports and records (and ping pong). But Ma is intuitive, intellectual, interesting. He also smokes up a storm, has troubles at home and wears the fuck out of a black leather jacket, he’s every inch the potboiler protagonist, so this should all play out like a good, simple detective story, right?
The case seems clear cut, with a likely culprit in the form of a developmentally disabled man the old woman had been carer for. But there are alluring clues and mysterious figures all around this case. A message on a tape, a woman with wavy hair, there must be more to it right? But why? The noir is off kilter; suspects all but throw themselves at Ma, standard scenes seem out of order, all while the bodies pile up fairly randomly. If this is a potboiler, some pages have been put in the wrong order, and others have been ripped out altogether. Ma’s insistence that there is further to go down the rabbit hole starts to feel less like intuition and more like illness. The obtuse storytelling can be frustrating, but there’s a great account bubbling underneath here, about the dangers of getting lost in the woods failing to see the forest for the trees.
Ma plays detective, looking for a hidden evil that simply has to exist, just like in the movies (in an on-the-nose gag his investigation is set up in an abandoned cinema), meanwhile there are more obvious, depressing social decays playing out by the riverside, just as sinister if less cinematic. Shujun puts the fallout of the Cultural Revolution right up on camera, and draws the eye away with stunning noir cinematography from collaborator Chengma Zhiyuan, low lit, distant, grainy and gloomy. The style distracts from the substance, a sly sleight of hand from a director who ponders philosophy with a Socratic sense of play, stacking the deck and twisting the knife. The more Ma tries to solve the case, the more reality around him breaks down. Only the River Flows is appropriately uncompromising, and not everyone will get into its flow. But there are truths under its surface, of neglect, both personal and social, and it sifts through them swimmingly. Eccentric and intriguing, it is anxieties, not answers that are uncovered in this wryly maddening mystery.
(4 / 5)
Only the River Flows screens at the IFI from Friday 16th August.