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| Director Lou Ye |
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| Lou Ye and Gong Li |
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| Gong Li |
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| Mark Chao, Lou Ye, and Gong Li |
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| Lou Ye, Gong Li, and Pascal Greggory |
SATURDAY FICTION (Lan xin da Ju yuan) B+ China (126 mi) 2019 d: Lou Ye
So mysterious, so full of secrets.
Lies! Deceit! Murder! Betrayal! Espionage! What’s not to like about this murky and shadowy presentation of Shanghai in the lead-up to the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, specifically Shanghai’s “Isolated Island” period, with relatively neutral sanctuary corridors divided into an International Settlement and a French Concession, completely surrounded by Japanese-occupied territory following their 1937 invasion (Second Sino-Japanese War). This film is drenched in tense mood and noirish atmosphere, appropriating the past with a contemporary sense, where nothing is as it appears, instead it’s a puzzle piece world of spies and counter spies, as China has become a treacherous wartime intelligence battlefield of camouflage and deceit for both the Allies and Axis Powers. Taking three years to be screened in the United States after it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, seemingly lost in the pandemic, Ma Yingli’s screenplay is based on the novels Death of Shanghai by British-Chinese writer Hong Ying and Shanghai by Japanese writer Yokomitsu Riichi, creating a lurid picture of a city in flux that tries to present itself as going through normal activities, but underneath there’s a nefarious plan afoot to radically extend the theater of war into the Pacific, where the element of surprise is of utmost secrecy, a matter of national security, where lives are viewed as expendable in order to carry out this devious plan. That is the backdrop for the return of iconic actress Jean Yu (Gong Li, once the darling of Chinese films in the 80’s and 90’s, best known for her creative-romantic relationship with Zhang Yimou in 8 films, or fellow Guangxi Film Studio graduate Chen Kaige in 3 films, providing yet another spellbinding performance) to Shanghai after an absence of many years, ostensibly to appear in the play Saturday Fiction directed by her former lover Tan Na (Mark Chao), who also plays the lead male role in the play, while the theatrical character resembles Marlene Dietrich, seen smoking while dressed like a man, wearing suspenders attached to trousers, featuring a dancing scene fueled by American jazz music that erupts into pure chaos on multiple occasions as reality intrudes, serving to remind audiences of the boundary between cinematic space and the real. With captions counting down each day of the week of December 1, 1941, her Mata Hari-like goals are to free her ex-husband in prison (Zhang Songwen) and steal the shocking secret of the Japanese, dividing her time between the Lyceum theater and the luxurious Cathay Hotel in the French district (renamed the Peace Hotel after the war), which is entrenched in a hall of mirrors atmosphere, reflecting the paranoia and surveillance inherent in the setting, where every character in the hotel is hiding something, and no one can be fully trusted. Somewhere in between she is accosted on the street by Bai Mei (Huang Xiangli), an aspiring actress, magazine reporter, and obsessed fan who has memorized all her lines in an attempt to ingratiate herself, craving to be allowed access to the rehearsals, and while viewed suspiciously, most likely a Nationalist (KMT) government agent with her own motives, whose leadership is simultaneously fending off a second front with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while fighting Japan, Jean Yu thinks she may be of some service due to the extreme difficulties of her tasks at hand, becoming essentially a living double in a relationship based on mutual exploitation.
This film is not presented in a conventional narrative style, but feels essentially abstract in nature, blurring the boundary between fiction and reality, with no musical score, shot in black and white by Zeng Jian, often with a shaky handheld camera, mostly in a darkened palette where humans are little more than shadows moving in the night, yet even in this subdued manner, Gong Li shines, as always, where something is driving her, bottled-up deep inside, yet her character remains as opaque as the film itself, like a hard-to-crack enigma. “That woman is too mysterious,” a man says of her, “She’s like a box of secrets,” though near the end she ends up with a gun in her hand, fending off intruders, which is a completely different side of her, like seeing a gun-toting Ingrid Bergman in Ingrid Bergman Tribute: Casablanca (1942). Existing somewhere between Lou Ye’s Tiananmen Square epic historical drama SUMMER PALACE (2006), which was banned in China, officially censoring the filmmaker for five years, and Ang Lee’s erotic WWII Shanghai spy thriller, Lust, Caution (Se, jie) (2007), this is a film built around international political intrigue, where swirling in the air are matters of extreme urgency, with a variety of languages spoken, including Mandarin, English, French, German, and Japanese, as characters come and go, often incoherently, creating an uncertain and suspended atmosphere, while at the same time recalling the complex historical moment that is the backdrop to the events of the film, yet what’s never in question is the infamous timeframe of the Pearl Harbor attack, or as President Roosevelt described it, “a date which will live in infamy.” While that incident is never seen, it’s a precarious time in history, giving what we do see an undercurrent of gravity, as little is otherwise known about the dates that precede such a momentous moment in history, as that seems to be of special fascination for the director, where the people living in these times are completely unaware of what’s about to happen, instead they are simply living their lives as usual, following their daily routines and pursuing their goals, interweaving the destinies of different people during complex times, dividing time between the spaces of the theater and hotel, while also moving between on-stage and off-stage. The film is entirely fictional, with a surprise twist at the end, where information is obtained through a mysterious use of hypnosis, with Jean Yu in yet another disguise, yet she refuses to pass along the information to her superiors, maintaining her allegiance to China, which needed outside military intervention to fend off the stranglehold of the Japanese military occupation. What’s never in doubt is the star status of actress Gong Li, who is catered to like an international star, yet underneath the surface, with its myriad of changing characters, it’s hard to get a read, even between good and evil, as there are so many artificial façades, betrayals, mysteries, and enemies, where the only certainty is the deception in the air, with a supreme challenge of shooting on real locations, recreating the year 1941 in the heart of metropolitan Shanghai. We are reminded that Stanley Kwan already made a love letter to the city of Shanghai in Everlasting Regret (Changhen ge) (2005), also shooting on real locations in contemporary times, but due to the rapidly modernized face of the city, most of the only remaining preserved historical sites were indoors.
What prevents this from being more greatly appreciated is the meandering style, where the fragmented editing can be jarring, subversively using a combination of long takes and jump cuts, mirroring the past and the present, freely moving between Jean Yu’s mysterious stage performance and her own dealings as a saboteur, as the secrets she holds are matched by the theatrical secrets she plays on stage, yet what’s remarkable is that the director always concerns himself with the contemporary post-socialist society in which he lives, offering a veiled critique underneath the historical theatricality. According to the director notes, Lou has made a film “about the destinies of different people during a time of complex world crisis,” which speaks to the present as much as the past. From the beginning, theater, politics, and human relations appear linked under an artificialized idea of performance that makes it difficult to achieve truth, as theater and espionage are shown as equivalent worlds of fiction, yet the filmmaker continually provides Yu’s female eyewitness perspective (rare in male-dominated spy movies), elevating the level of ambiguity from reality and performance, as well as history and fiction, with the Japanese becoming increasing violent and aggressive, especially towards the Chinese, their sworn adversaries, with Japanese imperialist forces oppressing the seemingly peaceful neutral Isolated Island of Shanghai, unleashing sweeping attacks at specified targets. At the center is General Furuyama (Joe Odagiri), a target of the film’s spy operations, who is a bit of a blank slate, despite efforts to flesh out his character with a tragic backstory, yet extracting vital military communication codes from such a high ranking intelligence officer appears to be Yu’s real agenda, assisted by fellow Allied agent Saul Speyer (Tom Wlaschiha), disguised in the role of the Cathay Hotel’s manager as he welcomes Yu into the premises away from the prying eyes of paparazzi. She is acting under the orders of French spymaster Frédéric Hubert (Pascal Greggory), who supervises Yu in her various missions, yet her intentions are anything but clear. Constantly circling back to Tan Na’s theatrical production of Saturday Fiction, continually moving back and forth, intermingling the different perspectives, we are reminded that she remain as mysterious and inscrutable as possible, emphasizing that she is “unknowable,” a “woman of mystery,” always wondering what role she is playing now. But once the wheels are set in motion, all hell breaks loose, feeling more like a noir-drenched dreamscape than any existing reality, as there are some beautifully staged, rain-drenched atmospheric moments, yet they are transformed into a John Woo-like hail of bullets, where it’s odd to see this much gunfire in an art film, though seeing Gong Li with a gun in her hand recalls the famous Jean-Luc Godard dictum, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” highlighting his belief that cinema requires only two core elements, sex and action, to create a compelling, audience-grabbing story. Often associated with his French New Wave style, the premise suggests that complex plots are secondary to strong visual dynamics. There’s a Nietzsche quote referenced in the film from Beyond Good and Evil, “Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love,” accentuating themes of obsession and theatricality, while also blurring the lines between reality and performance in this spy thriller, yet other than Li’s character, and the various transformations she undergoes, nothing is individualized, instead there’s an everchanging fatalistic landscape of deceit and betrayal as the dominoes start falling, erupting in a shocking amount of blood and violence.
Note
The titular Saturday Fiction, also known as Libailiu, was a popular and highly influential literary magazine in China from 1912 to 1949, which flourished in Shanghai, largely consisting of serialized novels that focused on entertainment, romance, and scandal, targeting the urban middle class with recreational, rather than political or educational, purposes, explaining in its inaugural issue, “On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, everyone is engaged in their professions; only on Saturday and Sunday do they have leisure time to read novels.” At the time this film takes place, it had temporarily ceased publication during wartime, already long forgotten, dismissed as escapist, reactionary, and decadent, becoming a footnote in history, with filmmaker Lou Ye reviving its memory by utilizing it in an intricate play-within-a-play structure.
