📁 RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
📁 RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS
Wei Shujun (director), Only the River Flows, 2023. 101 mins.
Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows, an adaptation of Yu Hua’s novella Mistakes by the River set in 1995, has such an indelible period texture—largely due to Chengma Zhiyuan’s superlative 16mm cinematography and Zhang Menglun’s art direction—it makes you think of those American films from the past few decades (Boogie Nights, The Holdovers, Dazed and Confused) that pay direct homage to the New Hollywood Cinema through their style and idiom. The recreation of the late-Deng era is so astute and painstakingly mounted you could squint and imagine you are watching a Chinese film from thirty years ago. Except, unlike those aforementioned Hollywood movies, Wei’s film doesn’t have any real antecedents to speak of from the era it depicts, at least not in the PRC. You’d have found films of its sort from the era emanating from Hong Kong or Taiwan but mainland Chinese cinema at the time was heavily dominated by historical epics, comedies or social dramas, and it wasn’t until the emergence of the Sixth Generation in the late 1990s that crime films began to flourish.
Though Only the River Flows is in every respect a consummately Chinese film, its aesthetic references seem to be from further east: the Korean New Wave thrillers of Bong Joon-ho, Na Hong-jin and Park Chan-wook, among others. There is the same bleakly insistent scenario, a similar air of social concern, and torrential rain. Lots of rain. There’s so much of it in Only the River Flows that I swore I could feel my shoes squelch while watching it (as it happened, when I emerged from the cinema, a sunny July afternoon had given way to a massive downpour, suggesting that the rain perhaps had seeped, and then teemed, out from the screen).
The film follows a young detective, Ma Zhe (a seriously glammed-down Zhu Yilong), investigating a series of murders in a small town in rural Jiangxi province. He is a hard-drinking yet conscientious investigator whose wife (Zeng Meihuizi, credited here as Chloe Mayaan) is expecting their first (and no doubt only) child. He is the favoured underling of the avuncular chief of police (Hou Tianlai), who likes to keep fit by playing table tennis on his lunch break, but Ma’s maverick, overly methodical ways, soon fall foul of the boss, who is more interested in seeing case quotas being met than the truth unearthed.
Not that the chief ought to worry too much because, as a police procedural, Only the River Flows is a feature-length MacGuffin. The investigation is not near as important as what the film reveals along the way. These are the changes in Ma Zhe’s outlook, the strain on his relationship with his wife, and also the fallout for the town itself. The mood is the most significant thing in the film, and the tangible feel of an era now gone that, paradoxically, feels as distant as the First Chinese Republic, given the amount of infrastructural change that has ensued in China in the past three decades.
There is a wonderful sense of wornness in Only the River Flows in its portrayal of a Chinese society where consumer items and fashions are on their final cycle here in the Chinese interior. Ma’s shabby leather jackets and slacks look like something out of a Hong Kong or Japanese movie of the late 1970s or an Eastern bloc film of the 1980s. There is a sense of déjà-vu in the art direction, even for people who never knew China in the 90s. Part of that, of course, is a canonical memory—when Ma and his team move their office onto the stage of the town’s recently closed cinema, the sight of the auditorium brings to mind the episodes with the acrobats and plate-spinners in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo, Cina.
And there is a sense that you are at the outset of something here. You imagine Ma thirty years on: has he progressed on his honest policeman’s path, or has he been on the make in a spectacular way in collusion with shady local interests? Has he been swept up in one of Xi Jinping’s periodic anti-corruption drives? Has he succumbed to drink? Whatever the character’s fate, it is likely he is a very different person today to the dutifully impecunious one we see in this film, frequently drenched to the skin.
How to cite: Farry, Oliver. “Such an Indelible Period Texture: Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Jul. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/07/29/river-flows.
Oliver Farry is from Sligo, Ireland. He works as a writer, journalist, translator and photographer. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Statesman, The New Republic, The Irish Times, Winter Papers, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly and gorse, among other publications. Visit his website for more information. [All texts by Oliver Farry.] [Oliver Farry and chajournal.blog.]
Cha 