“A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop”: “Blood Simple,” Hunan-style

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:31:00 +0000

There may be no way to get you interested in Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou's "A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop" without making it sound like a minor and weird imitation of something else, rather than the ingenious if artificial creation it actually is. So let's get it over with: Zhang, an operatic visual stylist who has directed "Hero" and "Raise the Red Lantern" and numerous other international art-house hits in a career that reaches back to the '80s, has now made an oddly faithful remake of "Blood Simple," the American indie hit that marked Joel and Ethan Coen's 1984 debut.

But whatever you think that sounds like, "A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop" probably isn't anything like that. Zhang has taken the basic botched-murder plot of "Blood Simple," along with its grotesque slapstick elements, and translated it from one kind of movie -- and one kind of world -- into another. Instead of the classic American film noir universe, full of dumb people doing bad things (and vice versa), we're in the highly stylized 19th-century universe of Chinese genre films, with elaborate costumes, a self-evidently phony setting and archetypal characters out of Beijing opera -- the wicked older husband, the scheming wife, the young coward, the funny-looking buffoon.

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“A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop”: “Blood Simple,” Hunan-style