NYFF: The color-filled noir of "The Wild Goose Lake"

by Jason Adams

Police officers close in on and surround a perp, their light-up dance sneakers blinking blue with every step. Hotel rooms half orange half pink, a sleepless phantasmagoria. A panicked streak through a zoo in the middle of night, flashes of light illuminating a tiger, an elephant, a succession of wild animal eyes in extreme close-up, blinking back madness. The Wild Goose Lake, the latest film from Black Coal Thin Ice director Yi'nan Diao, turns the crowded alleys and markets of Wuhan, Central China, into some sort of neon fever dream -- a riot of crime and color and scooter rides straight to hell, bang bang.

Starting off like a variation on The Warriors we first meet our characters gathered for an underground syndicate meeting -- everybody's come together to divide up the city, block by block, street by street...

But the tensions inevitably spark high in that crowded basement, with flashing visual echoes of Fight Club popping forth, and quick spill into the streets -- before you know it one small-time kingpin Zenong Zhou (the hypnotic Hu Ge) is covered in blood and on the run from all of the bad guys and oh right also all of the cops, who can't precisely be classified as "good guys" in this day and age, in this place. It's basically M minus the pedophilia, plus the decapitation.

Long masterfully crafted takes careen across dense locations, and explode with sudden cuts like gunfire, which they often contain. The Wild Goose Lake has style for days, and spends its two hours cramming it all into every knockout Noir-ish frame. Falling somewhere astride the sinewy technicolor spaces and places that Nicolas Winding Refn's been as of late (though decidedly less surreal) Yi'nan proves himself a master visualist -- Goose Lake drips with night, with neon signs reflected in street puddles, with pimpled flesh and bullet-wounds that ooze a tar sheen.

That said its characters are often kinetic placards simply pointing us towards the next sequence, frenzied ciphers flailing about, with one massive exception -- Lun-Mei Kwei as the so-called "bathing beauty" Aiai Liu, who has sex with men underwater for money and who gets roped up into this violent tale through complicated machinations that become simpler with time: mere survival. Kwei, her hair short and her manner curt but endlessly sympathetic, makes for a mesmeric femme fatale of unclear motivations -- every time she and Hu gallop through Yi'nan's frames time slows, and the film's heart beats loud and hard and true.

Wild Goose Lake will play at 8:45 PM September 29th and 6:15 PM October 1st at NYFF, both screenings followed by a Q&A with the director.