Hollywood never has any problems adapting to their taste stories of oriental origin. Akira Kurosawa has been adapted till satiety and up to everybody's ears. In recent years it's the Japanese terror films and now Zhang Yimou's 'A woman, a pistol and a Chinese noodle shop'. Free transposition of the 1st film of the Coen brothers 'Easy Blood'.
Zhang Yimou has been somewhat erratic, having quite forgotten his initial stage of the 'Red lantern' which had made him internationally famous. In recent years he had embarked on extravagant and very expensive films of aesthetically spectacular productions, mostly of martial arts like 'The house of flying daggers', and now with 'The woman ...', a mix of intrigue and comedy, period drama with touches of oriental western. Many ingredients, too many really, to tie up into a neat story.
The result is between a re-make, a pastiche, a joke without much sense, quite remote from the tension with the touch of black comedy in the original of the Coens. The best part resides in the translation of the story to the scenario so different but at the same time interchangeable, like that of 'Easy Blood', a lost village in the middle of a desert, in the west of China, where the identical situations are repeated: a cheated husband engages a corrupt policeman to assassinate his wife and her lover. The simplicity of the original is converted here in rhetorical and absurd humour.
The idea of cultural displacement is good, but Zhang Yimou had intended to do something special where it had, in the original, only meant to be an entertaining story of series B.
Tags: noodleshop, pistol
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