PLACE: Some decaying mid-sized city in modern urban China. OBJECT: A bag of loot with a million Yuan. PROBLEM: It’s missing. Just about the oldest trope in the film noir playbook. Is the money ‘hot?’ Why was it stolen? Who stole it? Where is it? And who stole it from whomever first stole it? Structured as a series of interlocking chapters, the tone somewhere between early Coen Brothers (switchback double-crosses) & early Tarantino (impulsive violence); not that there aren’t many other influences in such a heavily mined field. This one emphasizes its range of backstreet characters: from most sympathetic (young man needing cash to ‘fix’ his girlfriend’s botched plastic surgery) to least (controlling mob boss phoning up hitmen & sadists to do his dirty work). But what makes it all fresh again is in presentation as brought forth by minimalist animator Jian Liu whose style holds to flat, mesmerizing visuals with action that often isn’t action at all, but painterly stillness between bursts of movement. You’ll find more separate drawings in a PIXAR trailer than in this entire film. Yet subject & style are so well matched, the drawings so evocative, characterizations & attitude so compelling, you rarely feel much lost by physical simplicity. How this technique would work in other genres goes unanswered here, but may be solved in Jian Liu's new film, ART COLLEGE 1994 (as yet unreleased Stateside). It sounds like quite the change of pace!
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: After the end-credits, a pop song (not by Shanghai Restoration Project who did most of the other songs here, but by Kuan Pang) plays over some of the evocative background drawings, followed by a tiny Easter Egg twist for one of the characters.
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