This slightly confusing stylized Chinese neo-noir premiered out of competition at Cannes, and feature debutant Shipei Wen seems to have taken a bit of an aesthetic cue from his much better-known compatriot Wong-kar Wai. Of course, Wen is light years behind one of the greatest film estheticians of the last thirty years, and we constantly jump from one time period to another, seeing the same events from the perspective of different characters. Wen may have had an interesting idea, but he complicated it all to the limit, and when we add to all that the standard problem of most of us Europeans that all these Chinese are almost the same to us, it was quite difficult to connect and untie everything.
Set in 1997 by Wen, the story begins when a young man named Wang (Eddie Peng) accidentally runs over a man and decides to dispose of his body to cover up what he has done. Haunted by a sense of guilt, he will try to sneak into the life of the widow whose husband he killed in order to somehow help her and redeem herself to some extent, and Mrs. Huifang (famous Chinese filmmaker and actress Sylia Chang) will allow him to do so. She thinks all the time that her husband has disappeared and that it is just a continuation of the misfortunes that have befallen her because her son also died before, and soon Inspector Chen (Wang Yanhui) will be involved in this complicated story, who will clearly understand that a lot of things don’t fit there.
This whole story fits together a bit like a puzzle because after the introduction we see Wang in prison and we realize that the story has moved a few years into the future. So we go back again, we go forward, we follow the story a little from Wang’s perspective, a little from the widow’s, a little from the inspector’s, and in moments when a man thinks he has finally managed to grasp everything, he realizes that nothing is clear to him just now. Although the narrative “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” (Elvis Presley’s famous hit is constantly running through the film) Wen designed extremely ambitiously, as he tried to record it in a recognizable style (events from a certain time period were recorded through some reddish filters, so it all seems extra mysterious), but the rest is there a lot of things are unfinished, although by no means uninteresting and intriguing.