Tag: Zhou Zhengjie

The Shadow’s Edge (捕风追影, Larry Yang, 2025)

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China’s mass surveillance system has come to the rescue in many a recent action film, as if it were saying that China will always find you if you’re in trouble but perhaps also if you’re the one making it. A loose Mandarin-language remake of 2007’s Eye in the Sky, The Shadow’s Edge (捕风追影, Bǔfēng zhuīyǐng) takes a slightly different tack in being somewhat wary of AI-based technology and the way it’s already embedded itself so deeply in our lives as to have engendered a rapid deskilling of the younger generation. 

The Macau police force rarely conducts on the ground surveillance anymore and is heavily reliant on its network of video cameras along with facial recognition software. Madame Wang (Lang Yueting), however, the officer in charge ends up disabling the AI system because it’s proving unhelpful and undermining her authority. In any case, it leaves them vulnerable to interference and unbeknownst to them they’ve been hacked. A talented group of thieves have managed to throw them off the scent by manipulating the footage so it looks like their vehicle is in a completely different place while they’re busy committing the crime. The hackers have managed to combine new technologies and old in a much more successful way than the police as they use a mixture of traditional disguise techniques and well-honed spycraft along with video manipulation to evade detection. 

It’s at this point that the police decide they need to bring back someone who still remembers how to do analogue police work to teach them how to combat this new digital threat. The irony is that the hackers are also being led by a veteran espionage expert now in his 70s and known only as “The Shadow” (Tony Leung Ka-fai). Though it’s true enough that he knows the evil that lurks in the hearts of men, The Shadow has surrounded himself with a group of former orphans whom he has trained in the arts of surveillance and infiltration while they take care of all the new technological stuff. But it’s also a slight degree of hubris and a mishandling of the digital side that leads to a slip-up in which the Shadow’s face may have been captured on camera for the first time in decades. As he ages out, there is conflict between father and sons as the boys begin to resent the Shadow’s paranoia and over cautiousness, wondering why they don’t simply take the bigger prize without considering that it may be more difficult to claim and leave them vulnerable to retribution.

Wong (Jackie Chan), the former special forces veteran officer they bring in to train the youngsters experiences something similar in the awkwardness of his relationship with Guoguo (Zhang Zifeng), the daughter of his former partner who was killed on the job because of an error in judgement made by Wong. Guoguo has been consistently sidelined by the police team where she’s surrounded by incredibly sexist men who doubt her ability to do the job because of her gender and short stature, and now has conflicting feelings about Wong that are bound up with her father’s death and a fear of being patronised convinced that Wong too is reluctant to let her do her job out of a problematic sense of overprotection.

Nevertheless, she proves a natural at the old-fashioned art of surveillance and develops a more positive kind of paternal relationship with Wong than that the Shadow has with his band of orphans. In essence, Guoguo learns both how to be part of a team and how to lead it, while Shadow’s boys don’t really learn much of anything beyond ruthlessness and generational conflict. In any case, the answer seems to be that’s what’s needed is both old and new, and that an over-reliance on technology isn’t helpful while AI isn’t necessarily faster than a finely tuned mind like the Shadow’s or merely someone who knows the backstreets well enough to anticipate an exit route. Drawing impressive performances from both his veteran leads, Yang succeeds in blending expertly crafted action sequences with interpersonal drama and giving the film a slick retro feel through the use of split screens and impressive editing. A post-credits sequence also hints at a wider conspiracy in play and the potential of a sequel, which would certainly be a welcome development given the strength and ambition of this opening instalment.

The Shadow’s Edge is in UK cinemas from 3rd October courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

A Long Shot (老枪, Gao Peng, 2023)

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The hero of Gao Peng’s A Long Shot (老枪, lǎo qiāng) is forever reminding himself to “regain your focus”, yet in other ways it’s something that he’s making an active choice not to do and that others wish he wouldn’t. Set amid the chaos of China’s mid-90s economic reforms, the film suggests that Xue Bing has little other option than to tune himself out and avoid being a direct part of the corruption all around him as he has little power to stop it.

In a prologue set five years before the main action, Xue Bing (Zu Feng) had been a sharpshooter on the national team but is told that he has experienced hearing loss which may affect his balance and is subsequently let go. The hearing loss is perhaps symbolic of the fact that Xue Bing does not listen to the lies and double talk around him and maintains an integrity that is nothing but irritating to his morally compromised colleagues. On the other hand, he later tells Xiao Jun (Zhou Zhengjie), a teenage boy to whom he’s become a kind of father figure, that staring at a bull’s eye all your life isn’t good for your eyes hinting at his problematic hyper focus in which he’s just trying to keep his head down and do the best job he can under the circumstances.

But the circumstances are grim for everyone. Now with shaggy hair and a look of disappointment in his eye, Xue Bing works as a security guard at a moribund ferroalloy factory where the workers haven’t been paid in years as the nation goes through a number of complex economic reforms that are changing the face of the nation and giving rise to a new class of wealthy elites who’ve gained their riches through immoral and exploitative means. With people not being paid, thefts are a common occurrence but the security guards have turned to taking bribes, tacitly turning a blind to equipment going missing if the thieves are willing and able to pay a small fee. Xue Bing doesn’t like to go along with this and avoids joining in, but is powerless against the other guards including his boss Chief Tian (Shao Bing). 

The film frames the factory as a microcosm of the wider society which has become a vicious circle of corruption. But on the other hand, the workers guards, and even in the management see themselves as taking what was rightfully theirs but has been unfairly denied them. The workers steal from their employer because their wages weren’t paid, the guards aren’t getting paid either so they extort the workers and rip off the company, while the management know the factory’s effectively bust so they’re asset stripping while they still can. Chief Tian runs into one of the thieves who’s since started a “trading company” having taken some cues from a Russian working at an equally moribund shipyard where he’s no longer monitored by the authorities and has been selling off warships as scrap hinting at the disintegration of post-war communism and the resulting capitalist free for all that followed. 

Xiao Jun, the son of a woman Xue Bing thinks he’s in a relationship with but the reality is somewhat ambiguous, is caught amid this crossfire as a young man coming of age in complicated times. He resents the corruption he sees around him and bonds with Xue Bing thinking he’s a straight shooter only to be disappointed by his defeated complicity which he also sees as a kind of unmanliness. Xiao Jun’s mother, Jin (Qin Hailu), had been trying to run her own business but later gets a job in a nightclub that seems to be sex work adjacent thanks to her relationship with another corrupt businessman, Mr Zhao. She remarks to Xue Bing that there are so many ways to earn a living these days she doesn’t understand why anyone would go back to the factory, laying bare the wholesale change in the society. Xiao Jun has taken up with a gang of seeming delinquents who frequently loot the factory complex, but even they are only taking what they think is theirs as one of the boy’s fathers was killed in a workplace accident and the family was only given a certificate of commendation rather than financial compensation for the father’s lost wages without which they are unable to support themselves. 

The guards have been told they’ll finally get paid after the company’s 40th anniversary celebrations, with corrupt manager Sun telling Tian he’ll need his help to keep the others in line when he presses him and is finally told they’ll only get two months’ worth of the back pay they’re owed. Xue Bing is told Sun was selling off the lathe machines in order to pay the workers, and it seems like he believes them naively falling for their greater good narrative while Xiao Jun seems on a collision with adult hypocrisy refusing to sign a false confession to get the managers off the hook. Gao lends Xue Bing’s world a greying hopelessness in which the only two choices are to close his eyes and ears or go down fighting, closing with a lengthy shootout in which firecrackers mingle with gunshots masking the sound of rebellion from a continually unheard underclass.

 A Long Shot screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Hovering Blade (彷徨之刃, Chen Zhuo, 2024)

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The funny thing about Hovering Blade (彷徨之刃, pánghuáng zhī rèn) is that it gets away with suggesting that the police won’t investigate properly and is quite unexpectedly sympathetic towards the hero’s desire for first hand retribution, albeit with the caveat that the police are seen to be investigating but possibly hamstrung by otherwise sensible legislation about the age of criminal responsibility. The Keigo Higashino novel on which the film is based had also been rooted in a moral panic that children were deliberately committing heinous crimes in the knowledge they couldn’t legally be punished for them.

The perpetrators in this case are a little older, though the argument is that if they had been properly charged for an offence committed in childhood they wouldn’t have gone on to commit further crimes in the belief that they are above the law. One of the men feels that in fact he is because it’s clear his wealthy and influential father often clears up his messes for him. A secondary issue hints at an anxiety about the nature of justice given that minors who commit serious crimes such as rape or murder receive much lighter sentences meaning they could be free to live a relatively normal life in just a few short years when their victims will obviously have no such opportunity.

Of course, that’s the point. The implication is that these young people were not fully capable of understanding their actions and could still be rehabilitated to become upstanding members of society. But that might not seem right to the families of their victims such as Li Chanfeng (Wang Qianyuan), a doting single father whose only daughter was raped an murdered by a pair of young hooligans with the assistance of their bullied friend. With judicial progress slow, he receives a tip off from the instigators’ underling and pays a visit to one of the other men who assumes he’s a burglar and attacks him leading Chengfeng to beat him to death with a baseball bat while a video of his daughter’s rape plays on the computer screen. 

The film presumably gets away with its hints towards vigilanteism by the fact the police are right behind him despite having received no tip off. The lead officer is however himself conflicted in beginning to doubt he can provide real justice because of the way the law responds to children who commit crimes and appears to sympathise with Changfeng to the extend he appears reluctant to catch him. The TV news and the people watching it also seem to understand and approve of his quest and desire for vengeance with a woman even helping him hide from the police if also urging him to turn himself in.

But the kind of justice Changfeng wants is incredibly direct. He doesn’t want these men off the streets because he fears for other people’s daughters, but wants to ensure they can’t live the share of life his daughter has been denied. The fact that, if legal justice is served, they’d get out and still be young men pains him without end and only death will answer it. Chased by the police, he begs them to kill him too to release him from his torment. 

Chen Zhuo keeps the tension high with a series of exciting action sequences including one though a disused water park near a moribund hotel the bad guys have been using as hideout. The reasons for their crimes are never explained aside from the ringleader’s dependence on his father, though they are assumed to be mere devilment and rebellion, an attempt to circumvent the system knowing they can’t be held legally responsible for their actions.

The familiar series of title cards at the film’s conclusion explain that the police caught all the wrongdoers while they have also lowered the age of responsibility though it wouldn’t have made any difference in this case. A flashback to another trio of teens suggests that they are emboldened by the fact the law can’t touch them, but the bigger issue is likely to be the way the system is corrupted by money and unequal access to justice. Changfeng is after all a lowly construction worker and is largely left on his own with nothing left to live for but vengeance. His quest to kill the killer is also a quest to kill himself and end his suffering. Zhuo follows him through the grimness of this everyday life, the squalid rooms and his general sense of emptiness but finally returns to the world of state justice and apparently compassionate police only sorry that they couldn’t do more to protect their fellow citizens from the “bad kids” of a changing society.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Back to the Wharf (风平浪静, Li Xiaofeng, 2020)

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“How dare you want to live when your existence is pointless” a father admonishes his blameless son, deflecting his own willing complicity in the persistent decline of the modern China. Repeatedly abandoned and betrayed firstly by his society, then by his friend, and finally by his father, the hero of Li Xiaofeng’s moody neo-noir Back to the Wharf (风平浪静, Fēngpínglàngjìng) first chooses self-exile only to eventually return and wonder if his crime has been forgotten allowing him to live again before discovering that nothing really changes, there is no escape from the whims of the rich and powerful in an increasingly feudal society. 

Quiet and studious, Song Hao (at 17: Zhou Zhengjie / at 32: Zhang Yu) first wakes up to life’s unfairness in 1992 when he’s called into school on a holiday by his headmaster who breaks the news that he’s losing his guaranteed university place supposedly because his grades are good enough to get there on his own and others need it more. “I like to prioritise the collective over the individual” he explains, reminding him that an extra person from the school going to a top uni can only be a good thing though it’s obviously a blow to Hao not to mention his ambitious father Jianfei (Wang Yanhui) who immediately rings up to complain and discovers that the place is going not to a needy student but Hao’s best friend Li Tang (Lee Hong-chi), son of the local mayor. Angry and confused, father and son set off on circular journeys to confront their respective counterparts, but there’s a storm raging and Hao accidentally wanders into the wrong house after noticing the door flapping in the wind. After walking past a baby sleeping upstairs he runs into an old man who mistakes him for someone else and soon lashes out, shoving fruit into his mouth and trying to suffocate him at which point Hao picks up a knife and stabs his attacker in the belly. Taking flight in terror Hao believes he has just killed a man and orphaned a little girl, never knowing that his father arrived a few minutes later and finished the old man off to stop him talking or that Li Tang was watching the whole thing from a window in the opposite building. 

Returning 15 years later for his mother’s funeral, it’s Li Tang who is most pleased to see Hao when he runs into him by chance at the ruins of the scene of his crime now a future development site for the young real estate tycoon, that is if the now young woman (Den Enxi) the orphaned baby has become whom Hao had been following out of guilt-ridden curiosity would agree to vacate her family property. While Hao has been languishing as a lonely construction worker, Tang has prospered off the back of the 90s economic boom largely thanks to an entrenched network of local corruption that runs from his father the mayor through Hao’s father Jianfei who was handed a fat promotion presumably to placate him over the uni places scandal. Tang has, in a sense, stolen his future leaving him quite literally displaced wandering in the ruined landscape of a haunted past while his father, he discovers, had divorced his mother and remarried in order to have another son. “Your upbringing was a failure” he cooly explains, he needed another male heir to salvage the family reputation and restore his name. Jianfei has, however, done pretty well out of the arrangement now a wealthy man with a separate apartment Hao is not welcome to visit but planning to send his wife and child abroad and retire to Australia. 

Intending to leave as soon as possible, Hao nevertheless starts to wonder if it hasn’t blown over and he might in a sense be allowed to seek happiness, bamboozled into a romance with an old school friend (Song Jia) apparently carrying a torch for him all this time. The past, however, will not let him go. The corruption runs deeper than he even suspected as does Li Tang’s insecure greed and duplicity, attempting to force friendship through blackmail. An embodiment of post-70s fuerdai Li Tang is an amoral capitalist willing to do anything it takes in pursuit of wealth, but at heart a coward ashamed that he owes everything to his father’s machinations and perhaps projecting all of his resentment onto his old friend Hao whose future he so casually stole.   

Yet the message seems clear, men like Hao will always be at the mercy of men like Tang. Perhaps this is the bargain his father has made, but it’s one that Hao can no longer tolerate once Tang forces him to destroy the roots of his redemption. The only sane response to the madness of the modern China, he seems to say, is to go mad in one way or another. Even so, this being a Mainland movie, the nihilistic fatalism of the inevitable conclusion is somewhat undermined by the brief coda in which a policeman reassures a young woman that the crime has been investigated and the wrongdoers punished while the now familiar title card explains to us who went to prison and for how long for their many and various moral transgressions. Hao’s existence is rendered “pointless” because he is unable to live by the rules of a corrupt society, yet his self-destructive act of rebellion does perhaps bring about change if only in the names involved. Beautifully shot with brief flashes of expressionism amid the rain drenched streets of a decaying city to the melancholy strains of a noirish jazz score, Li’s fatalistic takedown of the inequalities of the post-90s society is an exercise in style but one which lets few off the hook as its nihilistic conclusion stabs right at the heart of patriarchal corruption. 

Back to the Wharf streamed as part of the Glasgow Film Festival.

Original trailer (simplified Chinese subtitles only)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWM2BqxdCjk