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| Ge Hu |
Hu makes a great show of home renovations, revealing the incriminating radio he says must have been concealed by the departed spy. However, his signed commission as a KMT officer is still concealed in his boot or behind a framed picture. I did enjoy Hu reprimanding his slovenly wife for throwing the wash water off the balcony, where it drenches the eavesdropping cop not able to complain, and furtively congratulating her when they are out of earshot.
This material is presented as broad comedy and is not particularly funny. That’s not the plan. The deceit is shown quietly destroying the lives of both families. The teacher-spy’s unloved and unskilled wife tries to leave him and comes back rather than have their daughter starve. She finds the hidden commission and keeps sullen silence to protect the girl. Hu has met the school principal’s daughter, who is attractive and cultured and they go rowing together, romantically drawn (one of the film’s weakest elements recalling Feng’s feeble 2019 Only Cloud Knows, made during his New Zealand exile) but any romance could jeopardise his secret life. All this is being played out against the dramatically changing face of China. As the Cultural Revolution is denounced, officer Lei’s fanaticism gets him put on trial with ridicule and contempt, while Hu’s fake over-achieving, as with creating a bicycle-powered system for the (useless but they don’t say that) local pig-iron smelter, has won him honors and approval. This central portion of the film is the thing which makes it a stand-out - the drunken self-rejection where Hu cuts his face, draining two liquor glasses at once, or the constable’s unhappy uniformed son finding himself conscripted not into police work but distant coal mining.
I know Who You Are has striking visuals with a more sophisticated look than Feng Xiaogang’s already impressive early two-thousand hits like Aftershock or If I Were the One. There is a scene where dialogue is conducted through a bead curtain, reduced in the close-ups to a shimmering, defocused foreground haze. Telling details mark the passage of time as much as the date captions - the woman crier walking with her rattle, chanting the day’s news, consumerism hitting the community where Western brand names now letter shop fronts, China’s Olympics broadcasts.
The film’s foreign references are unexpected. “Pictures at an Exhibition" plays on the track as a plot point, along with offering sleeper agents as found in Telefon & Le Carre. The obvious “Les Misérables” similarities recall the 1936 Lang tao sha /Waves Washing the Sand made by Yonggang Wu immediately following his success with Shen nu/The Goddess, still the most admired early Chinese film. Also a particularly interesting comparison is Lucian Pitile’s 2003 Romanian Niki Ardelean, colonel în rezervaas/ Nikki & Flo, with its prospering Capitalist taunting the failed Communist neighbour.
This all makes I Know Who You Are superior viewing, even if I’m less likely to include it among the year’s best, as I did Two Girls. However, whatever its qualities as art or entertainment may be, the film is going to be considered primarily as a cultural artefact. It has an obviously tacked-on (after captions) ending, with a ceremony honoring the policeman for his long dedication.
Also we don’t know if there are other filmmakers mounting these critiques of Chinese society among the six hundred titles China now produces each year but, if there are, China Lion is not showing them here - even in the ethnic circuit’s old two language subtitle format (or in this case three, with calligraphy song lyrics vertical at frame edge). I Know Who You Are arrives at the same time as Christian Mungiu's Norwegian Fjord, two superior new films about the destructive effects of dogma. In a time of Woke Ideologues facing off with White Supremacists, that can't be a bad thing.
Critics have made Jafar Panahi’s Iranian Yek tasadof-e sadeh/It Was Just an Accident an arthouse hit while Feng Xioagang remains a blank spot in their frame of reference. Is this because Feng achieved without the support of festivals and foreign reviewers and was seen as someone from popular entertainment rather than an artist? We could place him in an impressive list of leading filmmakers in uneasy relationships with their political masters. Lev Panfilov in the Soviets or Helmut Käutner and the Nazis had films banned or tampered. We are not all that far from Sidney Lumet's critical legal and military subjects, though they fared better relying on market forces. These filmmakers all survived on their popular following.
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| A World Without Thieves |
Always an admirer of Feng’s work, seeing the new film motivated me to dust off my twenty-year-old Tian xia wu zei /World Without Thieves DVD. This one came when he was already a heavy hitter in the Chinese film scene, though his best were still to come - Aftershock, I Am Not Madam Bovary and the rest - but he’d already made Big Shot’s Funeral with a visiting Donald Sutherland and was sufficiently established to snare his industry’s New Year best opening time slot.
In World Without Thieves, attractive Rene Liu, already well into her thirty year and counting career, is training chubby manager Biao Fu to speak English. He gets grabby when the wife is not looking, only to find Rene’s boyfriend, Hong Kong star survivor Andy Lau has got it on video and it’s going to cost the businessman his BMW to stop the recording going public. Rene is, for reasons we will discover, getting uneasy with their line of work.
These opening scenes seem divorced from the body of the film but as well as making things scenic, the couple joining devotees at a temple significantly introduces the notion of karma. In the train station crowd on the way back from their Temple visit, Baoqiang Wang (Detective Chinatown) is telling his fellow monastery carpenters that he will carry his life savings with him, rather than cable the money to the home village, where he is headed to marry and buy a house. Baoqiang has already consulted with a wild wolf pack that howls at the moon and reassures his associates that he feels safe knowing that people must be better than wolves. Andy’s attention is immediately focused, as is it turns out, that of other con man, regular Feng lead You Ge (the If I Were for Real series), whose old man disguise Andy immediately sees through.
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| World Without Thieves - Yong You, You Ge, Ka-Tung Lam. |
The carpenter’s wax paper bundle of money moves among the characters, with Andy determined to hold off the other wolves eyeing his lamb and Rene is equally anxious to protect the simple-minded villager’s faith in human nature. Throw in masked train robbers and another set of those upright and skilled Security division policemen who inhabit Chinese movies. Did I mention cutting off the fingers of insubordinate henchmen?
We get the impression that the team wanted to compete with classic pre-war train films like the Russian Goluboy Ekspress/Blue Express, the German Fluchtlinge, the American The General Died at Dawn or the British The Lady Vanishes, even successors like Sammo Hung's Hong Kong Millionaires’ Express and the US Gene Hackman Narrow Margin and Denzel Washington Unstoppable, with their giant Diesels.
As a train movie, A World Without Thieves fails to meet these ambitions, the soundtrack neglected, no hint that the action is happening in swaying corridors and the leads riding on the carriage roof into a menacing tunnel as an implausible action climax. They do get the actors to emerge through the ceiling trap door in what looks like a real moving carriage at one point but most of the action has a sound stage feel. Particularly, that citation of Karma fails to motivate the changes of heart. Introducing an Asian Mystic concept is there to provide something more substantial than the traditional con man comedies. It however proves too big an ask, something they never really sell and a limitation of the film. It is plausible to see the lack of conviction here as influencing the shift to the later, better, experience-based Chinese films, of which Feng Xiaogang was a major architect.
World Without Thieves -Rene Liu, Andy Lau
In the context of the lacklustre Chinese productions after moving the heart of their industry from Hong Kong to Beijing, A World Without Thieves is passable.
Money has been spent on decoration, extras, effects and costumes but we get the muddy brown colour of the day. The film is too long, even after footage has been deleted from the still redundant robbery sequence, with largely extraneous elements like the near miss driving on the highway, Andy’s sleight of hand disappearing the egg last seen abandoned on the tracks or the effect with the ice cube tossed and caught by lively young Bingbing Li, who vanishes from the intrigue. Events are finally orchestrated by the cops, who abruptly turn out to have had things in hand all along.
We do get the director's interest in European music, with the use of "La Vie en rose."
Feng Xiaogang has since shown himself able to deal with treacherous environments - critical indifference and shifting ideologies. It would be satisfying to see these achievements now getting recognition. However, I Know Who You Are closed in downtown Sydney after a week - five people at the last city performance, gone before IMDB put up an unhelpful page on it. I have yet to find any comment in local media, while Gei A Ma de Qing Shu/Dear You was still going strong after a month in subtitled Teochew at the multiplexes.
Barrie Pattison - 2026
