09/17/2010

'A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop' an homage to Coens' 'Blood Simple'


Zhang Yimou, director of operatic spectacles such as Raise the Red Lantern, Hero, and the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, is a dazzling stylist with a painterly command of color and an eye for panoramic compositions.

For reasons known only to himself, in A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, China's greatest living director chose to remake the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple, their bare-bones Texas noir of 1984, and to set it in feudal China. The result is akin to using a frayed shoestring to make a silk purse.

In truth, it's more rethink than remake. If I had to guess what drew Yimou to the Coens' movie, itself a gloss on people behaving badly, it would be its prototypical characters caught in a prototypical situation. The principals - a wealthy husband, his beautiful and faithless wife, her feckless boyfriend, and the detective who hunts down the lovers - are figures as universal as they are timeless. As are the safe full of money, the forbidding lock, and the gun, sold by a Persian merchant, that fires endless bullets but does not always kill.

Read more at The Philadelphia Inquirer


Sep 17, 2010 9:30:58 AM | Movies

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