Review: The Wild Goose Lake Is a Scathing Indictment of Societal Ills

The film’s masterstroke is that its fugitive antiheroes are framed by an environment that reflects their criminal lives back at them.

The Wild Goose Lake
Photo: Film Movement

One major development in mainland China over the last 20 years or so has been an enabling of exposure to more contemporary international cinema. During their time at the Beijing Film Academy, the Chinese filmmakers who emerged in the 1980s—Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Tian Zhuangzhuang, among others—had been able to watch prints of films ranging from Taxi Driver to The Tree of Wooden Clogs, but only well after those films were released. And that was still several years before the premiere of Chen’s The Yellow Earth, the film that established the so-called Fifth Generation of filmmakers.

This in itself marked a big change from the time of the Cultural Revolution, when Chinese cinema essentially stalled in its development for a decade. But it wasn’t until around the turn of this century that contemporaneous films could really become an influence on budding filmmakers in China. This is, of course, because of the internet, which, even despite the obstacles created by the censorship system known as the Great Firewall, democratized film viewing in an entirely new way for the communist country. And as those aspiring filmmakers with internet access, like Diao Yinan, grew up and started making their own features, China’s assimilation into a contemporary world cinema has become readily apparent.

Diao’s The Wild Goose Lake is a prime example of this new generation of Chinese films, which not only concern themselves with a sociopolitical context, but also an aesthetic one. The film opens in the textbook register of a neo-noir: pouring rain and neon lights, shadowy figures meeting at a rendezvous point, a man checking his watch, and a woman sauntering into position, whispering, “Hey, got a light?” The man, Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge), had been waiting for his estranged wife, but instead, the mysterious Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun-mei) appears, a sex worker who demands that Zenong prove that he is who he says he is. Then, in an extended flashback beginning two nights earlier, it’s revealed that Zenong is a recently released convict involved with a gang that steals and resells motorbikes. He’s put in charge of a group of men, one of whom runs afoul of another high-ranking mobster. A contest is set up to resolve the matter, but the outcome is rigged, and soon Zenong finds himself the target of a massive manhunt.

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What plot there is here is almost entirely devoted to procedural detail: Zenong and the couple of comrades who he brings with him on the run negotiate discreet meet-ups, call in favors with their few remaining friends, and maneuver around a phalanx of cops, led by Liao Fan’s unrelenting police inspector. All the while, Aiai lingers in the periphery, her motivations and intentions keeping us guessing right up until the end. It would be easy to write off all of this as mere scaffolding for a twisty genre exercise, which Diao does deliver on, and exceptionally well: In a rather huge departure from his acclaimed 2014 noir Black Coal, Thin Ice, the long takes and master shots he once favored have been traded for dynamic camera movement, suspense-building close-ups, and top-notch fight choreography. There are also some fantastic set pieces, such as a motorbike race that’s visually highlighted by the streaming trails of headlights, and at least one creative, if wholly ridiculous, kill scene involving an umbrella.

If Diao’s ambitions were limited to crafting a crackerjack genre exercise, that would be just fine. But this film is up to a fair bit more than it might at first seem. Diao joins other contemporary Chinese filmmakers like Vivian Qu (Trap Street) and Xin Yukun (Wrath of Silence) in recognizing that genre movies offer a kind of smokescreen for a form of sociopolitical engagement that the Chinese censors likely wouldn’t otherwise approve. Which is to say, the heightened violence and ugliness of a crime film seems to allow for a kind of depiction of Chinese social life that wouldn’t be acceptable from a “realistic” drama.

Diao takes this all a bit further, however, utilizing the sprawling geography of what’s essentially a chase film to deep-dive into the sordid underbelly of a Chinese society where lawlessness trumps order. The Wild Goose Lake’s masterstroke is that its fugitive antiheroes are framed by an environment that reflects their criminal lives back at them, seemingly no matter where they turn: The beach by the titular lake runs rampant with a humorously untraceable type of prostitution, while a late-night meeting on a factory floor—to determine who will lose their job and who stays, by way of lottery—resembles nothing so much as the gathering of mobsters that Zenong attends at the beginning of the film.

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It has to be said that it’s still something of a minor miracle that Wild Goose Lake even made it to festival screens, considering that one of its most emphatic themes is a critical attitude toward ruthless and incompetent Chinese police. In one scene, Zenong’s comrade (Zhang Yicong) is accidentally killed by police fire, after he raises his hands in surrender, and in another, a team of eager cops pose over the body of a man they just gunned down, to take selfies. There’s also a moment where Fan’s police inspector asks who among his squad doesn’t know how to use their guns and, tellingly, most every hand in the room is raised.

This all amounts to an extraordinarily uncommon depiction of police, at least for a film from mainland China—and one can imagine that Chinese authorities were irked that much more by this in the wake of the Hong Kong protests, and Beijing’s fervent support of its local police. (The Wild Goose Lake’s Chinese theatrical release, which was planned for this August, was abruptly canceled, as part of a string of films pulled from theaters and festivals by Chinese authorities throughout this year.) More even then on its strengths as an expertly directed piece of entertainment, Diao’s latest impresses for its scathing, and unexpected, indictment of societal ills—for how the filmmaker recognizes the extent to which the contours of a sordid genre film appropriately express realities of Chinese life.

Score: 
 Cast: Hu Ge, Liao Fan, Gwei Lun-mei, Wan Qian  Director: Diao Yinan  Screenwriter: Diao Yinan  Distributor: Film Movement  Running Time: 113 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Sam C. Mac

Sam C. Mac is the former editor in chief of In Review Online.

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