Feuerwerk am helllichten Tage (2014)

Feuerwerk am helllichten Tage: Directed by Yi’nan Diao. With Fan Liao, Gwei Lun-Mei, Xuebing Wang, Jingchun Wang. An ex cop and his ex partner decide to follow up on investigation of a series of murders that ended their careers and shamed them, when identical murders begin again.

“How does a Chinese director empty the noir sensibility of any and all of the glamour associated with its Hollywood counterpart? How does it become a study in pure dourness and grimness? If youu0026#39;re Yiu0026#39;nan Diao, the first thing you do is set it in a place as grim and dour as a northern Chinese factory town circa 1999. In this frozen wasteland that may or may not be Harbin – it doesnu0026#39;t matter, it could be Siberia – the ball gets rolling when dead body parts start showing up on the conveyor belt of a coal processing plant: after all, in this time and space in China, the human body is just another physical commodity…u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eFollowing a bloody shootout that leaves the two main suspects and two of his partners dead, we jump forward five years to find the surviving detective, Zhang Zili, paralyzed by the trauma, retired from the police force and passed out in the snow in an alcoholic stupor. But things are never what they seem in noir, right? So heu0026#39;s dragged back into the case when a former partner of his suspects the involvement of a black widow- like female at the heart of the matter. An exotic call girl? A mysterious nightclub singer? No – just some depressed woman who works at a dry cleaneru0026#39;s where sheu0026#39;s regularly mauled by her piggish oaf of a boss.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe plot is unimportant, really, because the film is one big painting, a night-time world where the neon signs of the internet gambling dens and bleak taxi-dancing joints are beaten into submission by the cold dark chill of northern China, where all color and light are sucked into the filmu0026#39;s essence, which is nothing but a black hole, a gravitational death machine that swallows up every photon in sight. At one point, while spinning around the worldu0026#39;s most depressing ice skating rink, Zili asks his former partner, u0026quot;Does anybody ever really win at life?u0026quot; Of course not. Like all the other catatonic ice skaters, heu0026#39;s just going round and round, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind (depending on oneu0026#39;s point of view…) getting nowhere while people continue to copulate and kill and die. The key to the film is the direct translation of the Chinese title, which means u0026quot;daytime fireworks.u0026quot; Iu0026#39;ll let you figure that out for yourself, but if you like your noir pitch-black, this oneu0026#39;s for you.”