'The Conformist' ('Bing Zhi Xia'): Film Review

Courtesy of Tokyo FilmEx

Chinese star Huang Bo secured a prize in Shanghai for his turn as a ruffian drifting across jobs and cities in the Sino-Russian borderlands.

After The Conformist's Tokyo FilmEx screening, a viewer asked director Cai Shangjun whether film noir is a genre on the rise in Chinese cinema. It's not hard to see why. Cai's third and latest feature, which bowed at FilmEx alongside Vivian Qu's noir-inflected Angels Wear White, is a finely crafted tale in which a hard-boiled hoodlum contends with myriad criminals, multiple conspiracies and an icy femme fatale in bleak border outposts in China and Russia.

Though The Conformist's story and visual style bear scant resemblance to Bernando Bertolucci's thriller of the same name, Cai has acquitted himself with many of the same elements that propelled that 1970 film to legendary status. There's the lead actor's stellar performance, with Huang Bo (Lost in Thailand, Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons) delivering a nuanced, measured turn in perhaps his most against-type role to date. Then there's the sight and sound: Hong Kong D.P. Yu Lik-wai teases out an eerie sense of beauty from the film's gloomy architecture and snowy landscapes, while Qin Wenchen's score and Wen Bo's sound effects further augment the ambience.........

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