Film review: banned for four years, No Man's Land depicts crime in the mainland
If there is a Chinese equivalent of the Coen brothers, it's probably Shanxi native Ning Hao; the director's acerbic comic capers unravel as cynical dog-eat-dog scenarios of misanthropes scheming to top each other.
NO MAN’S LAND
Starring: Xu Zheng, Yu Nan, Huang Bo
Director: Ning Hao
Category: IIB (Putonghua)
If there is a Chinese equivalent of the Coen brothers, it's probably Shanxi native Ning Hao; the director's acerbic comic capers (Crazy Stone; Crazy Racer; Mongolian Ping Pong) unravel as cynical dog-eat-dog scenarios of misanthropes scheming to top each other.
No Man's Land might be the harshest of his films yet. Mainland censors were disturbed enough to shelve the movie for four years. Judging by the nice upbeat epilogue, who knows how much Ning's vision was compromised to appease the authorities. But despite the re-edits, the result is a nihilistic and delightful bender. Thanks to its cheekiness, it ends up being more captivating than disturbing.
An arrogant and opportunistic big city lawyer, Pan Xiao (Xu Zheng), represents a falcon-poaching crime boss in a small dustbowl town. He gets the defendant off, and presumes the poacher will owe him big time. But there is little honour among thieves in the lawless dusty frontier towns of northwest China.
Trying to drive home across the Gobi desert — in his client's snazzy red car, which he took as partial payment — the unscrupulous attorney runs into more than his fair share of hick crazies and amoral villains. "Extortion? We don't like that word around here," a grizzled gas station owner says to him after overcharging for a tank of gas. But when you have a dead body in your trunk (sorry, we're not explaining that here), and you're in a creepy ramshackle truck-stop, you pay the toll and get the hell out of there.