After years of nakedly cynical American remakes, the east strikes back with “A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop,” a remake of the Coen Brothers’ classic noir “Blood Simple.” And do they ever strike back: director Zhang Yimou has taken the skeleton of the Coens’ debut and turned it into something else entirely. We’re still scratching our heads, frankly.
For those of you unfamiliar with “Blood Simple” — you shouldn’t be, rent it — the plot concerns a love triangle between a married couple and a male interloper. When she decides to leave her husband, her lover murders him instead, only to find out that the husband’s last act was to send a professional killer to his doorstep. It’s taut, but with a knowledge of the genre and a sense of humor that’s decidedly Coen. Zhang Yimou, meanwhile, has a very specific body of work, moving from deadly-serious chamber pieces, to equally somber wuxia epics. You should probably rent Yimou’s pictures too, for the record.
Yimou’s fondness for the original shows not in his fidelity to the source, but through his refusal to adhere to genre. ‘Noodle Shop’ begins in the desert in feudal China, as we learn that the dynamic from the original is altered. The pretty-boy Ken doll features of The Other Man have been replaced by a softer, more feminine model in actor Xiao Shen-Lang. Moreover, his lady love (Yan Ni) is a screechy, emotionally abusive harpy, and she works under him at the noodle shop, injecting some class tension into the proceedings. Her husband, the reclusive Wang (Ni Dahong), is the shop owner, but he’s also an emotionally damaging persona, an elderly curmudgeon tending to below-the-line matters at his work station.
The mood changes fairly abruptly as we learn the extent to which he abuses his wife. It’s an ugly, surprising reversal of the film‘s earlier slapstick, and perhaps cultural differences are to blame, but it never feels right. As we head into the pitch-black morality of the original story, with an opportunistic soldier arriving and complicating matters, the darkened tone skitters in and out of the antic vibe of the performers, who desperately scream and flail in the face of a dead body.
If the wild tone doesn’t exactly sit well, at the very least, the film is gorgeous to look at. During a rousing noodle-making sequence, Yimou’s strength at creating a striking visual tableau is apparent, and the desert locations never look less than stunning, as it’s easy to imagine one of Yimou’s more straight-faced epics happening just off-screen. Bursting with primary colors, and beautifully framed widescreen vistas, there isn’t a wasted frame in ‘Noodle Shop.’
But the film never gels to create actual human comedy out of elaborate tragedy like in the original, nor does it ever bristle with the tension the situation, at least on paper, seems to suggest. Stylistically off-balance, wavering from broad slapstick comedy, to regional humor, to just plain WTF antics, and near the end of the film to some very well staged action sequences, it ultimately just doesn’t feel like a total experience. Too short to explore the small world we’ve entered, and too weird to ever feel fully invested, ‘Noodle Shop’ is about half a good dish. [C+]