A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
Dir: Zhang Yimou
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Sony Pictures Classics
95 Minutes
When word got out that Zhang Yimou was remaking Blood Simple — reportedly one of his favorite movies — I’m not sure what I expected. Deep down, I supposed I expected another wuxia film in the vein of his more recent efforts like Hero and House of Flying Daggers, but with a vague similarity to The Coen Brothers’ debut film. I did not expect A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (original Chinese title: A Simple Noodle Story.
Yimou’s last non-wuxia film was 2005′s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, a somber fatherhood drama sandwiched between violent, colorful period epics House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower. Hardy a departure for an arthouse filmmaker except that Yimou and a couple of his peers at the time were exploring epic period martial arts films post-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Riding Alone seemed a small, personal rest stop in that cycle. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is a far bigger departure.
The film has some evident similarities to what we’ve come to expect from the director. It’s a period piece for one thing, complete with swords and helmets, and it opens on a bit of fantasy swordplay. Yimou’s penchant for bright colors continues from Curse of the Golden Flower — our male protagonist wears bright pink, our female a green robe, and our antagonist a stark blue. Then there’s the desert of Gansu province where the tale is set, rendered in a beautiful, otherworldly orange. The film is best during its sunnier scenes, where it becomes gorgeous to look at. However it is simply a familiar bow on an unexpected package.
As soon as the opening bit of swordplay ends we realize we’re looking at cartoonish Persian trader (complete with gravity defying beard) and a small audience of goofy noodle shop workers. There’s puns, loudly broad comedic acting and a gun. There’s a big unit of armored lawmen, whose captain is crosseyed. Then we realize that A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is not only sillier than its neo-noir progenitor, but it’s also much sillier than the average Zhang Yimou film.
After this first 15 minutes the film begins to resemble Blood Simple. There’s the offer, the double-cross and the series of miscommunications and misunderstandings that plague the characters of any good Coen Brothers film (and some of the bad ones). I’d have loved to have watched this film with someone unaware that it was a remake just to see their moment of realization. The thing is Noodle Shop is hardly as straight-faced as Blood Simple. These are still silly slapstick characters reacting to this situation. Li (Xiao Sheng-Yang) reacts to Wang’s (Dahong Ni) body with pratfalls and wide-eyed, contorted faces. Wang’s wife (Ni Yan) reacts abuse and danger with cartoonish shrieks. Murderous lawman Zhang (Honglei Sun) is the one exception to the comedy; grim and straight-faced, he is the specter of danger that follows the other characters.
Some of the comedy isn’t necessarily outside of the realm of the Coen Brothers. For example, Yimou introduces two new characters into the mix — one a chubby noodle shop worker with buck teeth, the other an incredibly short woman with pigtails — that feel like imports from Burn After Reading, complete with an idiotic, sense of entitlement-driven theft scheme that ends poorly once it clashes with the film’s other moving parts. There’s also a choice accidental shooting gag vaguely reminiscent of that one that the Coens used twice in Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers.
By placing the events of Blood Simple into a slapstick period piece, Yimou not only reveals the universality of the story with its Shakespearian undertones (people will always miscommunicate, misunderstand and kill one another), but also shows the benefits of the remake, a practice that’s become a dirty word for cinephiles. After years of needless Western remakes of foreign films where the only difference is missing subtitles, it’s refreshing to see a foreign filmmaker tackle a remake as a passion project, taking a film and repurposing it instead of simply transcribing it. It’s why the recontextualization of Infernal Affairs into The Departed works so well while the simple translation of Ringu into The Ring doesn’t warrant a second viewing. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is an example of a remake that stands on its own.
by Danny Djeljosevic
