Hidden Man (Jiang Wen, 2018)

Jeez, what a slog. I've quite admired Jiang Wen as a director in the past, and although there's a very good chance that he will never top the exquisite chaos of Devils at the Doorstep, I think there is a lot to be said for The Sun Also Rises and his much more populist Let the Bullets Fly. Each of these films has represented a complex but subtle balance between interpersonal dynamics -- ambition, deceit, sorrow -- with a thoughtfully elaborated historical backdrop. The Japanese invasion of China and the Cultural Revolution are Jiang's primary concerns, and as a filmmaker he seems intrigued by the old Marxian line from The Eighteenth Brumaire, about history repeating, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. 

But Hidden Man, which forms the third part of a trilogy with Let the Bullets Fly and Gone With the Bullets, is a massive, overstuffed canvas that attempts tonal dissonance and mostly achieves numbing cacophony. There is a primary through-line of sorts -- the revenge sought by orphan Li Tianran (Eddie Peng) against the two men who killed his master. But Jiang layers so many complications and subplots across the nearly 2 1/2 hour running time that nothing has any real substance to it. That's to say, it is possible to keep track of all the double-dealings and triple-crosses if you want to, but at a certain point I just tuned out. 

It's fairly easy to see what Jiang thought he was doing. The invasion of Peiping (the temporary name for Beijing) by the Japanese required duplicity on the part of various Chinese and American nabobs who were attempting to maintain nominal power until such time as the invading forces were beaten back. And in exploring this problem, Hidden Man strives to provide a broad tapestry of social and political machinations, involving the chief of the Peiping Police (Liao Fan), a well-connected seamstress (Zhao Yun), and the American doctor in country (Andy Friend) who plans to use his adopted son Li to attack the collaborators in an  elaborate power play. And at the center of it all is Mr. Lan (Jiang), who is playing every side.

But in fact, people come and go, kill and die, with no real human consequence. Romance and revenge plots never get past the schematic stage. And the problem of the Japanese occupation, instead of being a historically specific crisis, functions as an occasion to expose the basic venality of humankind. What's more, interjections of broad humor, including cartoonish violence, feel desperate.

I'm already tired of thinking about Hidden Man. But if you've ever wondered what you'd get if Takashi Miike remade Khroustaliov, My Car!, have at.