How important is perfection? We’ve been conditioned to believe the appearance of perfection is equivalent to the most personal success for so long it has become its own kind of all-consuming beast. A monster lingering over our shoulders, anxiously awaiting to taunt us for our smallest slips. It’s the unattainable goal we are told to want to pursue in every aspect of our lives, from work to family, and anything less than is an offense punishable by public shame.
The court of public opinion has perhaps never been more rabid than it is today, but writer/director Wei Shojun’s ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS—based on Yu Hua’s short story, “Mistake by the River”—sets out to prove how poisonous it can truly be. Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) has been tasked with solving the murder of a local woman. The deeper he and his team dig into the clues left behind at the scene, the more convinced he becomes that the locals have a lot more to hide than at first appeared.
Pressured to close the case as soon as possible, Ma Zhe begins to crumble at the edges under the weight and lose his grip on reality. His pursuit of the truth is costly in more ways than he could have imagined. Meanwhile, his pregnant wife, Bai Jie (Chloe Maayan), learns there is the potential risk that their unborn child could have delayed and/or complicated development. In light of this, the couple must make a choice on how they wish to respond.
ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS is a complex, dream-like noir immediately awash in madness and death. It wastes no time planting us in an uneasy atmosphere where we begin to question our senses and perceptions along with Ma Zhe. The further he goes into the precarious balance between solving the crime officially as a matter of honor for the department and truth for his own sense of rightness, the more time and space and people seem to slip in and out of where they should be.
Driven to the brink by the idea that there is something more beneath the surface of what others believe to be a fairly open and shut case, he is consumed with thoughts of death, pursuit, and imperfect failure-as-monstrosity in equal measure.
He, or we, begin to hallucinate his own violent or aggressive actions, and nothing anyone around him can say seems to ever fully bring him back from his obsessive, destructive thoughts.
The grungy visuals of ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS frequently captivate, planting viewers firmly in the ‘90s era of filmmaking, and of the film itself. The atmosphere is tinged with something akin to the feel of Twin Peaks in its darker moments. It is both bleak and, increasingly, touched with a sense of unreality that feels unique to noir films.
There are just enough unanswered questions sprinkled throughout to encourage multiple revisits, and a rather ambiguous ending lends the film to any number of rich interpretations. I can only hope a successful release will lead to an English translation of the source material from one of China’s most renowned writers of the unusual.
Tags: Chloe Maayan, Film Noir, Foreign Films, Only the River Flows, Twin Peaks, Wei Shojun, Yu Hua, Zhu Yilong
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