"A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop" (2010)

East Asian films are far more comfortable with situating broad humor side by side with serious drama. For American viewers there can be a bit of a whiplash with the rapidity and ease with which this is achieved. A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop is set in a world, filled with characters, elasticity and humor that the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote might be comfortable with, but its action is, by contrast, consistently, and perhaps questionably and strangely, dark and bloody. The film is loosely remaking the plot of the Coen Brother’s debut Blood Simple. And while anyone who’s seen the original will recognize the basic shades of the story, Zhang Yimou fills the film with touches that are very un-Coen Brothers-like. A noodle shop owner discovers his wife is having an affair with a low-level employee, so he hires a soldier to kill his adultering, but also sexually abused, wife and her lover. The soldier, however, finds himself incapable of going through with the murders, but he isn’t above killing the owner and trying to break into his safe loaded with money. No one’s actions go as plan and the universe seems to be playing a cosmic joke on all of them for their moral transgressions. Yimou has the characters react with comic disbelief as impossible shit piles onto their troubles, but when the violent scheming occurs he shifts the tone to be appropriately thrilling, tense and serious. The film benefits from Yimou’s attention to action which re-calls his other action-adventure efforts House of Flying Daggers and Hero. The film is sure to give tonal whiplash to even the most unconcerned viewer, but Yimou provides a gorgeous sense of scope and atmosphere and never loses sight of the slippery slope his characters have set themselves upon.

Grade: B