The true story of a gruesome murder in 1940s Shanghai is turned into a stirring widescreen melodrama with a message in Hong Kong director Peter Ho-sun Chan’s first Cannes premiere since martial arts drama , better known as (2011). Programmed out of competition as the final red-carpet gala of a festival that has no official closing film, features Zhang Ziyi’s meatiest role in a while as a woman accused of murdering and dismembering her husband in the closing months of the Japanese occupation of mainland China. In some ways it’s an unashamedly old-school exercise, one where every tattered cheongsam dress, bloodstained floorboard and iron prison grate has a tactile quality.
It’s old fashioned too in tricks like the use of slow-motion footage to drive home poignant moments, or the soft halation effects that bring a mist of memory to the film’s black-and-white flashbacks. But gives this historic cause celebre contemporary relevance by first teasing the story as a lurid true-crime tale before revealing it to be a drama of domestic abuse. In a country that only passed its first domestic violence law in 2015, one that has been rocked recently by a series of high-profile cases and viral Weibo videos, Chan’s film is riding a wave that it should also help to augment.
Overseas play will be helped by its widescreen allure, the return of of Zhang Ziyi as a leading lady, and a script that flirts with sentimentality but also has some other more interesting moves – for example, .