All of the answers to the murder plot, or rather the lack thereof, were surely quite clearly signposted by the Camus epigraph that opens this anti-noir. A mixture of the anti-detective literature of Stanisław Lem, Cure (1997), A Touch of Sin (2013) and Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), I get the sense that this film is, amongst other things, asking us not require answers to every question in life (and cinema), and that there might be some refuge in social performance. Perhaps the period setting is then hinting that China took this route in the early 1990s, but what that might imply, given my extremely blunt knowledge of Chinese sociology, eludes me.
The screenplay is adapted from Yu Hua's novella, "Mistakes by the River", and its renaming here is apt given that, according to Josh Slater, "The river is the only entity in the movie with the freedom to keep going, steadily, unchanged and unbothered, a gurgling symbol of a peace Ma Zhe is denied by his deep-rooted misgivings about his job."
It's a little too knowing in places, with the missing puzzle pieces of the jigsaw being a little on-the-nose; I wish it maintained some of the elusiveness of the opening sequence where the boy opens a door onto the demolished building site, immediately re-orienting us much further up than we might have thought, and with significantly different weather. Still, the jigsaw puzzle metaphor is interesting, as it suggests that just as Ma deliberately sabotages his wife's jigsaw (incidentally a divorceable offence in my book), there is some unseen but crucially deliberate force that is sabotaging Ma's investigation, rather than the universe and humans' impoverished understanding of phenomenology.
Leo Robson's broad essay-review on the New Left Review blog is not only informative on the Fourth and Fifth generations of Chinese film-making and how it might relate to Only the River Flows, he applauds the movie for using 16mm film stock, pretty much the only film from mainland China to have done so in the past decade or two. Whilst an interesting factoid enough, what's more remarkable is that the film stock had to be scanned and printed in Taiwan. Indeed, recalling the quality issues and political incentives that Russian filmmakers had to use (or not use) imported Kodak film, there's a book begging to be written on the history of the material nature of film itself, and one that goes beyond the typical romanticisation of 'celluloid'.
Wryly questions the thriller genre’s assumptions about the essential knowability of motive and agency; the idea that people commit crimes for clear reasons and their means and opportunity are governed by the equally explicable conditions of the physical world.
— Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian)
Wei has given himself the additional task – familiar to Hitchcock on other occasions – of needing to resolve by narrative means a central dilemma in aesthetics and epistemology. He is hardly the first director to overrate the conceptual possibilities of the mystery form, to mistake a refusal to deliver on expectations – almost to shirk his basic obligations under genre-cinema trading laws – for an act of tribute to the wonders of phenomenal reality. This implicit position is the corner into which Antonioni painted himself in Blow-Up, and was pretty much the starting-point for Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad.
— Leo Robson (New Left Review blog)
1990s, Banpo Town, rural China. A woman's body is found by the river. Ma Zhe, Chief of the Criminal Police, heads up the murder investigation that leads to an obvious arrest. His superiors hurry to congratulate him, but several clues push Ma Zhe to delve deeper into the hidden behaviour of his fellow citizens.