‘Only the River Flows’

One of the​ most fascinating aspects of Wei Shujun’s film Only the River Flows is the continuing contrast between its look and its story, between the faithful realism of the first and the elusive options of the second. An early instance of the former is the picture of a police station in a provincial Chinese town in the 1990s taking over a closed cinema as additional office space. Desks occupy the stage but the rows of seats for the audience are still where they were. Nothing ironic or meta here, just the world as it is. The use of a 16 mm gauge throughout the film adds to this effect. The movie is in colour but it feels as if it’s in black and white, and this impression continues even as we recognise that we are (mentally or materially) in a cinema that’s still open.

A good example of the other effect is the fate of a jigsaw puzzle the wife (Chloe Maayan) of the leading character (Zhu Yilong) has nearly completed. The couple have a row and the husband, in a fit of inventive pettiness, throws a handful of the remaining pieces down the toilet. A few scenes later he is looking at the finished puzzle, all pieces there, nothing missing. Which of these shots tracks a hallucination? Wei is not going to tell us, but he invites us to think that the answer to our question may lie neither in probable history nor in fantasy but in absurdist philosophy or certain modes of detective fiction.

The film opens with a quotation in French from Camus’s play Caligula: ‘We don’t understand destiny and that is why I became destiny. I assumed the stupid and incomprehensible face of the gods.’ Perhaps this is just what detective fiction refuses to do. The novella on which the movie is based, Yu Hua’s Mistake by the River (1988), puts us in the same double or alternative worlds.

The first scene is a tiny allegory. Three children are playing in an abandoned, broken-up building, with papers littered everywhere. They run down a corridor and disappear, and a fourth appears, obviously chasing them in a game. He has a toy gun, aims it, kicks down several doors but finds none of his friends in the rooms. Then he comes to a door at the end of a passage and kicks that open too. All he sees is space, and he only just saves himself from falling into it. The building has no side wall at this point. We look down on ruins and rubble. There may be an allusion here to Yu’s answer (in the Paris Review) to his interviewer’s question about violence in his work at the time of writing Mistake: ‘The violence just poured out every time I sat down to write – I couldn’t help it. I think it might have had something to do with my childhood, growing up during the Cultural Revolution. I would see people getting bloodied with sticks and beaten to death in the streets, getting pushed off three-storey buildings.’

The setting of the film is the fictional Peishui City. It rains a lot there and it sometimes seems as if there is no daytime – we are constantly seeing policemen using their torches. The soundtrack returns occasionally to the repeated tapping of a Chopin prelude, as if to suggest that beauty and boredom might be the same thing. The city’s police force, led by a genial but strict commander (Tianlai Hou) and an earnest and troubled chief detective, Ma Zhe (the man who did or did not dispose angrily of the jigsaw pieces), is trying to solve the mystery of a murder. And then of two more. There is an amazing sequence in which Ma dreams of watching a movie of each murder as it happens, with different suspects in two cases and an absent figure in the third. This is a portrait of a mind in action, not an uncertain riddle, as later images in the movie are.

We have already seen other takes of what Ma sees, but with the murderer carefully left out, or never put in. There is an ageing lady by a river. We look at her confronting some geese, then at her head from the back, at an axe or heavy knife in close-up, at the police examining the murder scene. Later we see a man walking by the river; then his glance at the camera, which may mean, within the story, that he sees someone coming; then a high row of beautiful trees; and then, again, the police at the crime scene. The third murder, that of a young boy, is announced by his smiling at the person he doesn’t know is about to kill him. That’s all we see until the police occupy the next shot.

Who is it that we don’t see in these instances? This is where we arrive at the question belonging to philosophy and the detective genre. The mystery appears to have a solution from the start. A person known only as the Madman, who lived with the old lady and was looked after by her, disappeared at the time of the crime, was found and interned in a mental hospital from which he escaped at the time of the boy’s killing, was caught again, and is waiting for the police to make a case against him. This is what the commander wants to do, but Ma can’t believe things are so simple. There are other suspects, and one of them, after gratefully thanking Ma for his exoneration, commits suicide, falling in an extraordinary combination of realism and fantasy on top of Ma’s car.

The commander’s view of things is plausible and may be correct, but it fails the tests of both active philosophy and detective fiction. It is too close to Caligula’s idea of embracing chance by calling it destiny. And it’s not just simple, it’s quick and straight, as if common sense ruled a crazy world and it was the plodding policeman who is usually right, rather than the eccentric private eye or rogue cop. What would we do with Dupin or Holmes or Marlowe or Morse if this was the case?

Ma is distressed by the suicide of the ex-suspect, and tormented by other life and death issues, like the possible abortion of his child, who is likely to be born with serious health problems – this is what he and his wife are arguing about. He drinks a lot and has run out of suspects. After he dreams of the murders, the movie offers a sequence of scenes that can’t all be true at the level of the story’s notional reality. Wei fiercely refuses to adjudicate among them, probably to counteract a habit he identifies in an interview: ‘If we can’t explain something, we get upset.’ Let’s just say the scenes present violent failed solutions – all but one, that is, which offers a trite tribute to Ma’s success in catching the murderer.

The most subtle moment in this sequence (and one where look and story have serious creative trouble in occupying the same space) shows Ma pursuing the Madman and later claiming he has killed him, shooting at him four times. His boss doesn’t believe this and asks to see Ma’s gun. Ma produces it and the boss asks him how many bullets it holds. Ma says seven and drops three bullets on the boss’s desk. The camera lifts slightly so that we don’t see what happens next, only hear the clicking of four more bullets as they fall.